Odd

When I began to think about coming back to write this blog, I also found myself thinking about the title. Back when I created it, I wanted to use it as a place to jot down my ideas about fiction and voice. But the more I think about voice, the more I realise that it’s just a by-product of my own thought processes and that when I’m writing fiction, I am really writing about myself. It’s heavily disguised but everything I’ve ever written contains a mutated form of my experience. Sometimes those are experiences I’ve lived. Sometimes they are experiences that I’ve found at second-hand, though books, film, the television. The point isn’t that I’ve moved away from thinking about voice. I’m just happy to be writing as myself. It’s liberating to be myself. It’s still all a fiction, of course. Even as I try to write about personal experiences, I’m transforming them into something else. Anybody who reads me will transform them again. Voice is all fiction. Even when I mean it to be quite real.