Recipe For Losing Your Voice

How to Lose Your Creative Voice

  1. Preheat the environment with a year-long global pandemic.

2. Mix together despair, grief, and self-doubt.

3. Add several dashes of social media. The seasoning will become extra strong if you combine vitriol directed at your profession (teacher), and criticism directed at your identity (mom). Fold in frightening news coverage.

4. After diligently working the material, produce a small batch of products (stories, blog posts, book queries) that are sent out and rejected, some immediately and some after a period of time during which hope grew, only to be crushed.

5. Pause to cry and regroup.

6. Repeat steps 2-5.

7. Bake until the creative voice is completely dried out.

How to Get it Back

Recipe still in progress, but I do know some of the ingredients:

  1. Persistence
  2. Faith in self and in the creative spirit
  3. Continual creative production
  4. Shutting up the constant self-editing, self-doubt, and fear of public humiliation
  5. Reading for inspiration
  6. Time
  7. Patience

Readers and friends, it’s time I got my writing voice back. I’ll be blogging every day this week, in hopes of gaining the confidence of the pelican in the picture below.

See you tomorrow!

I wish I had this guy’s voice.

3 thoughts on “Recipe For Losing Your Voice

  1. I’m right there with you, my creative voice all but gone. I hate that I’ve allowed this to creep up on me, but I’m stumbling around looking for my own recipe for restoring it. I started with a complete break from trying to write. I’m going to take a short and careful road trip with a close friend–and I’m hoping that will help to jump start everything (excuse the mixed metaphors…)

    Hang in there, Leanne–your creative voice means a lot to me, personally.

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