The Writer’s Voice. A Work In Progress

The older you get the faster the time goes. It sounds like a lamentation, but if you get to a certain age like me and you’re still quite healthy, you start to look at life a little differently.
 

The Lucky Bastard Principle
 

You start to think, man, I’m one lucky bastard, especially when you consider all the great creative people lately who are checking out in their late 60s and early 70s.
Since writers tend to reflect a lot of the stuff that collides with them daily the results can sometimes lead readers to believe that the writer is perhaps a little depressed. That sort of happened to me last year.

Let me answer that by saying that I have no idea what depression feels like. But I do know a lot about what I feel inside my head. Because that’s where my office is.
What people tend to think of as depression in other people, may very well not be that. First of all when people are truly depressed, it’s quite unlikely that you would hear from them at all.

Also, depression is a very serious mental health issue and a physical ailment. But it’s one of those words that people use instead of asking someone if they are pissed off or lacking iron in their system or some other minor condition.

There are a lot of words like that: amazing, radical, awesome, excellent, dynamic etc. These words have been overused to the point where their meaning is lost.
Trust me, when I tell you that the last thing I would be doing if I were depressed is sitting here explaining the misuse of the word.

Balls To The Wall
 

I have always been pretty hard core in my personal writing. No matter what I was writing: lyrics, short stories, poetry, screenplays or blogs, a lot of it is pretty blunt. But that’s my choice. It is the voice I feel most comfortable speaking in.
 

Voice Modification
 

Over the past several months, I have started to notice my voice changing. And like anyone who is confronted with change, be it internally generated or externally directed, there is a tendency to rebel and rage against the change, even though you are in charge of it, and going with the flow would be much easier. But that is not the case here. In fact it’s quite the opposite.
 

BeBee…A Change For The Better
 

Moving my blogging headquarters to beBee and leaving LinkedIn Pulse behind has been a real change for the better for me, because for most of 2015 a lot of the stuff I was doing was kinda bitter and twisted and that really was dictated by the repressed environment in which I (and a lot of other writers) found myself in.

Today, this change is clear in my head. And I am pretty much all about working my new voice and stretching ti this way and that to see what happens.
 

Blogging Is Fun Again
 

I’ve been writing for more than 50 years. And writing professionally for about 40. During the course of that time, writing was never difficult for me.

I suppose you could say I'm very lucky, in that I never really had to suffer for it. I’ve never had writer’s block. It has never caused me to become ill in any way. Writing has been basically a companion for me. Something that has kept me out of a lot of shit I could have gotten into otherwise.

And this is not the first change that I have gone through. There was one other major change. And that was the one that took me from a mad scribbler of unfocused blank verse to a writer of much more structured pieces, which, in turn gave me the discipline to write short stories, screenplays, even a bad novel.

But this change is different. It’s much less jarring. And what makes it that way is the environment I have managed to create here on beBee combined with all the support that writers get here in general.

’m privileged to know quite a few good writers here on beBee and on LinkedIn. They have influenced me, entertained me and moved me in countless ways.
@Phil Friedman, @Kevin Pashuk, @Don Kerr, @Jesse Kaelis, @John White, @Matt Sweetwood, @Donna-Luisa Eversley, @Chas Wyatt, even @Randy Keho, Ian Mirlin, Bob Hoffman, @Graham Edwards, @Renee Cormier to name but a few.

For writers, the people you read are as much a part of who you are as a writer as the writing you do. And if course, the voice you speak to the world in.

One of the other changes I am going though is leaving the city I have called home since 1969. Hopefully, it provides me with lots of new stimulation in a less crowded and noisy environment. I’m not sure it will change my voice. But I’m also not sure it won’t. We’ll just have to wait and see.
 

As usual, likes, comments and shared are all gratefully accepted and appreciated.
 

If your business has reached the point where talking to a communication professional would be the preferred option to banging your head against the wall or whatever, lets talk.

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