Identification, writing and empathy

Following on from my last post, and having emailed to and fro with a couple of wonderful writers who are either languishing or writhing in the throes of the issue of ‘am I writing like me, or am I writing like somebody else’ (and they know who they are and which of them is which) I had one of those revelatory moments.

I was driving back from Horsham, which is not usually a place to be visited with revelations, although I do get light-bulb moments quite often when I’m driving or running. Anyway, I was watching the road, as there are a couple of nasty places where crashes happen with worrying frequency, and listening to the radio, which is always tuned to Radio 4 when I’m driving and over the forty or so minutes of the journey I was taken through the short and truly tragic life of Ivor Gurney, poet and composer, survivor of the Great War and troubled genius who died in a mental asylum after years of incarceration and treatment that would seem monumentally inhumane to us today.

Anyway, the point was, I knew a little about Ivor from my dilatory PhD research into World War I and by about fifteen minutes into the broadcast I was utterly identifying with him. And that was odd. Odd because I really don’t like that kind of music, and because the experiences with which I was identifying were ones that would send me, as me, running for cover, such as his joy in barrack room life with his army mates (this, remember, is the woman who has a neurotic flap over having to spend a week with fourteen perfectly nice people on an Arvon course and she had her own bedroom, not a bunk in a barracks) and his sentimental love for a VAD nurse (I’m prejudiced a bit against the VAD because my abandoned PhD was about a different branch of volunteer nursing so I’m inclined to be partisan) and general bucolic happiness about his home county, Gloucester, a dismal place that has rained on me, and pretty well through me, every time I’ve been there.

So how was I so completely identifying with Gurney that when I heard he’d written to the American President to complain about being tortured with electricity (about the only thing he wasn’t tortured with was electricity: they injected him with malaria for what probably seemed good reasons to the asylum staff and pulled all his teeth) and begging to be sent back to Gloucester, I was almost in tears at the prospect of the poor creature never seeing the meadows of his home county again?

Well, because I’m a writer, obviously. Because almost any well-presented set of facts will move me, and most other writers, past understanding into a degree of empathy that is often painful and disorienting. And because I’m currently writing about a musician, so any reference to Gurney’s music chimed with an area that I’m immersed in to the point of mania.

So what? Well, a lot of the agonising we do about voice is an attempt to ensure that we’re managing to express what we’ve so easily managed to internalise – that we’re doing justice to the lives that live within us, whether they are completely imaginary like the protagonist in my current novel or wholly factual, like Gurney. And if we can move from thinking about voice as something we have to ‘master’ to thinking about it as an outgrowth of empathy, we are more likely to find the tools we need, and less likely to damage ourselves with doubt and anxiety during the search.

Who do you write like? Or even, like whom do you write?

When we start writing, we often do so in a more or less conscious imitation of a writer we admire. For some of us it’s because we’ve read everything that writer has written (and if they’ve died, everything that will be published by them) and we want more, so our only option is to try and produce a simulacrum of their work with our own imaginations. That’s what slash/fan fic came out of: the boiling desire to have more of something that had ended or migrated to a new place. Some Star Trek fans want only Spock and Kirk, no other captain and first officer will do, so they write (and act out, and film) their own episodes. Some Dickens fans must know what the Mystery was that Edwin Drood was to be the hero of, had Dickens not died after episode six of the eponymous twelve-part story, so they write the second half themselves.

And many of us move on. From slavish imitation we move to unconscious imitation. More of ‘us’ gets through, but more of other influences does too. Sometimes this looks like maturity, but it is still a stage of groping after our own voice, our own vision, even our own map of the world we want to write about. We’re grabbing at bits of other maps, fragments of other pictures, echoes of other voices because we admire them and want to take those directions ourselves.

The final stage comes when you leave all those other voices, visions and maps behind and move into a territory that is purely your own. What makes this part frustrating is that it becomes much more difficult to talk about, and less robust than either of the other two stages. If you’ve been channelling Reginald Hill or E M Forster, you have a sense of where to start and finish. When there’s only you to set the direction, work fades into a grey mist in the impossible future of ‘the end’ and you have no idea how to get there or even which way to start travelling.

That’s where a long-established writer’s group can be so useful. Even if they don’t know your territory, they know you, and that allows them to support, critique, observe and challenge your writing, even when you yourself can’t find the words to encapsulate your novel or describe your play in progress. And in holding you to account on a regular basis, they can stop you getting lost in uncharted territory.

It doesn't have to be a physical group, although that can be good. My online writing groups have been the greatest support I've had, and I still always run my work by one particular writer (she knows who she is) because she's my toughest critic and the person who most 'gets' my writing - sometimes she gets it even when I don't!