How To Find your Voice As A Writer
What does “finding your voice” mean? It’s about knowing who you really are.
By Ian Masters
That is what commissioners, producers, readers and development execs are all clamouring for: that truly authentic voice, newly discovered, blisteringly fresh, painfully honest.
But what if you hate your voice? I hate mine. And I’ll be clear, I mean my actual voice. That’s the reason I write. Why? My actual voice is embarrassing. I can’t pwonounce my r’s. My first girlfriend was called Ewica. She introduced me to her parents, Gwaham and Vewa and I knew it was never going to last.
Voice is shit. I don’t want to have to speak; that’s why I write.
During the first Covid lockdown I took ownership of my grandfather’s old Chaplin film reels and borrowed a projector from a couple in my village. I was able to watch again the dozen 8mm Chaplin films I had last seen forty years earlier.
I screened them to my daughter. (When she was younger, we went to a Chaplin film festival in Cambodia. There he’s known as “Saklo” – a corruption of his French name, Charlot.) We watched The Kid. Though a child of the YouTube generation, she was totally absorbed in the film, laughing and crying in all the right places, and it didn’t even occur to her once that it was a silent film.
And yet Chaplin grappled with voice his whole life. Maybe it was his defining creative anxiety. Famously, his first outing as a performer came as a young boy when his mother’s voice gave out on stage. He rushed on to rescue her with an improvised pantomime and diverted attention from her failed voice. It became a constant reminder to him of how voice couldn’t be trusted.
In Ghana “Charleh” as a term of endearment and brotherhood has been attributed by some to Chaplin. In Cambodia, tooth-brush moustaches can still be seen on stand-ups even now.
Chaplin’s global conquest through his silent comedies was without parallel at the time, maybe even today.
But by the 30s Chaplin was in danger of being eclipsed by technology. He began experimenting with sound – and the sound of his own voice. He was deeply sceptical. In City Lights he turned the film into a sideswipe against talkies – silent, except for a song of gobbledigook. He wrote a dialogue script for Modern Times, but bottled it in production.
But the thing is, while Chaplin struggled with his voice, he was desperate to be heard. I think that’s the crisis of almost every writer.
The point is, with his status and presence across the globe, Chaplin had an extraordinary power to speak his truth through his films.
More than anything, Chaplin wanted to be taken seriously as someone with something to say, not “just” the silent comic who kicked the Kaiser up the backside. He visited statesmen and artists, from Einstein to Gandhi. At a dinner with Churchill, he presented his own economic theories. (His friendship with Churchill was an extraordinary one in so many ways: one, a nobody from Dickensian poverty who made his fortune and fame from his silent persona of the downtrodden everyman, the other an aristocratic orator who famously used his voice to rally the UK against fascism). The point is, with his status and presence across the globe he had an extraordinary power to speak his truth through his films.
But he was trapped: his universal appeal was based on him not speaking. As soon as he spoke, the magic was gone. Would he speak as himself or as the Tramp? How would he speak? Down-on-his-luck British aristocrat? Working-class have-a-go hero? Or a classless American twang? And what would he say?
It’s this tension that creates his best films – City Lights and Modern Times. Mesmerising, tender, soulful, biting, funny – the tramp speaks in his silence to the everyman.
Then in 1941 he spoke in The Great Dictator. But beyond the character of the Jewish barber or Adenoid Von Hynkel, he spoke in those famous final moments of the film as Chaplin, down the lens, straight to the audience in an extraordinary post-satiric moment of absolute honesty – and almost childish naivety.
Was it out of technological necessity, or because he had something pent up that he desperately wanted to say?
When asked about voice he famously said, “It’s my belief that motion pictures need sound as much as Beethoven’s symphonies need lyrics.”
The magic of the Tramp was gone. But I’ve never seen that speech shared as much as I have in the last few years. A speech against fascism, totalitarianism and a violence that was more than he could bear. A howl for humanity.
In the next few years, audiences turned on him for being a Communist, and he was exiled from the US for speaking his mind. Charlie Chaplin had found his voice, but lost his audience.
When asked about voice he famously said, “It’s my belief that motion pictures need sound as much as Beethoven’s symphonies need lyrics.”
Voice isn’t speech. Voice is you. It’s everything about you that influences who you are. Yes, there are a million screenwriters out there, but there’s only one you. Trust in yourself and the validity of your own unique voice.
Ian Masters
Ian Masters is an award-winning scriptwriter who has worked across Africa and Asia for the past two decades. He is now based out of the UK with his writing partner, Jon Smith.
You can connect with Ian on LinkedIn, contact him through his agent or his website, and find out more about his work here.
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