The Uncanny Valley of Voice: Preparing Authenticity

Nearly every piece of writing that truly embodies my voice was formed from the same process, a process that has become increasingly incompatible with procrastination. Procrastination was my first love. I say this only half-jokingly because I was a chronic procrastinator. For most of my life, I relied on the deadline, transforming the adage “If you only have an hour, then it will only take an hour”, into a holy scripture that guided my writing. It was only recently that I realized the damage that procrastination had caused to my progression as a writer, and to my confidence in my written voice.

Rereading my most egregious examples of procrastination—the unedited writing I submitted right before the deadlines—would almost always evoke a unique feeling in me. I liken it to a researched phenomenon dubbed “uncanny valley”. This psychological phenomenon is an eerie feeling that humans experience “in response to not-quite-human figures like humanoid robots and lifelike computer-generated characters” (IEEE 1). This was a feeling that became increasingly common as I developed as a writer but continued to struggle with my voice. I realized that I needed a new process to feel authentic, and this is what I created.

The process that I implemented to project a genuine voice in my writing was like the arrangement of a complex bank heist (though admittedly with far lower stakes). The most neglected part of my writing had always been the planning. With no roadmap, outline, or structure, I struggled to write authentically. I afforded myself no time to experiment, plan, and scheme, the characteristics that make your writing uniquely your own. Consequently, my new strategy heavily emphasizes the planning phase.

Now when I begin writing, my bank heist will be weeks away. Long before I place pen to paper, I will simply stop to think. As I walk through life I will let questions float around me, attached to me throughout the day with tiny strands of invisible string; How should I arrange my essay? Can I introduce my quotes more effectively? What am I really getting at? Things I rarely asked myself, but I now realize are essential for confidence in my writing.

While my voice will undoubtedly need to change based on the genre that I write in, time, reflection, and planning have proved to be essential components of the pieces that most accurately reflect my voice. Much like a successful bank heist, a truly authentic piece of writing cannot be carried out in one day. It is only through deliberate reflection that you can create a piece that is wholeheartedly you. A true reflection of yourself rather than a robot trying its best to imitate humanity.

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Poetry vs. Prose and my Relationship with the Haiku

There is one specific type of poem that I have always had a deep attachment to. The haiku—a three-line poem, with 5 syllables in the first line, 7 syllables in the second, and 5 in the last— is a strange choice at first, given poetry’s deep emphasis on creativity and freedom of choice. However, to me, the most powerful part of poetry is creating something unique within a familiar structure. Limerick, Haikus, Sonnets, etc. are all formal and relatively rigid structures of poetry, yet every writer’s attempt within this structure will produce a piece of vastly different writing. Good poetry is specific to the life experience of the writers. Shel Silverstein, Robert Frost, and Shakespeare all lived vastly different lives, and their poetry is a reflection of that.

In the spirit of that claim, here is the first Haiku that I’ve ever drafted:

a trek to Dessau

confusion and a lesson

form follows function  

While it was far from a masterpiece, this haiku captured a very distinct screenshot in my life. My parents have always been completely obsessed with modernism. As a result, at the tender age of 16, I was dragged along to visit the Bauhaus, a German design school responsible for producing many famous modernist designers. I realized how helpful of an experience it really was and decided to write genuinely about it. 

This trip became the basis for my interest in poetry, an interest so intertwined with my family and life that, in the argument between prose and poetry, I am most certainly biased. 

I’ve found, at least in my attempts at both prose and poetry, that it is far easier to express your voice in prose than poetry. My suspicion is that prose’s similarity to conversational English makes it far easier to digest and articulate your words. However, in some of my better-written poetry, I find a reflection of far more than just my voice; it is a reflection of my life experiences, internal conflict, and even the mood that I’m in as I’m writing. While my experience is most certainly individual, I have concluded that my prosaic writing is far more consistent with my voice, while my poetic writing either represents me at a deeper level or is completely alien.

 

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My Relationship Between Writing, Memory, and Sentiment

I never kept a dream journal. I never had a book of notes for jotting down ideas. And I most certainly never kept a diary. However, I do wish I saw the merit of writing my thoughts down earlier in my literary lifespan. It would be like having a time capsule into the thoughts and feelings of an alien who spent considerable amounts of time in your body. For me, grade school essays represent the closest alternative to a journal of my past. In a way, they are a reflection of memories and disjointed experiences. I remember writing nearly all of them. I remember writing an essay about mass incarceration in eighth grade. And how can I forget the Huck Finn essay, now permanently etched in my memory? But for every essay and academic paper that takes up space in my mind, I wonder if there’s a core memory I’ve omitted?

Only recently have I started recording my thoughts. I own a small Portuguese notebook that I keep in my pocket in case of an epiphany. At first, I approached notetaking as a skeptic. I had initially begun it as a way to pacify my brain in order to sleep. Every night I would jot down a few ideas, hoping to finally get some sleep. The first three ideas were as follows: 1) An idea for an adult jungle gym, 2) how I would beat the prisoner’s dilemma, and 3) how much I missed my family. 

