In a post on the Stage 32 blog, Chris Morley continues his series on finding your creative voice. “Art is a gift from our Voice, the product of our Voice, and our work may have a certain style or brand, but the brand is not our Voice,” he says. “It’s bigger than that.”
Rather, voice is your gut instinct, the part of you that knows when a story isn’t working and warns you that your writing sounds inauthentic. If skill, theme, topic, and character are members of the orchestra, voice is the conductor who brings them all together, Morley says. “I’d say it was the deepest, most creative, and most trusted part of us that knows,” he writes. “It is capable of deep insights and creative inspiration and can lead us to new levels of artistic expression and personal success.”
Voice can’t be bought, but it can be encouraged and it should be trusted. When Morley worked on his play about King John and the signing of the Magna Carta, his “voice” would tell him when a scene wasn’t working. Sometimes, the voice wasn’t pointing to a problem, but saying that the work could be better. Then Morley decided that he could work with his voice, not merely wait for it to show its displeasure.
“I decided to pose the question of ‘what was wrong with the story’ and see what it might say,” he explains. When he did, the voice told him to experiment. Morley did so, swapping dialogue between characters, changing the sequence of events, inserting characters into scenes where they were absent. “It opened up whole new windows of opportunity and lifted the work up to a much better place,” Morley writes. “Eventually, after many drafts, the Voice was at peace, and the play was finished and ready for submission. Each time your Voice speaks, the stronger and clearer its guidance and the better your work becomes.”
