I Fought Writer’s Block Through Singing Lessons

Originally Published on ShondaLand

 The Zoom camera assures me I’m not in the same room as the vocal coach. That’s how I convince myself to sign up for one-on-one singing lessons at the start of the pandemic. I have no aspirations to cut a demo tape or sing backup for Lady Gaga. Rather, I want to address a logjam that centers in my throat, a blockage that’s been paralyzing me. Certainly, there are worse afflictions than not being able to sing, unless that inability connects to the rest of your life. I’ve published four books and helped countless others find their “voice.” Meanwhile, the novel I most want to write eludes me. My own voice has gone missing. 

 “Just sing the tones, following after me,” Melanie, my voice teacher, says. 

I try but I mangle the notes. 

“That’s okay,” she says. “We’re just making sounds. No judgement.” 

My husband is in another room and I wish he’d leave the house altogether. The dissonant yowl I make offends even my own ears. My voice has become alien, and worse, a symbol of what I’ve failed to achieve. I want to speak and write in pure tones. Will these lessons help? 

“Let’s try matching pitches.” Melanie taps a note on her piano. When I hesitate, she sings it for me. I open my mouth and make a sound. “That’s close.” She gestures, pointing down. I’m a little too high. I adjust and try again. 

“Much better.” 

Sweat prickles my ribcage. I feel so exposed. 

“Try going lower here.” Melanie’s fingers flit around middle-C and then beneath it. I attempt to mirror the sounds, but only raspy air comes out. 

“Does that hurt?” 

I shake my head. 

She rules out organic problems with my vocal cords. “You have no sound there at all, huh?” 

Though she’s not in the room with me, I want to crawl under the sofa. I have no midrange notes, and the rest of my voice is so feeble as to be inaudible. 

Melanie moves lower still on the keyboard, into what she calls my chest voice. I can make sounds way down low, but I can’t tune them. Sometimes by accident, I hit a correct note. She claps. It’s like getting a star on your worksheet in kindergarten. 

I grew up in a musical family and am not tone deaf. I can hear, painfully, when I’m off. My mother had been a professional singer before emigrating from Ireland, having children, and being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Even when she was sick, she could occasionally tap into the curative power of music. One moment she was drained of life, sinking into a bog of depression. When a song overtook her, though, her eyes sparked, she raised her chin, and was restored to who she’d once been. As a kid, I sang along with her to recordings of Madame Butterfly, The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, harmonizing without strain or embarrassment. Our voices combined made my arms trill with gooseflesh. 

In our lesson, Melanie instructs me to buzz my lips to ascending and descending tones. When I get an atonal horse’s whinny out, she applauds. It’s not beautiful, but according to her, it’s progress. 

This is not the first time I’ve tried to fix a writing problem by addressing an issue in my daily life. My last book was about learning to embrace my fears via motorcycling, including confronting my terror of heights. To overcome my acrophobia and break through the creative impasse it represented, I learned to rock climb. First time out, I panicked halfway up the wall, my heart thundering. After a few sessions of hypnotherapy to give context to my fear, I was back on the wall. Over time, my skills developed, the hyperventilating eased. Soon, I was able to both climb and complete the next draft of the novel. I was convinced I’d overcome the obstacle that was stopping me. 

And yet, the story’s still not right. What’s interfering? 

Melanie assigns two pieces in Italian. I practice every day for 45 minutes, starting with a YouTube vocal warm-up, doing ear training by matching pitches, and then practicing the songs I’ve been assigned. I hold two polished blue stones in my hands as I sing, envisioning my throat chakra as a crystalline lapis lazuli, not as it appears in my imagination, overgrown with bleached and dead coral. With every correct note I hit, I chisel away that obstruction. 

I manage a passing job with one of the Italian songs. The second, slightly more difficult piece, though, I keep butchering. Melanie removes it from our rotation. 

How can rock climbing and singing lessons be tied to an incomplete novel that’s about neither? My main character has been an advertising executive, an English teacher, and an aspiring cellist who is synesthetic, experiencing musical notes as distinct colors. The current narrator, Lucy, sees apparitions of the Virgin Mary. I can’t get Lucy’s voice right. 

