Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.
– – – Oscar Wilde
Back in the early seventies, I starred in a movie about the Vietnam War, the first acting job I ever got. After we finished a scene that took place in a commune, the director asked the sound man to play back the tape. He did, and when I listened to it, my voice sounded so bad to me, I thought they were going to fire me. They didn’t. They just moved on to the next scene. In that moment, I realized that I heard myself differently than other people heard me.
When we write and read aloud in my class it often surprises us to hear our own voice. Our own point of view. Ghostwriting demands the opposite. Mimicking a voice that isn’t your own is one of the mandatory skills. It feels odd at first, not only to the writer but also to the person you’re emulating. I had a client once, now a disgraced member of British Royalty, who was upset when I handed her the pages I had written. I was proud of them. I had done the interviews, I had listened back to them and I thought that I had picked up her voice very well. She read a page or two and she handed them back to me.
“I don’t like this,” she said angrily.
“What don’t you like?” I asked her. “I think it really sounds like you.”
“It does,” she agreed.
“So what’s the problem?” I asked.
“I don’t like how I sound.”
It takes a lot of acceptance to be with things like they really are. When I was ghostwriting one book after another, I had gotten so good at writing in someone else’s voice, I had lost my own. When I sat down to write for myself, it felt like I was wearing a coat that was the wrong size. The sleeves were too long. The material was busting at the seams. I was in my car one day and I wondered, If a bus hits me and I’m about to die, whose life would flash before me? Would I be a black girl singer from Detroit, a self-serving spiritual guru, an egocentric self-help motivational speaker, a rock star with a dirty mouth, an inspiring role model who lost her legs to frostbite and set speed records on prosthetics, or the long-standing executive producer for a legendary TV host?
I had written as all of these things so when I finally stopped ghost writing, I went on a search for myself and my authentic voice. I had to consider what “finding my authentic voice” meant? When you mine for diamonds (searching for your voice), massive amounts of soil are lifted from the earth (the text) with the diamonds hidden inside. Once the rough gems are extracted, they are cleaned, cut and polished (edited), a process that spans many months from the day they were unearthed. And you are left with a sparkling diamond that reflects spectacular prisms of light. That’s your voice.
It takes teams of people to mine diamonds, but finding your voice is your personal mountain to climb. You’re searching for your truth, for the natural rhythm and pacing of your words that will allow the sentences to fall into line and sound like you. You have to suspend judgments and turn to your own commitment to find what you’re looking for. Yourself.
There’s a Sufi story about a spiritual seeker who would do anything to know himself better. He heard about a master who lived on the top of a frozen mountain and he wanted to study under him. He thought this man could help him in his quest so he began his climb. The temperatures were frigid and he fell into snow drifts and slid across ice banks. He kept going. He was shaking and exhausted when he reached the top of the mountain. He stopped and stared. There was the master in his red robes, his right shoulder and arm bared, sitting quietly in the freezing cold, meditating at the entrance to a cave. When the holy man opened his eyes and looked at the weary traveler, shivering and soaked to the bone, he said, “You came all the way up this freezing mountain to look in the mirror? You can stay if you’re not looking for a teacher.”
Whether or not you like who you are, how you look or how you sound, you’re stuck with yourself. Nature made you exactly the way you are so you might as well accept it. When you drop into the familiarity of being with yourself, life becomes less complicated and more satisfying and a lot more comforting.
Marilyn Monroe said, “Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.”
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