Voice

I remember an anecdote about Helen Keller.  She wrote a story that was precious to her and gave it as a gift from her heart to a dear friend.  She ended up being lambasted for that story, accused of stealing it as it was so similar to something that had already been written.  Plagiarism.  The most evil demon lurking around writers and writing. 

I found a website with excerpts from her autobiography that in horrifying detail recounts the episode and her devastation; being accused, losing a cherished supporter and friend through the incident, and actually being tried by a panel to determine her intent and guilt.  After reading it I’m terrified to quote any of it, so I refer you to the link to peruse.  The Story of My Life, © 2014 American Foundation for the Blind. All rights reserved.  http://www.afb.org/MyLife/book.asp?ch=P1Ch14

In this missive, that reads like a confession, she racks her brain to remember if she had ever heard of the story she was accused of plagiarizing.  She puts together a chain analysis, going back, and back more, trying to determine if the

story had ever been told to her.  She ascertains that it must have been, and that she unconsciously called it up, and copied the memory in her own story.  Think about that; a deaf and blind young girl, her only way of absorbing information through tactile symbolic communication.  The stories that were “read” to her – how were they stored in a complex brain without the experience of sight or sound, how those experiences would otherwise be stored and called up as a resource when trying to depict something new?  We write by analogy.  We describe what we’ve seen, what we’ve heard in life, composing by contrast and comparison based upon our experiential contact with these things.  But being ‘told’ something was the only resource for analogy Helen Keller could have, her entire store of resources from which to draw.

This story is truly tragic and it breaks my heart and terrifies me at the same

time.  Everything we read, hear about, becomes an ingrained part of us.  How can we separate the stories we hear, that we now see in realistic surround sound, three-dimensional display?  How can we separate that from any other life experience that is “ours”?  What still belongs to the author and what becomes ours by virtue of its integration into our own network of interpretation and experience?  How the hell to tease all this apart?  Can we?

That’s my worse fear.  How many times my oh-so-profound and epic thoughts, epiphanies, story ideas, inevitably turn up already chronicled in something I end

up reading.  Had I pursued that thought into a story, wouldn’t I too be accused of plagiarism?  Where’s the line?
 I believe the only line that we have is our own voice, and our integrity.  The best thing I ever got from a writing class was reinforcement for my own voice; the concept that our unique voice is what writing really is, how you tell your story – not that the theme has been told already.  I clung to that.  I still cling to

that.  I will always cling to that.  It means I get to exist.  I get to write whatever I want.  I have my own unique voice.  It is legitimate and worthy and deserves outlet.  I get to tell my stories anyway I choose. 

Collectively, we know our stories, our shared ancient history, our epic “Hero’s Journey” tales.  We will never stop telling these stories; the same stories, generation to generation, culture to culture.  It is the telling of the story wherein the magic dwells.  Our lives, both

big and small, would diminish without being reflected back to us in the story.  It

is how we claim our lives in a vast, empty and terrifying universe; it’s how we know we exist, that our existence matters, has meaning.  We need to hear the stories of ourselves.  It is our humanity, how we remind ourselves that we all have a story, each of us.  It binds us, connects us as much now as it did round campfires at the dawn of man.  The stories are repeated but are fresh and unique by virtue of the voice of the storyteller. 

We know there is the “who, what, when, where and why” of any piece of writing.  But another lesson that stuck from a writing class so long ago – the ‘how’.  I wrote a short story on assignment, loose parameters that I don’t recall.  I ended up with an alien at what turned out to be a soccer match that through the alien’s eyes was a gruesome trial and punishment of the ball, which to them was sentient.  Fluff.  My teacher said it was well executed, technically flawless, that she ‘couldn’t find anything wrong with it.’  But?  Well, the ‘but’

was the ‘how’.  She gave a very impactful lecture after that on the ‘how’ of our stories.  How do we tell a particular story?  Is it just to complete an assignment, an obligatory deadline?  If so, it shows.  The ‘who’ is the characters; ‘what’ is the genre; ‘when’ of course is the time period; ‘where’ is the setting; and ‘why’ is the plot.  But ‘how’ – that is all us, uniquely us.  The rest is the jacket flap description.  How we write, while informed by the rest, is the essence, that piece of us bursting and nagging to be released, that won’t let us go while we’re at work, shakes us awake at night demanding life, to be actualized.  The result is our voice speaking to the reader with powerful words and stories that transcend the mechanics.

If we have chosen to take up the mantle of ‘writer’, then we intimately know the truth.  It is the clay in which we sculpt.  And if we are truthful and write from that core, we will not copy other works.  That is my story anyway.  And I’m sticking to it.