Jason Chatfield has an article on the Writers Digest website dated June 13, 2023 with the title ‘Five Ways to Turn Down the Volume to Hear Your Own Voice’. His basic point is we can’t hear our own genuine voice as writers with all the ambient noise.

Jason Chatfield is an Australian cartoonist and comedian based in New York. He is Australia’s most widely-syndicated cartoonist, producing the iconic comic strip Ginger Meggs which is syndicated daily in over 30 countries through Andrews McMeel Syndication. Ginger Meggs has been running since 1921, making it one of the longest-running comic strips in history, celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2021.

Jason says,”There’s something to be said for immersing yourself in the marketplace of ideas and being exposed to what your contemporaries are doing. There is, however, a very real danger that in doing so, you become the kind of creative individual that does more on-looking than creating.

The ability to yank yourself out of the endless slip-stream of “content” and quietly explore your own ideas is one that should be cultivated above all else. That is, unless, you like the idea of mimicking everyone around you by osmosis and wondering why nobody is noticing your work.

Artists only languish when their primary drive is to merely strive to keep up with what their peers are doing. If they are only exposed to the contemporary trends of their art form, their ideas will reflect that limitation. But, this isn’t a new problem. As long as art has been created, it has been mimicked and iterated on to the detriment of true originality.

For example, in 1801, Ludwig van Beethoven was lamenting the fact that he was slowly going deaf. By 1800, his hearing was in full decline. He was 30 years old. Over the following years, he had to accept that there was no hope of remission and would have to live the rest of his life without the ability to properly hear a musical note. He told people that without sound, his life would be meaningless. But what happened as a result changed the world and holds a lesson for us more than two centuries later.

By Age 46, Beethoven’s deafness was complete, so music only existed in his imagination. During that period, Beethoven was unable to hear the popular compositions of the day. Across the decades, while others were busy replicating each other with slight variations on the same themes, Beethoven was in his own mind, writing the music that he alone wanted to write. This ability to work in a creative silo culminated in his greatest work: his famous Ninth Symphony, which would define his unique style, change music permanently, and make him one of the greatest composers of all time.

With that in mind, here are five of my best pieces of advice for turning down the volume to hear your own unique voice:

1. Become Comfortable With Silence.

Becoming comfortable with silence is one of the hardest skills to cultivate in the modern world, but it is the most important. It’s made even harder with a seemingly infinite amount of ways to disturb the silence. We’ve become so used to cramming “content” into our audio and visual senses at all waking moments that we’ve lost the capacity to just be.

Be honest with yourself; can you remember the last time you left your house without your earbuds? Or got in your car without turning on the radio or a podcast, an audiobook, music, or something else to fill the dead air?

It can be tempting during quiet moments to simply play some soft background music, or some white noise, or even a loop of a crackling fireplace or some rain, but it is essential that your mind benefits from the absence of any sound whatsoever.

2. Deactivate Your Social Media.

We’ve lost much of our ability to examine our own thoughts, ideas, and opinions—to cultivate our own unique voice in the world. Most of the time, our opinions are just a simulacrum of those we’ve heard online, on every topic from immigration law to Taylor Swift. Here’s the truth: You don’t need to have an opinion on everything, even if the social media slipstream insists you do. Doing this is diverting your creative energy away from the things that would actually bear original artistic fruit.

If you have the ability to do so, I would highly recommend the practice of taking yourself as far from the aforementioned slipstream as you can: Deactivate all social media, remove the apps from your phone, and disable all notifications. Remove your default browser if it means you won’t be tempted to check social media in your browser app. If need be, you can reactivate them and showcase your work when you finally have something unique and original to share.

Think people will panic and wonder where you went if you stop posting to Instagram? I’m going to tell you a very upsetting truth that I and many others have discovered: Most of them won’t even notice. Try it for one month and tell me I’m wrong.

3. Clear Your Calendar.

Learning to say “No” to every invitation is a skill that needs to be learned like anything else. A “No” after saying “Yes” is even harder to master, but I guarantee you it will be of great value if you want to dig down and do the work needed to cultivate your most authentic work. As James Clear writes in his book, Atomic Habits, “No is a decision: Yes is a responsibility.”

In the same way that rest days are important for physical training, deliberately building in time to turn down the volume on the rest of the world is essential if you want to be able to cultivate your own distinct voice. By maintaining routine blocks of protected solitude, the world’s greatest artists have produced their most innovative creative work, pushing their medium forward into previously unexplored terrain. There’s absolutely no good reason for you not to do the same.

4. Get Away From It All.

Some of the most satisfying, deep and original creative work I’ve managed to accomplish as an artist has been during times of great isolation—picking up from the city and driving off to a tiny cabin in the woods with an empty sketchbook, a french press, and a bottle of scotch. (OK, and my dog.)

5. Bring Only What Is Necessary.

You’re going to be tempted to listen to something or read something if you bring novelties to fill the silence. Instead, bring only what is necessary to do your work. Nothing else. Limitation breeds extraordinary clarity and creativity. Turning down the volume includes not reading and looking at other artists’ work in print.

Try these tips today, and tell me they don’t make a massive difference to your creative output over the coming months.”