The Guardian could test itself.

Pretty, but why do we keep them?, originally uploaded by notime4jibbajabba.

Life I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my voice. Not my voice voice you understand, as in the sound of the words which spew from my mouth. I resigned myself ages ago to the fact that I’ll never sound like Laurence Fishburne, that the best I can muster is Paul McGann rising to a Paul O’Grady if I’m really annoyed or excited.

I’m talking about my writing voice, the way I express myself in prose. It’s probably more properly described as my writing style, though I think you can have a decent style without having anything to say. Certainly, it felt that way for me at university when I was trying to apply Freud’s female trajectory to the film Amelie (independent girl still needs man for total fulfilment or she’ll die lonely etc).

I’ve been questioning exactly what my voice is and what makes it distinctive to the many millions of other writers on the planet. I look at my recent film reviews and though intellectually I can see that they’re perfectly functional pieces of writing which get most of the points across, they don’t sing and more disappointingly they don’t sound like me; they sound like me trying to mimic what someone else, specifically what I think a professional writer might produce.

That’s something I’ve caught myself doing all too often. I’ll either be impersonating the kind of bloggy style I’ve seen elsewhere or pretending I’m doing it for Sight and Sound. You can and should tailor your style depending upon the subject to be sure, but lately I’ve found myself being dragged in a hundred different directions, at least as far as I can tell.

In other words, I think I’ve lost my voice.

I’m highly self critical of my work at the best of times. At worst, I feel guilty that I can’t seem to get myself to think in a way that produces writing of what I think is of a quality, with strong, surprising unrepetitive phrases, a clear argument with a thorough through line that leaps out at the reader, the reader I suspect often that is just me. I know we can’t all be George Orwell or Earnest Hemmingway, but can we at least stretch to a Woodward or Bernstein or Clive James?

How distinctive is a writer’s voice or style, especially when someone’s writing non-fiction or journalistically? I have favourite writers, in books, in newspapers, on blogs and I know that how they express themselves isn't as important as what’s being expressed. There’ll be some admirable turns of phrase here and there and in some cases it’s the sentence structure which draws you in, but more often than not it's the, to quote an unfortunate phrase from an unfortunate lady, “world view”.

If I had a copy of The Guardian, a paper which I’ve read for years and years, with all of the author names blotted out and profile photos, would I be able to tell who had written what? The Guardian could test itself. It would be an interesting exercise if, one day, a number of their columnists were commissioned to write for the G2 supplement on exactly the same topics, the work was published anonymously and then the readership had to guess who wrote what.

I think I probably might because of my long service, but might someone who’d just picked up the paper? Would they care? I suspect I could identify Charlie Brooker very quickly since no one’s quite like him, but is Hadley Freeman that different to Marina Hyde? Philip French to Xan Brooks? Sam Walliston to Gareth McLean? Barbara Ellen from Miranda Sawyer? Are they trying to be or am I missing the point, since by definition a newspaper has a single voice however blissfully sarcastic and if they were writing for a different audience their style would change accordingly.

But I don’t think even in those circumstances someone’s style is invisible even if its not as specifically different as Swift or Austen, Ibsen or Gibson and there lies my problem. I think my style is invisible and there’s nothing to distinguish it and I think that’s only something which has happened recently. Looking back at old blog posts and reviews I can tell that they’re written by me. Looking back over this group of paragraphs, I’m not sure that’s the case any more.

A couple of evenings ago, BBC Four broadcast an insightful interview by Mark Lawson with the actress Maureen Lipman. In the closing stages she was explaining to him how she’d come to terms with her own crippling self-criticism, how nothing she does will ever be as perfect as she’d like. She paraphrased from the final page of the autobiography of Agnes De Mille, the choreography.

De Mille was describing a conversation she had with her mentor Martha Graham, during a period when she too was having pangs of self doubt. Graham said:

“It is not your business to judge what is right and wrong in a performance. You have only one thing to do in life and that is to keep the channel open. There is a vitality, a life force in you which is quintitentially you, and if you block that channel by judging yourself, it will never exist in any form and the world will be deprived of it.”

De Mille pleaded: “But then there’s no satisfaction.”

To which Graham replied: “No satisfaction, ever, at any time. Only a queer divine dissatisfaction which marks us out and makes us different from the rest.”

In other words, it’s up to other people, critics or whoever to judge how good you are. Your job is simply to communicate – in her case through dance, in Lipman’s case through acting, and in my case I guess, in writing.

Even if I’ll never be happy with my writing style or anything I put in writing, no matter how much satisfaction or otherwise I’m giving to others, I should just resign myself to the fact that nothing is ever perfect and I should just live with it and carry on. That has the potential for delusion and a wasted life, but we’ll leave that exploration for now. Thank you, doctor. Why aren't you writing any of this down?

Graham’s words are constructive, but it expects that you know what your style is and its power. I’m not sure I have that, and don’t know if I ever will. QED.

My conclusion, as ever arrived at in a roundabout way even with the help of Googe Maps, is that the reason I feel as though my writing has stultified and nullified is that I’m trying too hard. That the reason I failed to capture the kineticism of The Night They Raided Minsky’s is because I wasn't being as open and expressive as I'd wanted to be. What I really wanted to do was obsess over Norman Wisdom’s surprising participation but felt that, because it was a review of a film many of you simply don’t know yet I loved, I had to cover all the bases.

That’s crazy, especially since, like this thousand odd words, I was purely trying to fill the one post a day minimum (hopefully of at least three paragraphs) I’ve promised myself I’ll put up here or one of the other blogs or websites. I need to relax and get back into simply enjoying the process of writing and in a way which entertains myself at least without, also, admittedly, the constant concern of potential professional engagements at the back of my mind. Otherwise I may go mental and not in the kind of upbeat way I observed on Tuesday night.