Voice Control
“Control is the only thing that makes me feel whole. Chaos is the only thing that leaves me with a story.” (Derene, "Controlled Chaos")
I’ve always had a strong relationship with control. I love it. I exercise it. I crave it. I need to be in control of myself, my future. My unreasonable and irrational desire to plan and for certain outcomes goes beyond just a character trait. It has largely been a pitiable flaw. But it’s also been a truly defining factor in my friendships, my jobs, and most notably, my writing. The control I exert in my writing parallels the growth of control in my life.
This particular battle has come excessively to light as of late. Transitioning from the somewhat sheltered boundaries that come with being a college student leaves many question marks on my to-do lists. For much of the year, I had to accept the ambiguity of what I would be doing next year, where I would be living, and the rest of the clichés all soon-to-be-graduates worry about. But for me, those generic worries are more suffocating than exciting. Rather than having complete control over my next steps, my fate is in the hands of employees and their headquartered cities.
Knowing what is expected of me is a comforting barometer for success. Guidelines allow me to plan, measure, and predict my exact performance, especially in terms of my writing. Did I follow the prompt? Did I support my thesis? Did I reach a conclusion? Depending on my answers to each of these questions, I could be in control of my fate, which for me coincided with my grade.
In high school school, I was always given a writing prompt. Every essay should follow a predisposed format that has been drilled into your brain. First, the very classic five paragraph essay. Then the research paper. Then a foray into argumentation. Perhaps a little creative poetry. But each with guidelines and a strong understanding that the audience is the teacher and the only control I had was choosing between writing about the longest book ever, Anna Karenina (which granted, I only chose because I had already read it), versus a culturally irrelevant shorter book. But the assignment was the same for every student: pull some theme out of the literature and use good grammar, better wording be damned.
At the University of Michigan, I was given my first freedom within the classroom. Essays could take multiple forms and functions. I could swear. I could relay terribly personal opinions and stories without fear of being sent to the principal. But where does the comfort to take those risks come from?
I remember my first open writing assignment in my first semester of freshman year in English 125…we were told to write about something that changed us. I was fresh off the destruction of my high school friend group (thanks to the chain of inappropriate boyfriend choices I made), and as a boring girl from a boring town with a boring life, that seemed to be my only experience out of the ordinary.
I tanked that essay.
Rereading lines from it now, I cringe as I feel how entitled I seemed. I was in a classroom of entirely new peers and this was the impression I was giving off: a young girl who dated too much. I didn’t mention my worries about feeling lonely, how this was the only year of my life that I felt I truly abandoned my identity. I held back my darkest thoughts and most vulnerable moments from the essay in order to humanize myself, and yet, my essay managed to have the opposite effect.
I didn’t understand. I was getting A’s on my research papers for Peoples of the Middle East, possibly the most voiceless of work. Not that writing about the origins of Mesopotomic writing (so meta) didn’t allow for some personality. I got to select my arguments and supporting research all on my own. And yet, this 10-page paper had guidelines that I managed to fulfill in one day of work. Somehow, my high school writing hadn’t trained me to be more than just a successful robot.
In my very first semester as a Minor in Writing, I took my first stab at trying to analyze why I write. “With my burgeoning persona as a writer, I want to utilize this passion for words and structure to enhance the rest of my personality. I once heard a person mention that she loved a piece of writing because it reminded her of nothing but the author. I hope to write and emulate exactly that: me as an author” (Derene, Why I Write). Reading back over these words now, it is extremely clear how that desire to write in my own voice is inextricably linked with my desire to control. After all, my voice is just the embodiment of me as a person, but perhaps with a little more filter.
I’ve struggled a lot with the paradox of having the freedom to risk sharing such intimate details while maintaining control over my privacy. The more everyone else knows, the more influence they can expend.
This paradox has been extremely prevalent while in the hunt and interview process
for a full-time job. While all entry-level jobs require a certain amount of “being a bitch,”
one of my huge checkpoints for a role is the ability to learn and grow in the ways I see fit.
As I answer the most common interview question, “tell me about yourself and why you are
interested in this role,” I get to give the miniature evolution of my passions, education, and goals. My regular response mentions my original passion for journalism, my practical degree in business, and then my marriage between the two. But how much of myself can I really be during these interviews? The sole purpose is to impress someone else.
As I started to analyze my writing for this evolution, I realized that it is exactly the same as my evolution into launching my career. I struggle with giving up my control and limiting options. Even during these interviews when I am supposed to impress, I struggle with how much do I need to follow the guidelines and how much should I risk to show my true self that I will bring to the role. I crave a job that will allow me to be wholeheartedly me in terms of culture and position. My “voice” so to speak, just doesn’t want to shut up.
In a major where flowery wording is frowned upon and individuality is measured in Excel skills, my voice all but disappeared. For a long time, I
The more everyone else knows, the more influence they can expend.
In a major where flowery wording is frowned upon and individuality is measured in Excel skills, my voice all but disappeared.
