YET ANOTHER VOICE CLASS ANALOGY
This week, I brought in a new song—Cole Porter’s “Night and Day”—to work on
in class.
My teacher, Martha, has been pushing me to add increasing force and
intensity to my singing. Initially I felt I was screaming my songs, but a few
weeks ago something clicked—the way it does when you’re struggling to learn a
new language, and then suddenly realize you’re thinking in it—and the “bigger”
voice started flowing out, naturally, as if this was my real voice and I knew
what I was doing.
Martha has been enthusiastic about my expanding voice and range, the way a
good kindergarten teacher would be—praising my effort and development, and downplaying
the objective result. One reason we’re all making such good progress is that
she doesn’t set up competition among us by singling anyone out for particular
praise or censure. She treats rising stars and rank beginners with the same
attention and respect, taking each of us where we are and encouraging us to
move to the next step. She’ll tell us when something is working well, but
that’s as flowery as it gets.
When I had run through the song once, she said, “Okay—you’re hitting the notes
with clarity and force. It’s time to work on expression. I want you to try for a
rounder, more open sound for this song—a sexy sound. Think of warmth, of
opening up.”
When I started this class last spring, if anyone had suggested I try for a “sexy
sound” I would have frozen into seventh grade hell on the spot. I would have
blushed from my toes to about 6 inches over my head, my shoulders would have
hunched around my ears, and my voice would have disappeared entirely. Now, I was
inside the song, inside the process, and beyond self-consciousness. I did a
flash self-hypnosis/visualization exercise and tried again.
She was silent for a moment after I finished, then said, “You are turning into a singer!”
The next morning, telling a friend about it, I heard myself say, “I flew
home!”
The term struck me powerfully, because each step of this process—starting with
forcing myself into the building to sign up for the class—has felt like jumping
out of a plane, unsure whether my parachute was functional.
That is what writing has felt like, too, from my first post-childhood
decision to write a story, to actually showing work to friends, to submitting
it, to reading and presenting. I still feel that way every time I start a new
story, and at that inevitable point partway through when everything feels
muddled and wrong. But I’m learning that my feeling that I’m incompetent is
just that—a feeling—and that chances are, if I take the leap, I’ll discover not
just a parachute, but wings.
Susan O'Doherty, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist with a New York City-based practice. A fiction writer herself, she specializes in issues affecting writers and other creative artists. She is the author of Getting Unstuck without Coming Unglued: A Woman's Guide to Unblocking Creativity (Seal, 2007). Her Career Coach column appears every Monday on Inside Higher Ed's Mama, Ph.D. blog , and she is a regular monthly panelist on Litopia After Dark. Send your questions to her at Dr.Sue at mindspring dot com
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Posted by: The Daily Reviewer | October 07, 2009 at 04:58 AM