Solitude in the Writing Process

I have been cursed with a propensity for laryngitis. When most people say that they lose their voice, they mean that when they speak, their words may be slightly raspy or they may sound a few octaves lower than usual. But when I lose my voice, I lose my ability to make a sound. It is a phenomenon I experience with irritating regularity and last weekend's particularly bad cold ensured that I was forced once again to live a game of charades for three days.

When you have experienced the problem of being unable to speak as often as I am, you realize the importance of human vocalization acutely. I consider myself a fairly quiet person, but after three hours of being unable to talk to anyone, I felt increasingly isolated and oddly useless. When I was alone with another person, they would lapse into silence, unable to continue a onesided conversation for more than a few minutes. I became more engrossed in written classwork than I normally would have; at least through writing I could express myself, and imagine that eventually my ideas would be "heard."

We often speak about writing as being an intimidating, and often lonely, process, a process where we are so engrossed in our own thoughts, our own ideas, that we isolate ourselves from others. This clearly can be true. A friend remarked to me recently that it made her more comfortable to work on a paper when there were others around her. Even though they had no idea what her paper was about or what she was thinking, their presence reminded her that there was a world going on outside of the ideas she struggled to engage with on her paper.

However, I believe that writing is an exercise in communication. This sounds like a statement so obvious that it is not worth typing. Yet, when I am writing something, whether it be this blog or an analysis on South African history, the sheer act of forming words, of forming sentences, of creating ideas, is a method of expressing my ideas. Even if there is no audience, by writing, I am clarifying my ideas. I have a feeling of building someone, to adding to some unknown collective pool of understanding.

I think the merging of these two concepts - of solidarity through sheer human presence and of silence for self-reflection - is why a writing center exists. Wingate says that a writing center is a place in which "tutors and writers grow accustomed to being treated with respect, to being listened to, and to having the opportunity to respond thoughtfully" (11). Part of giving respect is knowing that the writer needs, more than anything else, your presence as a sympathetic fellow writer. Telling the writer what she needs to do does not truly help her; instead, listening to the writer talk about her ideas release her from her isolation while also allowing her to reflect upon her own ideas.