Writer and life coach Jackee Holder is close to completing her second book on becoming your own life coach, and reveals how the challenge of writing in your authentic voice never goes away.

January 2008

Jackee Holder

This commission has hit me bang in the middle of completing my second book. It’s a self help book on ‘How To Become Your Own Life Coach’, if you get my drift. It’s full of ideas on how to organise yourself and how to feel better about you and your life.

The last four weeks has been a ritual of 4am rising almost every day of the week with sometimes eight hours spent in front of the computer. With deadline number two, a mere 26 chapters only, days away and far too close for comfort I find myself skating around on what feels like a very thin layer of ice with slushy rough drafts that to the naked eye leaves me wondering how on earth with the time left I will transform these rough diamonds into polished pieces.

One of the things I am having trouble with is not what I need to say but giving myself permission to say it in my own writing voice. Since the beginning off the year I restarted a practice I’ve been doing for 15 years or more called Morning Pages. Some of you may be familiar with this technique of free writing three pages of handwriting first thing in the morning which originated from the earlier works by Creativity guru Julia Cameron.

Morning Pages have been a cornerstone of my creativity practice, and it was like a breath of fresh air returning to this practice just after the New Year. In the last few days I have made some startling discoveries in my Morning Pages. Deeply personal and illuminating, they have also provided a mirror, which I have held up to my writing self.

One such reflection mirrored back to me was noticing how much more freely I write in my journal than on the computer. In my journal I’m not proving anything. I’m just me. The voice in the journal is more of what writer Pat Schneider author of Writing Alone and With Others describes as the original voice, ‘ the one you first learned; the one you still use or partially use, when you talk to the people with whom you lived as a little child.’ Whereas the chapters of the book I am writing seem more geared towards an acquired voice, one that is heavily influenced by ‘shoulds’, you know, ‘you should sound like this’, ‘you should say this’, and ‘no you shouldn’t write about that’.

Of course the acquired voice has its place in certain domains such as journalism, academia, scientific writings, but if I allow this voice to dominate my text the reader will find the writing flat and lacking in what I call ‘real soul’.

This is a common challenge for many writers - to be true to what Schneider describes as the original voice or the primary voice which she describes as, ‘the one you use when you are at home, relaxed, talking to those with whom you live as an adult.’ Peter Elbow, novelist and creative writing teacher, calls this our ‘mother tongue’. Writer Paule Marshall calls this voice, ‘the poets in the kitchen’.

It is this voice influenced not only by the fast flowing, high pitched singing lilt of my Barbadian parents voices I grew up with which all six of my siblings can fall into at the drop of a hat. But it is also that natural unconscious voice that Schneider describes when I am speaking and sharing with people whom I am close to that I want to capture on the page. So in the days remaining I am returning to the text, axe in one hand and shovel in another to prune and cut back and at the same time dig for stories and pull myself out of hiding.

Stories I hope to pluck from my own life and those of the individuals who have trusted me over time to listen and bear witness in my role as a coach and sometimes friend to their stories, their hopes, their dreams and their challenges.

Funnily enough like a deeply erotic affair that we can’t get enough of, I’ll be sad when writing this book comes to an end. In many ways writing her has felt like being with a lover. I think about her throughout my days. I go to sleep with her on my mind and wake up to her whispering in my ear. I will miss our 4am early morning dates and I will miss the feeling this luminal time of the day never fails to give me. But I hope it won’t be too long before I’m back here continuing the self-enriching practice of Morning Pages, or to embark upon the next manuscript of sloppy writing and first drafts in my journal and the blank page that is the ongoing subscription I pay to be a member of the amazing clan called writers.

Read: Jackee's piece for Moon wRites, a newsletter, entitled Horace

Biography

Jackee Holder lives in South London and writes mainly non-fiction and personal essays. Her first self help book Soul Purpose was published in 1999, and her second book is due out in September 2008 with Infinite Ideas publishers. She is a self confessed self help and creative writing bookaholic. She misses early morning long distance running, which was a spiritual practice for a good few years as writing has gradually hijacked this slot. In the not too distance future she hopes to write a memoir, but for now is building herself up to accepting that if her memoir is published it might mean that the rest of her family who do still currently talk to her probably won’t.

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