Four ways to become an expert in listening to what can make your perspective unique, your reality.
The idea in short: we are finite. But writing can perpetuate part of us. At least the part that stood out. Our unique voice. The assumption is the deeper we can listen to it, the better we can write.
In fact, to become a good writer, I must do three things well: Read, Listen, and Write. A lot.
- Reading for filling me with inputs from other people.
It´s like having conversations with interesting people. Between authors and us about the way they see a subject.
- Listening to the details with my mind awake.
I receive the reality and internalize it differently depending on which lens I´m using. And we all use different lenses from each other. To be awake means to be aware of through which lens we’re interpreting the different details.
- Writing for materializing those differences in abstracting, learning, and thinking.
This skill makes a unique output to land on the paper with clarity and truth to the original idea.
Well, in summary, it is all there in raw three bullet points. No secret sauce.
Now,
to write with a unique voice is a whole different story.
And there is only one way of doing it.
Listening to something (sometimes, slightly) differently from the rest.
Listening between the facts.
Listening deeply.
The idea in depth: It´s very hard to have a unique perspective on the same topics everybody is talking about. As Terrie Schweitzer explains, once you have thought about a writing topic (mainly when you are a beginner writer), most probably someone has already done that. And with almost certain, using a better writing voice.
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Then, to minimize the chances of being repetitive while developing my reading and writing skills for uniqueness, I´m listening deeply to what will always be truly uniquely mine: the surrounding reality of my life.
Listening deeply happens when I´m capable of connecting the outside fact with something inside me inaccessible to others. It´s more than my interpretation of what I heard. It´s when I feel I´m the only one able to articulate something that way. Because only my repertoire of past and present experiences can connect that way.
The probabilities decrease a lot of finding people writing about the same details I chose to pay attention to when they tapped into something of my life. Those details collided with each other and ignited an insight into me.
It´s like whether everybody has the same puzzle pieces, but instead of trying to fit them in a predetermined picture, you decide to order them around another contour because you saw another print.
How am I doing that?
These 4 behaviors are helping me to listen deeper and find my voice in writing:
Surrender to what is happening in front of me right now, not in my imagination.
It took me time to understand that every situation I´m living in now gives me a good beginning subject to write about. But I finally surrendered. And started living awake.
My life is full of unpublished story prompts, like yours. Then we´ve plenty of uniqueness to write about. And that´s what I´m doing.
Because it becomes easier to write fluidly when I´ve paid attention to whatever was going on in front of me.
These are the things we own. Our lives and what it made us feel. It is what happened yesterday and today with everything in between.
Tomorrow is just in our imagination.
Until we´ve been filled by the reality with acceptance, our reality, the words will not pour out of our hands to the paper nicely. Our footprints will have lost the chance to be materialized and tomorrow we´ll continue living empty of awareness.
I´m not suggesting you publish all your domestic struggles; neither do I. I´m saying that it gives you a fundamental angle of experience. That is sufficient for hooking your inspiration and connecting disparate thoughts and facts.
Listening without judging helps me to hear the truth.
It´s difficult because I know how to learn things. This one asks me to unlearn things. Things I was sure about.
To gain distance from secondary critical thoughts is still an exhaustive exercise of presence I´m working on. Ignoring the noise in the background of my mind sometimes takes me more effort than concentrating on the sound of what I´m hearing.
But when I succeed and stop having an opinion of everything, I become less defensive of life’s contradictions and more compassionate.
And all of a sudden, I start listening to what things are and not what they supposedly mean when said. An aggressive colleague becomes a low self-confident colleague. A demanding person turns out to be seen as an attention childish guy or control freak bosses are power-needy managers. The tones of voices gain a lot more scales of meaning.
If you do so, you will listen clearly. And it´s important because without clarity you´re not listening to reality. You are listening the reverberation of your thoughts and what they affirm to be the truth.
So, taking in things without judging gives us free space to approach things for the first time each time. And the more we train to receive with clarity, the more clearly, we´ll listen to our mind too.
Journaling to capture what I heard.
Writing a journal helps us to capture volatile speedy ideas and gives pace to the cadency of our thoughts.
So, I am writing them down as much as I can. Not necessarily with rigor, temporal order, or clear objective. Except for inventorying ideas, ways of thinking or simply mirroring my mind and the way I experience life. Sometimes It makes me feel like a compositor completing a musical scale. Either materializing a piece of music heard or creating new ones.
It is remarkably productive when I´m excited about something. Because words flow through my fingers in abundance when I get ultra-inspired, super angry, or just particularly creative about something. I can now see it coming. So, I´m attentive to capturing these moments. Thoughts at generally at horse speed and everything else seems secondary.
Another reason for journaling is the fact I was feeling ashamed when I tried to describe what I lived the day before and couldn’t find anything to write about. That is how I realize I´m not putting enough effort into the behaviors of receiving and accepting attentively. So, journaling also became a great incentive to continue listing deeper.
Revisiting what I heard and took notes. But later.
Re-reading is a second chance to experience something. I also talk about the relevance of doing it here. If it was good, I can prolong that feeling while revisiting the scene and reading my writing details. If it was not, I can come back to it, in another context, and understand why it made me feel that way. Gaining insights from angles I was not considering when it occurred.
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When it happened the first time, it stroke me. I was astonished. And finally, woke up. How come I´ve never made use of such a simple act for expanding my perspective? Maybe because I was in a hurry. Maybe I´ve never questioned if I needed to expand it, in the first place.
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I said at the beginning, reading is a conversation. Reading my writing is like listening to a conversation between two selves. In this case between the self, that was thinking, and the self that was writing. And, when I read what the two of them were talking about, it is like inviting a third self of me, sometimes with fresh eyes, to participate.
That can become a very crowded and interesting practice when they disagree! And it´s when we´re listening to their discussion, that unusual perspectives appear.
That is also how we can close the gap between what we wrote and what we thought we heard. You will get surprised by how many times what your hand was writing was different from what your mind was telling you happened.
So, what?
Remember that the satisfaction of writing with your voice comes from the surprises it can cause. On us and others.
But it´ll only happen if we can listen deeper.
These 4 behaviors were turning points for me in listening deeper.
To become a listener of what our reality is telling us is to be able to unfold the different dimensions of our thinking process. And that is what makes our writing real. When we saturate our writing with our reality and become unique.
“Writing is 90% listening” —
Natalie Goldberg, Writing down the bones
The Deeper You Can Listen; The Closer You´ll Get to Your Voice in Writing was originally published in The Writing Cooperative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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Author: Lucy Wang
