Born to be Mild
Why can’t I channel my inner Starkey?
We all bring our whole selves to work when we sit down to write.
However we may wish to mask it, our background and experiences seep into every sentence we craft, and give the reader a glimpse into our souls.
It’s normal to see this as a good thing — writing in your authentic voice is more genuine, sustainable (and a damn sight faster) than trying to fake it.
But, what if you discover you don’t like that voice? What if you channel a true representation of your spirit in the best prose you can muster and you find the resulting persona weak, whining or insipid?
There are a few reasons for putting this out there. One is the salvage operation I have undertaken on my old novels, recycling the best bits for publication on Medium.
What I found is that I can still appreciate and share the slice of life vignettes from Obsession and the mental and spiritual odyssey of The Alpha Lab. But the lead characters in the stories leave me cold, even though (or perhaps especially because) they are a thinly veiled representation of how I was back then.
Matt from the Alpha Lab seems slow, anemic and indecisive, while Marty from Obsession appears like a toxic narcissist, out on the extremes of destructive self-justification. Their author wants no further truck with either.
The second reason for talking about voice is that in the daily grind of trying to acquire more followers, I have inevitably run into other writers with wildly different perspectives and styles than my own. And this is what I have discovered.
What I love to read is vastly different from what I am able to write
When attempting to make a humorous point, my natural English reserve and schooling in indirectness can render the end product vanishingly subtle, so that readers have a fifty per cent chance of passing over the piece without realizing a joke has been made.
The more serious posts are so circumspect and respectful of various points of view that in some cases people and companies I was aiming to critique can read them and continue on blithely unaware that they have been targeted.
Reviewing the growing back catalog, I had to laugh at the heading
“Staying in your comfort zone — Sometimes that’s where the magic happens”.
Although this was meant sincerely, it reminds me for all the world of the demotivational posters at Despair.com, including classics such as
“Mediocrity — It takes a lot less time and most people won’t notice the difference until it’s too late.”
And then you come across a writer like Starkey.
In reading his posts I veer between recoiling in shock at the unblinking depiction of harrowing events…. and literally laughing out loud moments later at the brutalist humor applied to the same situations.
This roller coaster doesn’t end, and it defies our Hollywood-driven expectations of narrative resolution.
“Surely someone is about to turn up and save those women. This piece can’t literally be about a boy’s death?”
Well, no they don’t and yes it can.
The density of the prose construction drives a coach and horses through received wisdom of conversational easy-reading style as the “correct” writing method and there are paragraphs which demand a multi-pass read to squeeze out every ounce of meaning.
The bleak landscape of much of the action puts me in mind of a David Lynch film (think Eraserhead or Blue Velvet). In my world, comparisons don’t come much more favorable than this.
And the humor… well we all know how personal that is to people’s taste, but I can’t remember when someone tickled this funny bone so consistently. Guess you have to find out for yourself, to which end, there’s a primer at the foot of this post.
In short, I could read Mr Starkey’s product all day long, and I have taken active steps to ensure supply of such fare is maximized.
This is unlikely to affect my own output, since my cultural conditioning has a 60-year head start.
I can only hope that, just as Mr S has opened up new vistas for me, so my scribbles will offer an alternative perspective, albeit muted and indirect, to those choosing to follow my Medium journey.