Is your voice a reflection of yourself or a reflection of the role you must take on to convey a point?
exacerbates both consumer waiting time and employee service time. As consumers go through the process of ordering a salad, a queue begins to form at the mixing/chopping step. Due to limited space at the mixing/chopping station, only one customer can be accommodated at a time, which causes the formation of the queue. Therefore, this step is the bottleneck of the process and is the source of long wait times.” (Derene, Salads UP Final Report)
Exciting right? “Order winner?” “Employee service time?” “Queue?” “Bottleneck?” This inexplicable jargon takes on a new meaning in an operational context, largely explaining why I couldn’t be satisfied knowing that any of my writing in the future would only be memos about operational inefficiencies. I would have enjoyed writing in a joke about the cook time of a salad, just to liven things up.
I’ve always been a storyteller. I get joy out of watching people’s emotions change when I’m speaking. (Or writing. Or texting.) But there has never been a doubt in my mind that my stories are infinitely better with no filter. My best friends get my best wordplay. Unfortunately for my foul mouthed sarcasm, more often than not, there is not always a place for it in my writing. Friends have suggested a blog, but I worry it will end in the eyes of the wrong audience. My parents have suggested writing in a journal, but I’ve never understood why I would write for no audience. So where is the balance between keeping my voice just that, MY voice, and tweaking it for the audience that I so crave?
Experiencing extreme growth from that first failed attempt at creating a personal essay, I ended up falling in love with the freedom. I loved it so much that I took a class about creative nonfiction. A class all about telling my own stories. In that English 325 class, I had my first taste of successful and unabashed voice. I swore, I talked about love, I wrote about my compulsive need for control, all very welcome oppositions to my carefully crafted business memos and executive summaries. After all, no one could tell my stories but me. They were mine. My voice was mine. My recollection, my commentary, my reflection.
The more essays I read from other people though, I realized that moments can be told from
multiple points of view. This led me to question: is your voice a reflection
of yourself or a reflection of the role you must take on to convey a point?
Maybe I had been thinking about voice all wrong. Maybe being able to mold my voice was the
ultimate form of control. Had I been limiting myself out of a petty belief that I was more interesting than
universally studied topics? After all I enjoyed reading objective pieces of work. And as someone who once wanted to go
into journalism, where did my appreciation for a well written article go? It takes much more talent to craft an argument than
to convey a story. It takes even more talent to make an argument seem as interesting as a story.
Enter native advertising, the solution to my questions.
I was first introduced to the concept during a business communications class. By a guest speaker. For twenty minutes. Never again was this magical concept discussed. Never in my marketing classes. Never in my entire business school education did this brilliant marketing tactic come up. Which is funny considering it’s on of the fastest growing advertising trends in the digital world.
So here’s the thing about native advertising’s brilliance: it is all about voice. Native advertisements reach out to a consumer in the same voice and format as the content surrounding it. The New York Times has a dedicated staff just to mimic the editorial voice while creating advertising content. That level of brilliance in voice acting has led to serious ethical debates.
I’ve even had my own debates about it. I think that my attraction to the concept stems from exactly that: it isn’t black and white. Native advertising is the industrialized version of my own internal voice conflict, a conflict I explore more thoroughly in my thesis. But one thing is for sure, and that is the extreme importance of voice. In something as biased as native advertising, the vulnerability of putting your own voice behind one side is just as immense as the risk of writing about deeply personal memories. Within the past few years, my ability to channel and understand when to intertwine personality and voice has been directly correlated with my interest. But my ability to intertwine the two has also been linked to the control I have over the work. I think my evolution has been shifting exactly how I feel about that freedom (or control as it may be).
I’m still not very good at being told what to do. When choosing my final capstone project, I was torn between focusing on native advertising and writing fan fiction for a favorite TV show (either Friends or How I Met Your Mother). When my professor told me to skip the fan fiction and embrace my native advertising expertise, I wasn’t completely satisfied. TV is a huge part of my life and I’m unashamed.
So I collided the two.
My final project is a native advertising piece about by 20-something-year-olds living in New York City. Clearly inspired by the many television series taking place in the metropolis, my fictional piece of advertising could have been paid for by the network. Currently, it is fake-sponsored by Netflix. This project is the messy and perfect collision of my passions, my business skills, and most importantly, my voice. See how it turned out here.
Just to further propagate my passion for blending over one choice, and an utter struggle to fully compromise, my entire portfolio is centered around this idea of collisions. I like this term because it encompasses the beautiful messiness that can sometimes ensue. But life is messy. Nothing is as cut and dry as it should be, and collisions often make the best art. So though I prefer control to chaos, it is this chaos of collision that makes my form of art, writing, interesting.
And by the way, my career hunt has ended in a full time job with a native advertising agency. As I said, the solution to all my problems.
resented Ross and all that it stands for. Rather than blaming myself for choosing
the major, I blamed its utter lack of fostering creative minds. I assumed
my audience didn’t care to hear from me, so I stopped trying to cater to it.
“There are three main problems that Salads UP currently faces. First, they lack the
capacity to run a quick and efficient process. By positioning themselves in the fast-
casual dining category, Salads UP clearly focuses on time as an order winner (in
addition to quality); however, their lack of capacity at certain stages of the process