Stacey Farber Instagram – My friends left Toronto for dormitories and campus pub crawls, but I stayed. I was bound to a Degrassi contract that wouldn’t expire for another year. What I wanted then, at 18, more than any job I’d auditioned for (aside from The O.C. and Juno) was to understand how writers did what they do. The transmission of ideas from writer to reader through the books and scripts I’d read felt paranormal. How—how—did a writer build a new world, depict scene, humanize made-up characters, or put language to still-embryonic thought with just 26 letters of the English alphabet and punctuation?
I enrolled in the only relevant degree program I knew of that was local and not journalism: the uninspired, blandly-titled, “Professional Writing”. Its coursework was fusty, matter of fact and too corporate for undergrads, but it had me look closer at specificities like authors’ “syntax” and “jargon” (i.e. their sentence structure and choice of words), exposing the central magic of writing I liked: voice.
I didn’t have that—my own voice; not then, not really, not even conversationally, but I longed for one. And I wondered how, if I found a voice, I might warp it to sound like whatever made me, me.
📷 @vanessaheins
@luckymakeup | Posted on 20/Sep/2024 23:45:15
