Writers Voice Quotes

“All writers are demonic dreamers. Writing is an act of sharing experiences and offering of an individualistic perspective of our private attitudes pertaining to whatever topics of thought intrigues the author. Writing is a twitchy art, which attempts to employ linguist building blocks handed-down from past generations. Writers’ word choices form a structure of conjoined sentences when overlaid with the lingua of modern culture. Writers attempt to emulate in concrete form the synesthesia of our personal pottage steeped in our most vivid feelings. Writing a personal essay calls for us to sort out a jungle of lucid observations and express in a tangible technique our unique interpretation of coherent observations interlaced with that effusive cascade of yearning, the universal spice of unfilled desire, which turmoil of existential angst swamps us.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A shaman and a writer each serve as their communities’ seers by engaging in extraordinary acts of conscientious study of the past and the present and predicting the future. An inner voice calls to the shaman and an essayistic writer to answer the call that vexes the pernicious spirit of their times. Shamanistic writers induce a trance state of mind where they lose contact with physical reality through a rational disordering of the senses, in an effort to encounter for the umpteenth time the great unknown and the unutterable truths that structure existence. An afflicted person seeking clarification of existence cannot ignore the shamanistic calling of narrative exposition. Thus, I shall continue this longwinded howl – making a personal immortality vessel – into the darkness of night forevermore.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A writer’s voice emanates from their interest and compulsions that absorbs them completely. Only by fully committing himself or herself to a pet subject or issue can the writer develop a thematic tone that speaks to other people with authority and serenity. The quality of their literary voice is the crucial part of the writer’s legitimacy, and their authenticity cannot come from mimicking other writers’ style, but must evolve naturally from their inner sanctity and must flow effusively from an inner necessity.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Only after becoming somewhat adept in a chosen field of study do most people feel comfortable developing their own distinctive style. More than one successful writer, for example, confessed to beginning their writing career by attempting to write in the same manner as the writers whom they admired. Artists, and other genuine people, are never truly comfortable in a fabricated role, living a life of mimicry, adhering to society’s preconceptions. Each person intuitively seeks to place the stamp of an emergent personality upon their greatest creation, the formulation of their self-identity. A person’s self-identity, similar to works of art, is autotelic, they reflect their maker, and are ends all unto themselves.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The tug of self-destruction and the desire to defy mortality by creating an everlasting mark upon this world are uneasy acquaintances. The strident edginess behind a writer’s searchlight voice is a product of the natural tension that engenders when an apathetic writer believes death could arrive tonight. Stunned by fear of a hard deadline, the writer is jolted from their state of laziness and mental neglect that trolling inertia dampens their aptitude to love life.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Practical affairs task the human brain throughout the day. At night, the mind takes a deserved hiatus to consider the impossible and the absurd. In the carnage of our nighttime sleep tussles, the colored liqueurs of the true, the possible, fantasy, and the mythic beliefs become intermixed. Eyelets of the commonsensical and the imaginative are incorporated, and a new realism emerges out of our distilled perception of the veridical derived from the phenomenal realm of sensory reality and the philosophic world of ideals contained in the noumenal realm. The resultant psychobiologic vision immerses us in bouts of intoxicating inspiration and artistic stimulation and leaves us rickety boned and weakened after enduring a dreaded hangover of perpetual doubt laced with vagueness and insecurity.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“An author’s operating charter is to unearth embedded symbols that reflect complementary and inconsistent relationships of our collective assemblage, combine harmonizing and contradictory conceptions that motivate us, and delve larger truths out of variable and erratic elements of human nature.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“At some point in life, we all feel burden, oppressed if you will, by the knowledge of our existence. Addressing our deepest anguish and greatest fear establishes the bedrock of any artistic effort, and ultimately represents the thin line that separates contemplative humankind from all other forms of animal life. A person with an artistic bent embraces the inherent anxiety of living and attempts to express anguish in a telling format in order to assist other people grapple with the baffle of being: awareness of the absurdity of striving in a world where the only thing guaranteed for a person with many cravings is hellish life of attachment and wanting. When we rise above the deceptions and temptations of an egocentric mind, we encounter our spiritual essence.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A personal essay is probably the most malleable form of writing style, because it enables a writer to engage in a felicitous conversation with oneself. The more formal rules that govern academic writing are largely inapplicable to personal essay writing. Personal essays are free from the forbidding cadence and rigid structure of thesis writing. A personal essay’s lilt reflects the movement of the writer’s mind.