You might have heard writers or writing teachers talk about the importance of “finding your voice.” The common metaphor of “finding” makes it sound like, well, you lost or misplaced your voice. How careless of you! Like a shoe you tossed into the mess of your closet. It also makes you sound like the heroine in the original fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid: robbed of your voice—it has been removed from your body by an evil sea witch, naturally—you must complete some impossible or epic task before it is returned to you.
Thankfully, unlike the original story (which is wonderfully vivid), no mermaid tails have been severed or even threatened by a sea witch in the making of your writer’s voice. In fact, all you have to do is…write. That’s right. Your writing voice is…you, writing. It’s everything you’ve ever seen, dreamed, heard, saw, smelled, tasted, felt, read, absorbed, touched, and experienced in your life–everything that backs you up on the page when your pen touches paper. It’s the banana you just ate, from the top of the bundle because you didn’t want the bruised bottom banana. It’s the lunch you just rushed through and just upset your stomach over. It’s the fact that you’re not great at math, because among other things you took Math for the Liberal Arts, out of order, and a cute boy in the first class distracted you the entire first semester. It’s your whole life that has come before your writing, before you pen drops down to the paper. It’s every choice you have made until that moment, and the choices you make in the moment—the period that Ernest Hemingway returns to like a lover, the commas Gertrude Stein refuses to give the time of day to, the semicolons Virginia Woolf drops like glitter between her words and phrases.
Your writing voice is…you, writing. […] It is every choice you have made until that moment, and the choices you make in the moment.
So what about the sea witch of AI? Am I being overly dramatic? haha. Let’s think about. If you paste your essay into ChatGPT, ask it to revise your grammar and your style and “not change your content,” ChatGPT will revise your choices, and thus revise your voice. What ChatGPT will in fact do—and we know this is how it works—is revise your writing to be like the many, many thousands of stolen voices its programmers have pirated and fed into its water-consuming engines.
Using AI to revise your writing is not a neutral choice. It does not mean revising your work to be like a blank, universal template, but like the work that ChatGPT has been trained on–the work of countless unnamed, uncredited, and uncompensated artists and writers. But even if it did mean revising your work to be “neutrally” good (in actuality, the result is mediocre; ask any decent writer!): would you want to be that? What would happen to our individual voices, then? What would happen to the traces of our choices?
Writing prompt: Set a timer for five minutes and journal. Write down at least five things you noticed today, or this week. Verlyn Klinkenborg says that everyone notices all day, but writers notice what we notice. So, notice. Give yourself the time and space to relax into writing. You might need to sit calmly for several minutes before your brain slides into a creative writing space—you are not a faucet; you don’t simply turn on when a nozzle is twisted! Give yourself space and see where your thoughts feel like going.
The Line Break 