Or “How I seem to occasionally misplace my voice”.

I have some very bad writing habits.  That’s to say I’m still figuring out what constitutes good writing habits, since there are so many different opinions on the subject.  Not writing regularly, mind you, is certainly not a good writing habit by any  means.  It’s something I’ve not done nearly as regularly as I would like since I graduated from college.  Because of that, I’ve noticed something when I do get around to writing.  It’s one of those creeping realizations that sneaked up and slapped me good and hard upside my (admittedly, at times, somewhat dense head).

I’m losing my voice.

One of the things stressed by a number of my writing professors (or, at the very least, by a number of professors I took seriously and respected a great deal) was the importance of writing often so as to establish and preserve one’s writing voice.  Mine’s changed a great deal from early high school writings, where the strongest tool I had at my disposal was the ability to completely bullshit a persuasive essay with the standard distanced voice high school papers seemed to call for.

The last post, for instance, didn’t quite feel right.  There was something about it that registered, for me at least, as the croaky gasps I’m stuck trying to use to convey my thoughts when I’m losing my voice.  I had gotten accustomed to having a certain ease with writing with my relatively relaxed, somewhat snarky, tone, adding in parenthetical asides here and there as they felt necessary.  The writing, itself, isn’t any more or less difficult; I just seem more prone to distractions and letting the big, bad world of real life push my writing to the backburner.  And then off of the stove completely.  On a similar note, having a small cat walk across the keyboard, only stepping on the WiFi toggle button, is very distracting indeed.

I was honestly going somewhere with this, but then the magical process of me opening Microsoft Word and getting to work happened.