Melanie plays the intro to a song and we sing together on Zoom. When I don’t expect it, she stops and gestures for me to continue by myself. Without her vocal lead, I feel as if I’ve been left alone in a forest at night with no flashlight. I stumble. My voice cracks. I think I hear wild animals howling in the dark. Then I’m crying, which isn’t as easy to hide on Zoom as I’d hoped. 

The novel is semi-autobiographical and deals with an event from my childhood. My mother, whose bipolar illness required frequent institutionalization and shock treatments at The Camarillo State Mental Hospital —made famous by the Eagles in ‘Hotel California’: “you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave” — tried to kill me. We were staying at a beachfront hotel in Ventura. She’d wanted a weekend getaway from the tensions of home, and my father had sent me as a kind of junior chaperone. At the hotel, she experienced a psychotic break and tried to strangle me against the balcony railing, then throw me off the seventh-floor. At eighty pounds, I somehow managed to overpower her and muscle myself back to safety. I was eight. 

Melanie suggests we step back from the classical Italian repertoire. I learn instead the Shaker melody, “Simple Gifts,” taking heart from its lyrics: “When true simplicity is gained, to bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed.” 

Did my vocal occlusion start with that balcony moment? My fear of heights certainly did. She’d tried to choke me, stealing my air. From that time on, I kept her as far away as I could; I don’t recall ever singing with her again, ever trusting her. And later, after she died, whenever I tried to sing on my own, it was as if she still held me by the throat, making sure I remained silent. I knew what was expected. Do not breathe a word. And I didn’t. Not until this year when social distancing made it possible to take singing lessons from afar. Little did I know what I was opening up. Now, all the memories and feelings rush over me in a crescendo. 

I text Melanie. “I need to cancel lesson. Too much going on.” 

These lessons are stupid. I’m ready to shred the sheet music. It’s just another way of assigning blame for my own inability to face the empty page. Melanie will soon forget about me and move on to other students.  

After three weeks and no progress on the novel, though, I reach out again. Running away has never helped. These lessons are peeling back my very skin, exposing every nerve. I’m not sure that confronting my vocal failure week after week is helping, but I don’t know what else to do. 

Melanie never mentions my time away and is soon able to trick me into singing over my passagio, including those notes that have long been silent. My voice is slowly returning. 

When I practice at home, I stumble on an articulation exercise in the YouTube warm-up. “Mommy made me mash my M&Ms.” I stand before a mirror, every door in the house shut lest I’m overheard. Any mention of a mother, must less a “mommy,” is hard. Add in the violence of “mashing” and I simply can’t get through it. I concentrate on the M consonant as instructed but I want to quit again. 

Next, Melanie assigns Poor Wayfaring Stranger about a narrator preparing to cross the River Jordan: “I’m going there, to see my mother. She said she’d meet me when I come.” These words are nearly impossible to form. The idea of meeting my mother constricts my throat. She loved me and she tried to kill me. How can the two coexist? How do I sing of that? 

As I try, though, something new arises. Whereas before, any mention of a mother had filled me with panic and anger and betrayal, now, even as the words still tingle on my lips, I ache with missing her. I yearn for her to come and meet me. I want to feel her love again. My heart is porous now, ready to make space for her and the illness that damaged us both.

Nine months into the pandemic, I’m able to resume the classical Italian repertoire that we started with. Melanie assigns Corragio, ben mio, which translates to Courage, my love. I’ve been practicing for weeks and feel confidence growing. She plays the introduction. I think she’s going to sing with me, but she stays silent. I know the cue and open my mouth. Somehow, I have enough breath even for the run that leaps up and down the staff, the words translating to “Don’t cry now, be brave and take heart, my love.” I sing the entire song without Melanie jumping in to rescue me. 

The gooseflesh I felt when I sang with my mother now shivers up my arms. I feel her presence again. Somewhere in the song, as I intone words of comfort and kindness to the hurt part deep within, I hear the little girl inside, raising her voice. She’s Lucy narrating my novel, the small and scared version of me who couldn’t let her mother know how much she loved and needed her. She’s yearning for a way to reconcile the two strongest forces in her life: to feel her mother’s love again, and to tell her own story. More than anything, though, for now, she just wants to sing. 

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Bernadette Murphy is the author of, most recently, “Harley and Me: Embracing Risk on the Road to a More Authentic Life” and a collaborative/ghostwriter for others.