My Two-Cents: Voice & My Dad
For a hot minute last fall, I dabbled with using ChatGPT in my writing. I’d be lying if I admitted I wasn’t curious if GenAI could make my job easier. Parts of it were pretty good. But in using a crutch/Chat, I stopped enjoying writing itself. Chat, and I often created tangible products of a similar standard. But there were times when Chat, without proper prompting, created lifeless, piece-of-shit-style writing. There was also a big elephant in the room. When Chat wrote, it took away the best part of the act itself: discovering what you want to create as the process unfolds in real time. Through years of AI-less reading and writing, we develop our voices, tones, and prose. And when someone is really good at this, and you know them personally off the paper, their work becomes an experience to read. There are a few people I know well enough and who write well enough that, when I read their work, I can hear their voice. And I think this will eventually become a lost trait – unless we start incentivizing and appreciating it. So starting now, I’m going to make a more concerted effort to appreciate people who write like badasses. I’ll start with my dad.
My dad is someone who writes well. He also speaks well, which is good — because it’s a requirement for his job. When I was really little, we’d watch him on the 6 o’clock news. At first, I didn’t understand how the TV worked. I often found frustration when he wouldn’t reply to me when I screamed Hi, Dad!! I thought he was being purposely rude and ignoring his favorite child. (Sorry, Brooke, Luke, and Jack – we all know it’s true!) For the majority of my life, he has been covering sports. He blessed and cursed his kids with the following: I’ve never met someone who loves his job more than my father. I don’t think there is another job in the world he would want to do. I asked him once when and why he decided he wanted to go into broadcasting and journalism, and his response was that he always knew he wanted to tell stories. So, as you can imagine, someone who was born with the urge to tell stories was bound to be pretty good at it, 50+ years later.
Now that my dad has switched from sportscasting to the role of a morning news anchor, a few things have changed. For one, he went from having bad hours to horrible hours. (A side effect of working in broadcasting.) For another, his writing is more community-centered. And for another, his show is on much too early for me LIVE – so if I watch, it’s after it re-airs two hours later. But one thing rings true in my dad's broadcasting and writing: I get to hear his voice. The same voice that dropped me off at preschool all those years ago. The same voice that picked neighbor friends and me up in the mornings and dropped us off at middle school. The same voice that covered my high school soccer games for all those years. The same voice that joked the Roosevelt girls' soccer team was going to get a big drop in coverage once I graduated. When I read his writing, I don’t hear some teleprompter version of what my dad thought. I hear my dad.
This is a prime example of what I touched on earlier. Voice is a trait that is frequently aspired to but rarely mastered. And I think it’s important we start realizing how important it is to keep reading, writing, creating, and sharing it with others – so that we may practice and perfect our own voice, so that our words read on paper in the minds of those who know us best. So that someday we can have people in cities to and fro reading our work, letters, and creations, and feel as if they have a little piece of us in their pocket.
