Sam Gentle.com

Letting the genie out

I walk in and sit down. "Hi", she says, "thanks for coming in. Why did you decide to do a voice training course?"

"I, uh, I'm interested in podcasting." This isn't really true. Mostly I'm here because I was talking to a friend about how radio people had such great voices. Were they born or made?

I had a theory: surely they must do some kind of special voice training. And if they could do it, so could I. I looked it up. I was right. I felt like Mendeleev predicting the existence of germanium. And now I had to do the course.

"Great", she says, "now read this", and hands me a piece of paper with a radio script on it.

"Right now?"

"Whenever you're ready", she says, pressing the record button.


Weirdly, I've had this experience several times when learning new things. Singing teachers expect you to just sing on command. Music teachers want you to just play the instrument for them. It's like they have no respect for the magic and deep significance of what you're doing. No special run up. No fanfare. Just, okay, read this. Now stop. Now read it again differently.

The first lesson in that course was me reading something I'd never looked at before to a room of 20 people, all listening and taking notes. Every lesson we did it again, until somewhere along the way it stopped seeming like a big deal. And if I think about the things I'm best at, they all have this same quality: no magic, just get on with it.

I wrote a while back about waiting for The Call, that yearning for someone important to come along and tell you "now's the time, go do the thing". Before that I wrote that success is imaginary: it's something that you feel second-hand when you see successful people, but first-hand success doesn't feel the same way. I think there's a similar effect at work here.

When you see someone do something really impressive, it's like magic – for you. For them it's work. That guy flipping his bike off Edinburgh Castle might look like he's working up to it, but that dramatic pause is for you, not for him. He can probably flip a bike in his sleep.

Something like that doesn't take magic, it takes practice. Waiting for inspiration, working yourself up to it, trying to summon the genie of creativity, these are all marks of someone who wants to be on stage, but still thinks of themselves as the audience. When you're a sausage maker you don't get the tasty rookworst, you get to grind up pig bits. When you're a professional singer, you don't get to feel like singing is still a special event. It's your job, you just do it.

I think that letting go of the specialness is a crucial, if tragic, part of creation as a process. When everything you make is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, what room is there for the procedural drudgery of self-improvement? What room is there for taking today's special snowflake and tearing it to shreds so you can build a better one tomorrow?

Maybe you won't dare. Maybe the allure of being special is too strong, and you stay home rather than give the most heartfelt and powerful radio narration of your life, a reading for the ages, with a voice that could shake the heavens themselves and make angels weep, only to be told "fine but too fast".

Nobody improves without laying their magic bare.