The Storyteller’s Voice
by Pete Hindle
I’ve been trying to write a blog post about my illness, specifically about the night that I nearly died, for a while now. It’s a story I’ve told to my friends over and over again, and despite it’s grim subject it’s something I can rely upon to have people laughing out loud.
Trying to make that story come alive in writing is something completely different. I don’t know why – maybe I’m just not good enough with written words. But whatever the reason, I just can’t make the story really ‘pop’ when I need it to. Parts of it that are hilarious when spoken out loud come across flat and dull when in a written form, and after a few separate attempts to squeeze it onto a page I’ve given up.
One of the reasons it’s such a fantastic story is that I’ve told it so many times. I now live far away from my friends, and aside from a small number of people I keep in touch with via email and phone calls, I don’t see a lot of people. When I do get back to Newcastle, I usually go on a socialising splurge, trying to fit in seeing as many people as possible. This usually means updating people on why I’ve been away, and/or what’s wrong with me, and why I get so tired now, and to help me do this I fall into a shpeel which rattles through various points of my health failure until I reach the present.
But this shpeel, this story, isn’t really being told in my usual conversational voice. It’s a tale that I tell people, something I share with them, and when it’s finished I stop being a storyteller and talk with them. I like to find out what they’ve been up to in the months that I’ve been away. The storytelling “voice” I use when relating my tale is similar to the written style I use here on my blog – which, again, is not the real me.
The best blogs are blogs that have a focus, like Lee’s printmaking blog, or Mike’s blog about his trip to the birthplace of Russian Anarchy, or Brenda’s blog on her photography practice. Currently, when I blog I have no real focus but to tell an amusing story, and in doing so I’ve let the story-tellers voice become confused with my own when working (and writing) online. I actually get a lot of compliments about my blog, and the style of writing that I’ve used on it, which is really lovely. But I need to try new things.
I’m not sure what those new things are, but I have to stretch myself. Writing in this semi-voice, this tonal range that sounds like me but isn’t quite, is starting to impose limits on the things I can say – and the things I can’t. So it’s time to change.
Maybe you put on storyteller voice to put a little distance between you and the bad thing that has happened to you. Almost like you are talking about someone else’s tragic story.
I’m actually fine with the illness – one of the reasons I tell the story (of my near-death experience) in such a humorous way is to set other people at easy with what happened to me. There are other things that I’m super-annoyed about though, like being stranded in Central Bedfordshire away from all my friends, which I find too difficult to talk about. I should come up to Scotland and tell you the whole tale sometime…
I ALSO MEANT TO SAY: yours was another one of those blogs I wanted to mention in the text! Except then it could have turned into a list of all the people I read on the internet who make cool stuff and blog about it.
Absolutely honoured, Pete.
Just keep on doing what you’re doing. It *is* you, and it just works.
No problem Brenda. As for the blogging here, well… it’s definitely a version of me, but – at the minute – this vein feels tapped out. I’m not interesting in writing from my viewpoint at the minute, but do I have some ideas for essays that I might want to show in public.
So to recap, roughly:
You quit Facebook over something to do with spying.
You don’t tweet because 140 is a diversion.
You can’t talk because you’re pretty much alone, and when you come north to see people it comes out all jokey.
And now your blog is somehow the wrong you.
Huh? What’s really going on here? You, the ordinary everyday personable non-literary genius Pete, the one who juggles, and is opinionated, erudite, funny, and a bit weird, is the person we all miss. Can be please have some of that back, especially since we no longer see you in real life?
In one sense, yes! That’s precisely it! And then, at the same time, no, that’s not it.
It’s that “roughly”, right at the start of your comment. What I might say, what I might gain pleasure from writing, might not be the same part that you gain pleasure from reading, and when I deal with a subject matter that’s so close to my own personality I run the risk of casting a false impression of myself.
The blogs and bloggers who I like to read, such as yourself, are talking about something that they have done, or a project that they are involved in, so that when elements of their personality come through it’s something additional to the topic at hand.
At the minute, I would say that I’ve become reliant on mining myself as a subject. I want to top up on my interests in life, maybe pick up some new ones, and I think part of doing that involves stepping away from the attention-grabbing parts of the internet and seeing what other things are out there. As I do that, I’ll have more things to write about, and more things to say, and perhaps I’ll even find a certain area where I want to stay, like new media art, or photography. A milieu where I’d feel comfortable working in, and have interesting things to say – that don’t just involve talking about ‘me me me’ all the time!
Hope that answers your question. Or, if the above was too long… I’ll be back when I have interesting things to say about an interesting subject!
be = we