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“An essayist’s tone can be grim or playful, somber or teasing, and critical or uplifting. Unlike a thesis that a writer drafts to establish, verify, and support a proposition, a person primarily writes a personal essay to please oneself by questioning, probing, and investigating the mysterious, anomalous, and the unknowable wreckage of our humanity. A writer frequently initiates a personal essay by simply clearing their throat.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A writer’s amulets include explication, free association, parallelism, antithesis, and epiphany to create a silhouette of that which heretofore did not exist and now speaks with an autonomous, ghostly reverberation.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Evocative memories seared onto the writer’s unconscious mind forms the essential cadence that brokers a writer’s telltale, shadowy light. Floundering in the commodious darkness, the writer’s seeks to discover a ray of lightness that inhabits the darkest recesses of their fitful humanity.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Our expectations and experience shapes us. When we write we must find a voice that expresses our sentient self, not some idealized version of a cogent self, devoid of the exacting life-altering lessons that come with enduring a variety of experiences.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Objective motives and subjective compulsions that incite a person to write is the decisive element in defining the writer’s unique voice. Anyone who does not understand oneself or is unwilling to ferret out their own buried, true identity and publicly unmask the hidden stranger that resides within us all will never be a person who can bridge a connection with other people who share similar thoughts, feelings, wants, and needs. Lacking critical discernment, this want-a-be writer will remain a cosseted imposter, playing a coldhearted game of charades. If a person is unwilling to peel back the craggy mask that we conceal ourselves behind and explore the seeds of inner awareness wrapped inside the enigma of doubt engulfing all people, one can still aim to be a writer of nonfiction or technical journals. Creative writing, in sharp contrast, is for the intrepid cliff dwellers, the recluses willing to mine the soft belly of their internal psychosis.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Art consist of a writer or painter’s psychosis extirpated on the canvas of his choosing, a truism whether one is inspecting a Vincent Van Gogh masterpiece or deciphering the incomprehensible utterings and dissociated ramblings of one of the Philistines framed in the picaresque novel ‘Confederacy of Dunces, written by American novelist John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969).”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A novice writer such as me tenuous, initiatory pen strokes usually are either dismal attempts to emulate through stylistic imitation authors of influence, or they are too preoccupied upon developing their own writing flair to actually communicate a thought. The emphasis upon writing with a definitive style naturally gets in the way of producing any work of substance. Preening amateur writers typically drown in the florescence of their own purple twaddle. Nevertheless, the only way to discover a mature inner voice that can speak to me and for me is to write with a ferocious stubbornness, gamely writing sentence after sentence until I can sieve valuable nuggets from a swamp of mental mire.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Storytelling is an imperfect methodology to provide a true accounting to a multiplicity of bilateral and three-dimensional interactions. Language cannot reach every recess of the mind, it cannot document every emotional chord, and it cannot splice the discordant pieces within us. Each story by a writer represents the sanitized accounting of the mind’s depictions. Try as one might, employing a panoply of traditional technique or other slick tools of modernist stage craft, it is impossible to separate the teller from the telling any more than one can distinguish the author from their doppelganger writer’s voice.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The rewards generated from writing materialize at all stages of the work. Simply spending time organizing a person’s thoughts is edifying. Revising thoughts lead to clarification of conflicting thoughts and greater precision of thought. Finishing a piece of writing about hurtful personal experiences allows a person to examine it for everything that the writer learned.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“An essayist, unlike a fiction writer, needs to establish their objective reliability, equitable sincerity, intellectual integrity and maintain their authoritative trustworthiness because they are an acknowledged reporter of true events and relating or applying the ideas and principles of their sources.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Myths, legends, and fables frequently tell us more about the human race than studying history does. G.K. Chesterton said, ‘Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.’ The whispering voices of our ancestor’s fables warn us about conspiracy, death, deception, and trickery. There exist inside some of us multiple voices clamoring that something crucial is missing from our fateful lives. Author Jenifer Salaiz said, ‘Writers are nothing more than borderline schizophrenics who are able to control their voices.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The text of a person’s writing reveals flaws in their thinking patterns, imperfections in personal character, and lack of acumen and academic skills.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A writer's soul is what tethers the story to the reader. It is the voice that cries out from the characters. A raw, carnal emotion, often louder than the words passing our lips.”
― Nathaniel Connors