It is a strange phenomenon but the privacy of externalizing your thoughts in a space you are sure no one will enter is a kind of freedom. I can write anything about my day, without judgment or a letter grade. I  write about memories I wish to preserve or bad Ideas I am not quite ready to let go of.  As I continued to write my thoughts before bed I began to develop a more concrete understanding of what I was perceiving and why. Most of my notes weren’t exactly sad, but rather melancholy, regretful and most often, hopeful. Writing down my thoughts, at least for me, became a way of organizing priorities in life. Reuniting with family, striving academically, and most often: a dream of upending my life and moving to another country to learn a language was actualized through writing. I hope to look back decades later at my small notebook and remember vivid memories of my time in college. But if not, I would settle for my sentiments.

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The Evolution of my Writing and the Importance of Context

For most of my life, I’ve had the same process; I sit down with a pen and paper—or more recently a laptop—and stare at a blank page until finally I—under threat of deadline— belt out a piece of writing that I’m proud of. I infrequently constructed sentences with grammatical rules in mind and instead opted for what felt right and persuasive. In the grand scheme of things, my writing is a bit childlike. 

My first-semester struggle meant realizing that much like voice and authenticity, structure, grammar, and cohesion should be important persuasive elements in my writing. My previous disregard for the structure was a result of my process. I wanted a great piece of writing but refused to give myself the time to improve it.  As a result, I struggled to even begin writing because I was fearful of a piece that wouldn’t represent my voice. Incorporating formal structure and sentence construction allowed me to write more freely because I understood their persuasive impact. 

Yet, here we are a semester later and I still have a similar worry. I’ve found some methods, particularly brainstorming, outlining, and writing a tentative first draft. But with my expanded understanding of the importance of traditional writing and a more experimental style comes a new set of questions and concerns. How should I balance proper and improper style to create something that is both academic and has my voice? That is the reason I decided to take this specific class. The utilization of blog posts/digital format, as well as our exploration into multigenre writing, will—at least I hope—help me begin to understand the proper contexts for using different persuasive techniques.

 When we were discussing an Eloquent Rage in the first semester our professor came to a conclusion that resonated with me. Brittney Cooper has vast experience writing academically, yet Eloquent Rage is not an academic text. She adjusts her writing style depending on the context. That is one skill that I would love to develop. A skill that would make me not only a far better writer but a more well-rounded person in the future. 

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What Makes Good English?

What makes something good is difficult to describe. I’m of the opinion that there is proper English. Proper in the way that if you comma splice, or you don’t punctuate you have broken a long upheld agreement on the way that we write. A norm. However, following rules of proper grammar rarely singularly guarantees that your writing is good. On the other hand, improper grammar has no correlation to the beauty or invention of “good” English. After all, who decides what is good? A concept that should be inherently subjective has become a uniform and standardized test. There are countless authors that clearly disprove a blanket test on the efficacy of “good” English. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God could be discounted for its use of a “broken English” dialect. And yet, she writes “If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don’t keer if you die at dusk. It’s so many people never seen de light at all.” A lovely and emotionally complex sentiment. Hurston creates invention not in spite of dialect, but because of it while also demonstrating that complex understanding does not correlate with “proper English”. This is also apparent in Amy Tan’s article entitled Mother Tongue. Tan demonstrates the lack of correlation between eloquence and English, stating that “You should know that my mother’s expressive command of English belies how much she actually understands. She reads the Forbes report, listens to Wall Street Week, converses daily with her stockbroker, reads all of Shirley MacLaine’s books with ease, all kinds of things I can’t begin to understand.” In my opinion, mastery over someone’s dictated the English language is an important skill to have, after all, it can sometimes allow you to express complex ideas in an eloquent manner. However, it is not a prerequisite for expressing those complex ideas or being eloquent. Returning to Zora Neale Hurston’s quote should be proof that legitimate forms of writing and expression exist everywhere, not just in between commas and semicolons. 

 

Works Cited
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Fawcett Publ., 1969.
Tan, Amy. Mother Tongue. 1990,
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Writing as a Conversation: Learning to Respond

For the majority of my educational journey, I have considered myself a good writer. I would always receive good marks with minimal criticism and critique. I developed great confidence in my writing, but often selfishly refused to take advice and criticism. This class served to demonstrate that our jobs as writers are never over and that revision and criticism are essential aspects of the literary process.

The most interesting aspect of this class was the way that our preconceived notions of writing were shattered. You reframed writing, not as a stand-alone piece of text, but instead as a small part of an ongoing conversation. It is here that the importance of critique and revision became apparent to me. If the true essence of writing is a conversation, then it is within the revision phase that the writer should enter into conversation with his own piece: meta-commentary. This is where I began to understand the power and importance of peer editing. An outside input can serve as a preliminary audience to help you test the effectiveness of your piece in the conversation. It is a forceful tool, whose effectiveness would not have been fully understood without this class. 

However, this class did not always need to revolutionize my views of writing to teach me something helpful. Before WRT-100 I had always been terrified of my rebuttals. I remember a particular instance in sixth grade that haunted me. I was writing an essay the night before it was due, as one does, and I discovered a counterargument that seemed far more powerful than my essay. I started freaking out and refused to even mention the counterargument. Through WRT-100’s recontextualization of writing as part of an ever-evolving conversation, I began to develop tangible methods to create an admirable rebuttal. One of the main methods was putting more emphasis on research and examining the topic as a whole, not only the sources that benefited my argument. This helped me immeasurably because the goal was no longer to ‘win’ my argument, but instead to flesh out my stance in the overarching conversation. 

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