What is your voice as a writer? We hear the term ‘voice’ thrown around a lot, but very few people actually define specifically what it is. The definition isn’t hard, but because it’s so wide and all-encompassing, it can sometimes be difficult to understand where it comes from or how it develops.
Your voice as a writer is just all of the rhetorical phrases, sentence structures, and adjectives that you typically use. It’s the thing that makes your writing yours because it’s a unique blend of your experiences and your proclivities all pushed into a style of communication. At the end of the day, that’s what voice is. A style of communication. Your style of communication.
Now, sometimes when you’re talking to an editor, they’ll say, ‘I feel like this character’s voice is not well developed enough.’ And they’re talking about exactly the same thing, just scaled down. The character’s style of communication, which falls under the umbrella of your style of communication.
One of the hallmarks of an experienced writer is that they have a distinct voice. And one of the ways that you can tell somebody is a newer writer is that they don’t have a distinct voice. Part of the reason for that is comfort. Part of the reason for that is practice. You see, we develop our voice over time by writing. That’s it. We just write a lot and we end up with a voice.
The question is, are you ending up with the right voice? And this is actually a really important question to answer. Is the voice that you have developed right for you? Now, some people will argue that we don’t get to decide our voice. Our voice naturally emerges from us and affixes itself to the page for the reader. But that’s not actually true.
Like a lot of writing mumbo jumbo, people who think about voice in sort of ethereal terms just aren’t actually living in reality. You might say the same thing about handwriting. The way you write, the way you form letters is an expression of who you are. Yeah, kind of. But you can always improve your penmanship. You can always practice your letters. You can always learn new styles of handwriting. It’s just a skill and you can develop it alongside any other kind of skill.
If you want to be great at kicking a ball, you have to kick a ball. And you don’t just kick the ball, you pay attention to how you kick the ball. If you want to have good handwriting, you don’t just write, you pay attention to how you write. If you want to have a good voice as an author, you pay attention to that voice.
So let’s talk about how to find your voice. If you’re a new writer or if you’re an experienced writer and you’re finding yourself dissatisfied with the voice that you’ve naturally developed over time, this is how you go about finding the right voice.
The first thing you do is you read a lot. And you don’t just read in your specific genre, you read everything you can get your hands on. But you don’t just read. It’s not about volume of words read, it’s about volume of words read that have been analyzed. You want to read as many books as you can and you want to identify which ones feel the best to you. Not which are the most technically accurate, but which feel the best, which speak to your soul the most.
Make a giant list of them and then start narrowing it down. Find the ones that are the cream of the crop, the ones that really call to you. Once you’ve done that, you can start to go through and identify what it is in those stories that really call to you. But I don’t want you to focus on the tropes, I don’t want you to focus on the storyline, I want you to focus on the writing itself.
Look at sentence structure. Are you someone who likes pithy writing? Are you someone who likes verbose writing that’s tight and expansive? Do you like a lot of description? Do you like dialogue that moves really, really quickly? Or do you like dialogue that’s slow and meandering and takes its time? How do you feel about the way characters are represented? How do you feel about the tense that’s used? How do you feel about the perspective? Do you like having a narrator? Do you not like having a narrator?
Once you’ve recognized these things, it will be much easier to put them into your own writing. To find a voice that is a blend of all of the pieces you like from all of the different books you’ve read. And if you’re an author who is a little bit more experienced and you want to change your voice, you do exactly the same thing. You read a bunch of books, you find the kinds of voices you like, and then you study them to learn how to emulate them.
I talked about this in a previous video, but imitation is the first step of learning. Once you have identified the voice you want to have, it’s time to get writing. It’s time to sit down, put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, and do your reps. Practice the voice that you want to have. Practice writing in the way that you enjoy.
Take your list of all of the things that you’ve loved from other people’s books and one by one go down the list and try to add them to your own writing. In the first step, you’re reading. In the second step, you’re writing. And the third step is just to pay attention.
The goal isn’t to write your story and then go back through and add your voice in. It’s to try and internalize all of the things you like about other people’s writings into your writing the first time. Put sticky notes on your monitor or on your desk and remind yourself of what you want to be injecting into your writing when you’re doing your first draft.
If you want to speed up your dialogue, just write a sticky note that says, ‘make dialogue snappy’ and put it on your monitor. That way, when you are actually doing the writing, you’ll see that and remember, ‘oh, I’ve got to speed up my dialogue.’ Over time, speeding up your dialogue will just become habit and eventually you won’t need that sticky note anymore. You’ll be able to put something else in, ‘add more descriptions.’
One of the things that I’m trying to do is flesh out my character descriptions because I have a terrible habit of just not describing characters at all. And that’s a piece of my voice that I don’t like. And so I want to improve and expand my voice by adding more character description in.
At the end of the day, your voice is going to be a unique mix of all of the things you like put together and expressed through story. Remember, voice is just a style of communication. It’s not fixed. It can change over time and that’s okay. Your voice will in some ways reflect who you are when you are writing, but don’t be afraid to work on it. Don’t be afraid to fine-tune it. Don’t be afraid to spend the time and polish it until it shines.
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/3qaLXCnQhvw
Thanks for reading and watching.
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