The Authentic Voice
A six-month writing course for creative practitioners, in collaboration with Elaine Davey, creative consultant and registered counsellor — 2023
Creative collaboration / writing course and workshop
A collaborative creation of six expansive chapters designed to help creative practitioners unearth and communicate their identity and voice through writing. What began as a conversation about the lack of meaningful, individualistic brand copy courses became a printed six-month programme; one chapter per month, each an open space for exploration rather than an authority, offering a suggested framework to reveal and refine.
The course drew on the particular intersection of Elaine's therapeutic and consultancy background and my own writing practice. The result was something that moved beyond copywriting technique toward the deeper question of what someone is actually trying to say, and why. Each chapter contained both conceptual grounding and practical exercises, offering creative practitioners a way into writing that felt genuinely their own.
“In my own practice, writing began with a love for another’s words and the worlds that published and celebrated them.
It’s natural to associate “writing” with the environments we most expect to see it within — books, magazines, newspapers, scripts, professional copywriting… Yet outside of publishing and corporate spaces, words are woven into almost every discipline, every form, every expression of self; the craft of writing exists in the foundations of all that we do.
A line of text beside a painting in a gallery; the scent description of a face cream; the invitation to connect on a consultant’s website; a saved, resonant instagram caption; a brand’s curated podcast or pamphlet. Content writing is more than a secondary medium or a cheap marketing ploy.
From the tutored space of a writing degree, to the challenges of my own independent creative practice, as well as professional experience as a copywriter, I know the far reaching and deeply interwoven form that words take in our everyday world. In consolidating the act of writing into the practice which unfolds in the following chapters, I found in my own writing craft a return to the joy of exploration and a new sense of boundless possibilities.
The interweaving of writing within other practices crafts a space where words may challenge and move beyond a singular use. If allowed, words are the most malleable of materials, free from the restrictions of other disciplines, shedding the need for definition or convention.
Words are a vessel for voice, offering the potential for completely individual ways of creating, with us directing the purpose and possibilities of what shape our words take. Writing is an ever evolving practice that transcends the written word as a self-contained medium; here, words form part of our everyday fabric, as facilitators of connection and translators of worlds.
Words are multi-disciplined tools, first revealing our authentic selves, and then refining and translating this unearthed voice through the combined process of noticing, noting and forming. The way we fall in lasting love (with a person, a brand) is through an intimate invite into another’s world.
In the age of the image, we are told a picture can speak a thousand words, but words are images in written form; they are whole worlds translated on the page. In our words, beyond revealing and refining our voices, we may facilitate the forming and deepening of connections, offering others solace in an escape from their world into ours.
The following chapters are not an authority on writing or voice. They are open spaces for exploration; a suggested framework to reveal and refine, each chapter yours to take and evolve as your own practice. It is a process that deepens with practice and play, often asking for a slowed pace to allow words to form untethered from pressure or expectation. It is at times a non-linear process, but one that gifts new ways of thinking and creating in-tune to our individual nature. Here, the practice of writing may allow a clarity and understanding of self that transcends this written-form, acting as the foundations of thought and identity that runs through all else we do.”
