The Indoor Secret Movie Voice or Being Wildly Coherent

As soon as you find your voice, you’ve lost it

                                                                         Jon Anderson

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Shifting the point of view is changing keys inside the same subject.

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The subject then, is an idea.  It is fluid not fixed.  A writer doesn’t have to know as much about a subject as they have to know what they think about the subject.

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Writing is thinking about a subject and not deciding on its virtue.  The relationship between thinking and subject creates heat which creates voice.  The voice rings through the subject and the last reverberation harmonizes with the point of view.

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Only after María Irene Fornés wrote her play Abington Square did she realize that one of her characters was homosexual.  She didn’t plan on writing a play with a homosexual character in it but she did create an environment in which a homosexual would thrive.  Then, he thrived, which was how she knew he was there and who he was.

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The writer has to know what it is about the experience about being alive on the way to being dead that is representative of an original way of saying with words what made that life lived life.

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Whatever happens to your writing after you’ve written it is their dream.

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As much as a writer doesn’t know where the writing may take them, they are very clear about the beginning even when the writer didn’t write the beginning at the beginning.

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First thought, best thought?  Bad idea.  Last thought on first thought?  Better.  The last thought has your voice in it.  Or your voice’s regret.  The voice doesn’t conflict with regret, it identifies it as duende.

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The first sentence is the eye looking at the point of view.  Or it is the eye blinking to make sure.

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A writer’s voice is apparent from the very beginning.  The singer opens her mouth to sing and we know what she sounds like.

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The first sentence or line unlocks the writer’s unconscious mind and affirms that however wild the thought may be there is language somewhere that can make it coherent.  Coherent only means direction – which is usually from left to right.

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Sentences don’t merely carry information.  They carry inspired information.

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Voice is music.  Period.  Or music of a period.

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The writer is singing and then when she goes back to revise, she is listening to what she just said.

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Re-writing is like talking during a movie.  You are reconsidering something you have just seen after you have just seen it.

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My boyfriend doesn’t like it when I talk at the movies and when he’s had enough of it he’ll say:  indoor secret movie voice.  This was one of the first real understandings we had between us.  The indoor secret movie voice is a direction to lower my voice, of course, but it is also a description of a singular sensation: a quiet voice but also an intimate voice; a voice that is carrying a kind of information.  Only he and I can hear it.  And, not surprisingly, most of the literature I truly care about is written in an indoor secret movie voice:  Only the writer and I, the reader, can hear it.

Image from here.