The Collected Works of D. Alex Rhue

If you think about it, nearly all of the communication we are exposed to is a total fake.

A news anchor reads text from a teleprompter written in a style and delivered in a voice that is far from the way they really talk. A politician gives a carefully crafted speech designed to “rile up the base.”

I could list many more examples of people and organizations that deliver some form of predigested content to the masses to please someone or something else. To feed the creativity-killing hydra that is today’s media landscape. If that were the only harm, I suppose I would have nothing else to say here. But that ain’t it.

At our jobs, we carefully word emails to cover our butts, placate customers, and please bosses. The result is that as writers and communicators, we can become a facsimile or even a caricature of ourselves because of the conditioning that slowly happens.

A friend recently told me that when I write professionally, I become a facsimile of myself (notice how I stole his line above?). I could have become offended, but I didn’t. Instead, I thought way back to when I had my strongest voice.

As I dug deep down to the Jurrasic period, I realized something. It is not new or profound, in fact many writers more talented and accomplished than me have said it over and over. But like the stubborn old geezer my kids think I am, it was just not sinking in.

What is this mystery, this insane earth-shattering secret? Write every day! It is not some shocking ritual that is only understood by a shaman in the Far East, but a simple fact. If you want to write and write well, put your thoughts down on a daily basis. It will strengthen your sense of your own voice.

How did I prove this idea to myself? As my personal paleontology revealed, as long as I can remember having the ability to read and write, I put my thoughts on paper. I never had a true journaling habit, but I was always writing. “Mom, can I have a sandwich please?” or “Can we go to the park?” and on to my imaginings that would change our understanding of the world and universe.

My grandiose dreams of changing the world aside, the fact that I articulated my thoughts in raw form all the time gave me a powerful sense of self in my writing. There was no fear of anything I wrote ever.

Fast-forward a few ice ages, and I entered the corporate world. My frequent emails expressing my opinions and feelings about things were not always well received, and so began a long process of winnowing away my personality in my writing. With this erosion, my writing became a desert devoid of life animation and color.

Now that I really give it thought, there is no way this dearth of realness in my writing hasn’t affected my fiction. It may even be a strong reason my last poems were written 20 years or more ago (sheesh I am getting old).

At any rate, I could drone on for hours, but I think by now, you get the point. Finding your voice is a process, but so is maintaining it. If you want to write, you have to commit to writing every single day. You have to limit your exposure to fakeness and be vulnerable. If you do that, you can find your voice and not lose it.

P.S. I would normally edit a post like this a lot. To take my own medicine, I only edited this for grammar. You have my raw, unvarnished thoughts.