Forgetting authenticity

When I went to my first creative writing workshop, over 20 years ago, the tutor introduced the rest of the group a bit like this: “Here is Dave, Clare and Janet – they have found their authentic voices. This is George, he’s nearly found his. And that’s Heather – she’s a long way off.”

I don’t remember the exact words, of course, but you get the idea: the secret to writing well was to find your authentic voice. When we each found ours, we’d know it, and everything thereafter would flow easily for us. If we hadn’t yet found it, we just needed to keep looking.

Our tutor’s job, it seemed, was to listen to whatever we wrote and tell us whether it was authentic or not. I don’t remember if I found my authentic voice; I didn’t stay around very long.

It seemed like an odd goal at the time, and it’s grown odder over the years. I like the idea of writing authentically – you could say it’s what I’m trying to do now. I want to write something that feels honest and true to who I am and what I value. It’s me here, doing this, sitting in a lounge chair in my mother-in-law’s house, which is where I’m working today, because my house has become a building site. That’s real.

But in practice it starts to get a bit sketchy. Going back to the Greek root, authentic would mean coming from ‘the self’ – the genuine, original me. Hmmm. If you’re looking to find your genuine original self so you can use it as the ground to write from: good luck. I suspect you might not find it, and I worry you’ll get blocked trying.

The good news - for me at least – is this isn’t a problem. And the great news is that it’s creatively liberating. My experience is this: whatever ‘self’ I have is always changing, shifting, learning and forgetting. Instead of trying to pin that authentic self down and see what it wants to write, I can just do whatever me-here-in-this-moment feels called to do. Not having to worry about being consistent or true to my self is such a relief. I commend it to you.

If I need a word to replace authenticity, my current favourite is sincerity. Interestingly, the online dictionary I just checked defines sincerity not as a presence of something but as an absence –  “an absence of pretence, deceit, or hypocrisy.” I like that. No need to go looking for something to cling on to; it’s what you let go of that matters.

Yours sincerely,

Neil