Stepping Into Another’s Voice

As a 17-year-old freshman (pictured) at San Francisco State University (College then) in the 60’s, my major was Drama. This was the #2 school in the US for Drama. I would later add Humanities to my major.

One special lesson in my Drama classes talked about the Stanislavski method of acting. He was the father of Method Acting. I wonder if understanding this played a part in my discovering this Gift.

There were of course required classes as a freshman, and where I learned about my own special Gift from God, showed up in Dr. Wilder Bentley’s (1900-1989) English 6.1 class that fall. Dr. Bentley I found out years later was a well-known artist . Here was this tall, spindly, white haired old man with very long bushy eyebrows. And he wrote long comments in the margins of our papers with a fountain pen, blue ink, and a penmanship filled with flourishes.

The first day of class we were seated around a very long conference table and Dr. Bentley began. His voice was in a soft-spoken monotone, and we had to lean forward to hear him. He walked around the table talking and people began nodding off. So boring! No inflection in his voice. Could I survive and hour with him?

Of course, I could. And I did. The second week half the class had dropped out. I was still there though, and he assigned five compositions for the semester based on works such as Dante’s Inferno, Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Voltaire’s Candide, and Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot.

I don’t remember the first book and composition. I remember I got a C+, lots of comments in the margins, and I struggled using the rules of composition to show how the book landed for me.

I got an idea! After class I asked Dr. Bentley if I had to adhere to the structure of the composition. You see my idea was to copy the style of the writer and continue their stories. And it worked! All the rest of my writings received A’s and A+’s. I cherished his glowing comments in the margins of every paper I typed on onion skin on my manual typewriter.

I wrote the tenth circle of hell in the voice of Dante!

I wrote a better ending (I didn’t like how Voltaire ended Candide), where everything was resolved, and everyone was happy. No Pangloss to interfere!

I wrote another ending to Tom Sawyer, using the exact vernacular Twain used. You really couldn’t tell the difference in any of the chapters I wrote!

At midnight one night I began reading Waiting for Godot. At 2:00 am I put the book down and wrote a three-act play, abstract, in the voice of Beckett. I finished the play four hours later and then finished reading Beckett's.

Fast forward forty years and here I am, a gold standard line editor, and the Gift showed up again!

A client who was in the military wrote the book the Robyn Hood Chronicles . It was about a modern-day team engineering their way back to the first century AD to study with healers of that time.

It so happens I absolutely adore that era. As I began editing every single line, I saw that one of the main characters was a 16-year-old young female healer.

My client, Cam Clark, wrote her part, yet it didn’t work as a 21st century man. How would he know how a young woman in the 1st century would talk anyway, right?

So, I wrote her dialogue and italicized it so the reader would know when there was a switch to her voice. Coupling my knowledge of the era with my ability to take on the persona … the voice of a 16-year-old girl wasn’t hard. I am a woman, and I was sixteen at one point. And I had been Voltaire, Dante, Twin and Becket, after all!

Often the things were good at as youngsters or young adults come back to serve us in another way. Do you have a gift from childhood that you find yourself relying on now? Is it your Gift?