I was asked to write a short article/blog today about how or why my style of writing is unique and/or different.  Every school teaches the MLA format for writing.  Every school from university up teaches the student to ‘follow the leader’ and do as they do.  Individual voice is lost in a packaging meat processing plant – much like the video from Pink Floyd’s The Wall.  Yet every once in a while one of us jumps the conveyer belt, and goes about writing our own way.  You hear and see it in their writing, like a chef carefully creating a canvas of art for your mouth. 

As any aspiring writer knows, it is a minefield when writing query letters and proposals.  Editors and agents want the Wal-Mart shopping style for proposals but expect a single owner, mom & pop shop experience.  When a unique author makes the big break, what is most recognized is his/her independent voice.  Soon every publisher wants the same thing and that voice becomes isle #9 at ol’Sam Walton’s suburban check out.  Universities offer creative writing classes that although advertize creative expression, only place us, the artist on the cardboard silhouette of conformity.  I hope that as you read further, you will ask yourself some simple questions: what made you unique as a writer, and how can you maintain your voice or find it again. 

Looking back, I started writing as soon as I was able to make a sentence.  Mother when I was young child was a pianist, and choir director of a hundred-twenty voice choir.  Before the age of eight our home was filled with classic, folk and rhythm & blues music.  I learned to make up lyrics while the instruments played on.  I took the verse and made up my own, stitching them into place.  As the years went by I found that story telling in poem form fit me.  At the time, I didn’t know it was an actual way to write or a format, and in many ways it still is, or so my editor tells me when correcting my work.

The need to write grew out of a quiet exterior.  When I wrote, I found whatever music was playing molded and changed my immediate persona and mood.  I was not much on the construction of grammar; I cared only of its flow.  I found my way down the looking glass, or the ‘word curve’ as I called it.  My primary and secondary school was a tossup of over 23 schools: nine junior high schools, four senior high schools and the rest elementary.  As we moved every three or so months, on average, each state was either ahead or behind academically from where I recently came from.  No my parents were not military, they were reckless. My father abducted me at an early age.  Three years later he was arrested for parental child abduction; it would be the first case in United States history to result in a felony conviction.  My mother, she became a lifelong survivor and then a traveling evangelist with a new and improved past.  

Due to our waterbed-terra foundation we grew up in, I learned my own way of writing and my own way of learning.  My childhood became both fodder and ample storage for future work in both writing and poetry.  My formal education was a patch work of old blankets-carefully woven together to make a covering.  As my poem style evolved everything took on multiple meaning like a Pink Floyd song or Masonic ritual.  I believe for that one reason my perspective or outlook on the world is a uniquely skewed prism. 

Prisms are not a bad thing though.  They are the reflection and convection of light both invisible (the pure white light inside us) and the outer (multicolored) of who we are.  Poems and lyrical play make up the world around me.  As a past journalist and free thinker said, “My deck of cards are the card catalog I file my reality by”.  Education has empowered me to understand the basics of life and the way an ‘MLA’ paper should be written, but it has not, by pure rebellion, changed my style, and I have become accustom to expressing myself through my own written voice. 

You have to find and/or dig deep to find your voice.  It is there.  As a writer you, we, have touched upon it and made written scribble, or sketches.   Having a class to teach us the basics is a wonderful tool.  However, it is a tool.  A color wheel is a guide, a road map for the painter if you will, but it is nothing more.  Use your wheel to give direction but use your inner voice to paint the world in words, your words.

Ken Connelly

Speaker, Author: Throwing Stones; Parental Child Abduction through the Eyes of a Child (Book I of the Finding Home series)

Wake up, Live the Life You Love; Building Foundations (Spring 2010)