Listen to the One Voice that Matters: Your Own

Recently, an editor turned down a piece I’d written with the comment that she didn’t think it “made enough of a splash.” I pictured a fat frog plopping into a dark pond. A kid cannonballing off a diving board. A car speeding through a knee-deep puddle, leaving me on the corner with a spray of muddy water across my good coat. The words to a ridiculous song by 50’s singer Bobby Darin emerged from some musty drawer in my brain: Splish splash, I was taking a bath. All upon a Saturday night.

I’m never devastated or angered by criticism. Yet, perhaps because I felt that this piece was especially strong, fresh, and interesting, I couldn’t get the editor’s words out of my head. As I sat down to write, I heard myself asking, “Is this going to make enough of a splash? What can I do to make it splashier? What if it doesn’t splash enough? Can someone please tell me how to splash?

How easy it is to slip back into old patterns. Here I was, once again, trying to please. A busy editor, who had probably read two dozen works that afternoon, scratched off a quick comment, and it had become a pronouncement on how I should write. Instead of finding the voice inside of me and the Voice from beyond, I was listening to the voice of a single person I’d never met and allowing it to tell me how to do the thing I do best.  

It’s a hard habit to break, especially for someone born in the oh-so-vanilla 50’s. I had a wonderful mom—nurturing, funny, and supportive—but her personal mantra was the most important thing in the world is what other people think about you. I was taught young not to value my own judgment, speak my mind, or stand out. And I dutifully learned to hand over the power to say how I should look, behave, and think to others—teachers, lovers, friends, anonymous strangers I might encounter on a bus.

As I writer, I still fall back into it, allowing myself to be limited by other people’s judgments, second-guessing my own. Again and again, I have to remind myself what my task is. Not to imitate someone else’s style. Not to jump on board the latest trend. Not to try and figure out what this editor or that is going to like. But to write from my own center, to write what I need to say.

On the Beyond the Margins blog, Bethanne Patrick writes about her own struggle to claim her solo voice, both as a singer and as a writer. “It has taken me decades,” she writes, “…to break free of our entire society’s focus on playing well with others, being a team player, blending in, and making ‘nice.’” Yet, it is only when she learned to value her own voice that she was able to blossom both in music and on the page.

My friend, the artist Chris Zerendow, recently told me he does his best work when he feels so defeated that he simply gives up on what he thinks he should be painting–what he thinks others expect or want-and just paints. That is a perfect way of thinking about how we should work.

So, today, I’m just writing. Not getting hung up on whether my work will get published, what a short story “should” be, how someone else writes, what I imagine editors are looking for, or whether I’m making a “splash.” I’m not following anyone else’s path into the forest, but carving my own.