Loud Environment

Screw it. Be you.

Dear Reader,

We’re opening the door to Tate McCrae’s Sports Car and driving to our middle-aged twerking class. We’re grinding the air in the back of the studio while the women who’ve been attending class for months rip their shirts off and helicopter them over their heads. We’re escaping the horrors of our country and failed careers and boosting our moods and self-esteem by giving our own asses a slap and yelling out “what what!” at the top of our lungs. We’re not dancing for the fucking attention, we are doing it for ourselves because we’re sad and we remember a long time ago when we took the depression medication it made us gain weight, so we’re trying to stimulate our own happy chemicals through physical movement. We’re upset at our watches who told us to stand up and are now telling us we’re in a Loud Environment. We’re taking a water break when the music changes to a song about our kitties, and then we’re accidentally having a breakthrough about our writing.

For two years, I’ve been working on a new novel (from which I am disillusioned) and writing Substacks (from which I am also disillusioned), and so a writing goal for 2025 was to focus on my first love, the love that requires nothing and everything of me: short fiction. I had two stories I wanted to do big revisions on, one being a story based on a time like 20 years ago when I saw Ron Goldman’s dad (O.J. Simpson trial — Google him) out in public. In 2020 (five years ago, WTF), I wrote a version of it as an essay, but right away that didn’t work because I only got so far as I once saw Ron Goldman’s dad out in public. Then I wrote it as a third person story which also didn’t work because sometimes I refuse to admit my strength as a writer: voice. I cannot, no matter how hard I try, achieve voice as a third person narrator. Some writers do this well. I am not one of them. I sent the third person POV Ron Goldman dad story out to probably 40 journals, received a few “meh, some parts are ok” but mostly form rejections. In a fever panic about a year ago, I tried to make it into a flash, which also did not work because the story is too big for flash.

Finally, when I had nothing left to try, I went back at the story as me.

Which sounds dumb! Of course I wrote the story as me.

But I mean, I doubled down on voice.

Last week, it was accepted at Mr. Bull and comes out in the next few months.

So, yes. I know my strength as a writer. My strength is voice. (Your strength is not plot, sings the chorus of agents behind me.) Acknowledging and embracing your writing voice is a hard, dumb, awful, exhausting, stupid climb. Some of this has to do with imposter syndrome. Most writers, including myself, struggle to say anything good about ourselves or our writing, and so to get to the top of the mountain and stab a strength flag into the ground is tough.

So what does voice mean? It’s who you are as a writer. What you actually sound like, write like, your vocabulary, and your tone and all that. It still means you have to study craft. (Now do plot, the agent chorus continues to sing.) Create tension and find your moments and give the bad people a few good qualities and give the good people a few bad qualities and propel the story with obstacles that make your characters (even if the “characters” are you in a personal essay or real people in your life) upset, blah, blah, blah, but if you are a writer of literary fiction and essays, you have to be unapologetically you.

How do you find your writing voice? Your writing voice is a voice you know but it might not (yet) be a voice you trust. Which sounds very woo-woo. Because it is. It’s super fucking woo-woo. But it’s like that thing in therapy when you’re talking about how you hate the choices your parents made, and the therapist goes, where do you feel that in your body? And you have to say, my shoulders, my stomach, my arms, my clavicle, and on and on.

When you are writing, where in your body do you feel your voice?

(Among other reasons, this is why AI in the arts is horrible and bad.)

I have cultivated my voice through failure. In this latest example, I wrote a story. I sent it out. It didn’t work. It continued to not work. I failed, then I failed again. I was at the end of the line with the failure and rejection on it. I couldn’t take it anymore. Then I said fuck it. Fuck. It. I was trying to make that story something it wasn’t and could never be. Even the title was a tricky bastard. The story went from being titled Ron Goldman’s Dad to Little Cat Feet to Size Nine and is now called Sunglasses for Whole People. I mean, we’ll see what happens but it’s a story that is very me, and if nothing else, that’s a feat.

Do not misunderstand what I’m saying here. I’m not suggesting you love and accept yourself. Like, please continue to hate yourself if that’s what you’re into. Please continue to lose sleep about your shortcomings and mistakes. I’m also not suggesting you don’t branch out, experiment with new POV or forms. All I’m saying is that in your writing, when you find your voice, you’ll feel it and you need to trust in that feeling and then, don’t ever stop using it.

Yours in Twerking for Self-Discovery,

Stephanie

Currently Reading: Someone who does do third person voicey writing well is Christie Hodgen in Boy Meets Girl