Who am I?

After reading the article assigned last week on discovering one's voice in writing, I must say that the idea of finding a happy median between the formal style of writing those of the higher echelons of learning use to confound us mere mortals and the chaotic mess of emotion that spills from the fingers of the young and foolish, is something I wholly agree with.

I despise reading when the writer has a holier than though attitude about their own intellect just as I hate wasting time on something that looks like it were composed by a school child late for a ballgame who knew there was no getting out of the house without showing that all homework was done. We've all been that kid, substitute ballgame for something else if you must, but no one wants to read that work. It wasn't written to be read, it was written to be done.

I have not had very many exceptional English teachers in my academic career prior to college, but I have had a few. A very few. Of those, each one encouraged me to read copious amounts of literature. Books upon books by different authors, each with a different style. All that I know about grammar and sentence structure comes from these books. I have tried to learn from the men and woman who created for me fantastical worlds, both fictional and factional, and emulate some bit of that person's writing. Personally I feel that I've done a rather horrible job at it as my voice, as the article calls it, has a tendency to change.

More than moods, my writing voice will sometimes weave in and out of those voices I have picked up from my books. To some degree, it's amusing. Yet, at the same time it's infuriating, it reminds me how erratic my thoughts can be. That is something I hope to work on this year. I hope to assimilate the voices and styles I already have, to refine them into a singular voice, one that is my own.