Leahey.org

This posting is a guest post by Gina Cacace. Her writings, artwork, and musings on life can be found at GinaCacace.com.

I’ve been reading Laraine Herring’s Writing Begins With the Breath (Shambhala Publications*). It has a really interesting approach to creating an authentic writing voice. Herring uses yoga postures and an awareness of the breath to help the writer access the part of the self that is usually guarded by our inner critic. Her first chapter is on risk in writing. She explains that most writers guard themselves in their works, “The writer tries to play it safe, tries to couch what he’s doing in layers of deep, and often beautifully phrased crap. The reader spots this right away…” But that through surrendering ourselves to our experiences, we can become more honest and compelling writers.

I very rarely take any risk in my writing. My memoirs normally adopt a sarcastic tone in order to downplay the importance of events. In fiction, I have created numerous middle aged male narrators, whose voices are usually comedic but distant. In an effort to tap into a more authentic voice, I created a female narrator in her twenties who was struggling to write a story (very much like myself). The result is the short fiction piece All In.

Any writer that shares their work understands that most people will confuse the narrator with the author. This can be frustrating, especially when we’ve worked so hard to create an interesting and complex character. But we can’t deny the little bits of ourselves that we invest into our characters (and that is where risk comes in–the more you are willing to invest, the more alive your story becomes, but also the more susceptible you are to be judged). Most readers will understand that if the story was purely autobiographical, the writer would have labeled it a memoir (as a side note, what is wrong with people who keep releasing fabricated memoirs? Why don’t they just call it fiction and avoid all of this?).

This is not to say that we can only write narrators that share our same demographic information. We all know that there is something that resonates beyond age/sex/location in a story. But to get to that point, we have to admit that if the story we write is our story then we’ll be closer to the characters and the result will be more powerful.

My hope is that the parts of myself I invested into my narrator, Rea, will make her believable. I also hope that readers will understand that she has certain exaggerated traits that make her distinct from me. It is a relatively simple story about self-realization and the confusion of college. Sharing this story is the most important part of the process (although believe me, writing it was difficult enough) so I’d love to have some feedback.

Thanks!
Gina

*For anyone who isn’t familiar with Shambhala Publications, they’re the ones that published Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, another essential tool for supporting your creativity.