June 15, 2007

Quiet that mind down for a spell. You been runnin’, son, full on, for a long time now. Make yoself easy. You don’t got no call to be in such a rush. Can’t get yoself all sorted out today, or tomorrow, or even this month. You keep goin’ eight mile a minute the way you are, you gonna burn yoself up. You hear what I’m sayin’ son? Git along, now.

Those of you who’ve been reading this conceptual train wreck since 2002 (I know you’re out there, and if we had the budget I’d have special decoder rings made for you) know that in addition to Your Humbly Tweaked Narrator, there’s an ensemble cast of eight or nine other voices that make periodic appearances here. They’ve served as characters in several ongoing series of short tales, fictional mouthpieces for me, or just opportunities to run with a silly idea or three.

I’ve always been cognizant of my own internal dialogues, to the point where I did some research awhile back on the phenomenon of “hearing voices” just to reassure myself that I wasn’t crossing a more serious boundary of mental health than I typically do. I concluded that I just pay a lot of attention to my thinking…the dialogues are in my head, they’re with myself, I’ve never confused them for external voices, and they usually shut up when I tell them to.

That said, I’ve found value in allowing the various members of my internal chorus a certain independence. The windy day voice, for example, is about the closest thing to the quiet voice of god that I’ve got, and although I know it’s an expression of the intuitive part of myself, listening to its urgings has put me through some harrowing experiences. Absolutely necessary experiences, and I’m grateful for them, but harrowing nonetheless.

Treating my internal dialogues in this way has also benefited my fiction writing…it’s a short step from independent dialogue in the head to a character’s lively dialogue on the page. My characters, like the internal voices, are all aspects of myself, but the more independent they are, the better they’ll read.

Very rarely, I’ll sit down to write a random post about nothing in particular, and a new voice will pop out. Some are named, some aren’t. The one at the top of the page doesn’t have a name, and maybe he’ll never show up again. But I wrote out those sentences, then sat back, and read the words to myself.

Damned if he isn’t right.

I’ve got to slow down.