Finding My Voice

"A Night Under the Stars: The start of something beautiful" was my first piece published on Vocal. When I decided to take a risk and enter a story in the Date Night challenge a couple years ago, I began the journey to discovering who I am as a writer and what I can create when given a prompt. At that point, this process was entirely new to me. I have always been a writer, but this was different. At that point, I was just developing a style of my own.

Upon revisiting "Stars," I can see the most extreme example of my completely internal and personal story lines. In this piece, the only sound the reader hears is that of an "old jazz record." There is no speaking, there is no interaction between humans. There is a complete absence of dialogue. The only character in the story doesn't even have a name. She is simply referred to as "she."

Since then, my voice has become more outspoken and my perspective more multi-faceted, multidimensional, scattered with varied viewpoints. Now when I create a story, it is not unheard of for it to be populated with characters other than the narrator. They've been known to contain occasional dialogue. I even wrote one story that was entirely dialogue and even though it did not win the challenge in which I entered it, it was a huge win for me. That story was an important step in the evolution of my writing journey. Now the characters in my stories have names and identities. They are three-dimensional. The stories I write now happen out loud. I still write tales told largely from the perspective of a singular person’s thoughts, I think (and hope) that that aspect of my writing style may never fully change, it's part of who I am as a writer. The difference is now that’s not the only element, it’s just part of the flavor of my writing, but I've recently added some new ingredients into my writing recipe.