The Voice That is Great Within You
The Voice That is Great Within You
Honing your authentic writing style is what will help you succeed
The Story Writer’s Path
Honing your authentic writing style is what will help you succeed
Ah, voice. That mysterious and sometimes elusive quality that everyone looks for in writing:
Agents and editors seek it
Readers turn pages like crazy when it is present
Your favorite Medium writers have it
The most effective fictional characters have one
Non-fiction books are written in specific voices, keyed to certain audiences, and magazines and other publications do, too. O is written very differently than Cosmopolitan, for instance, though some of their readers may overlap. And Magnolia magazine is very different than HGTV, each written in a different voice.
What is voice?
So what, exactly, is it? What is voice?
Voice is your personality (or your character’s) in words, on the page. It is your or your character’s worldview, the special something that distinguishes you from the writer next door. (Which is why it is also elusive.) Your voice is unique to you, and it is already within you, as the title of this piece indicates. The trick is to let it out.
Voice, or personal style, is like art: you know it when you see it.
Voice is what comes straight from the heart. It is what gives you authority and credibility — and you need authority and credibility even if you are writing fiction.
But what about style?
Style is slightly different, but intimately related. It is the way you put words and sentences together, how you use grammar, if you use long sentences or short, staccato ones. You may see style referred to as voice, and vice versa, and that’s because the two are always intertwined. Whatever you call it, it is essential if you want to make your mark as a writer.
How voice and style intertwine
I have an English friend whose writing voice just sounds British, even though she has lived in the states for years. She has certain words and phrases she uses that are very British, and she uses long flowy, authoritative sentences.
Another student of mine has a very distinctive voice. She uses, to good effect, a lot of parenthetical phrases. This is a grammatical tic, but it also becomes a stylistic one, showing how certain characters think.
Sometimes I read student work that is raw, unedited, exuberant and wild. It may need plenty of work, but it has a voice, an energy, an originality that lifts off the page. It is so exciting when this happens. All those other problems can be fixed:
You can learn grammar
You can fix spelling and punctuation.
You can master the technical aspects of writing, whether fiction, or non-fiction.
But you can’t really learn voice. All you can really do is learn to express it on the page.
Where is it? Where is your voice?
Attaining a unique voice is a mysterious process. Some people seem to be able to find their voice right away. For others it takes longer. A lot of it has to do with writing. Simply putting pen to page and writing.
Finding voice most often has to do with writing a lot. Writing every day. Writing more. Writing like your life depended on it. Only by moving your pen across the page repeatedly will you access the voice deep within.
Remember, you already have your voice — you just need to uncover it, and that is done by, you guessed it, writing.
The Voice That is Great Within Us is the name of a poetry collection that I used in college and it is an apt title for a post about voice, because the voice that is great within you is what you want to let out on the page.
It is the words that you might well censor as they well up inside you and out your fingertips. It’s the story that your head tells you not to write but your heart tells you to put on the page. But don’t listen to your head. Let it rip. This is why you must write a lot to find your voice — because the more you write, the more familiar you become with it. The more familiar you become with words, the more ease you have. And the more ease you have….the easier it is not to censor yourself.
When voice happens
Sometimes you’ll get lucky and a character will start talking to you. This happened with my novel, Emma Jean’s Bad Behavior. The protagonist, Emma Jean, began dictating to me in all her brash glory. But other times you won’t be so lucky. You may have to coax and wheedle your character’s voice out of him.
So here’s what I think about discovering voice in your characters: it’s just like real life. Some characters will show themselves to you all at once, at least their superficial selves, and you’ll be able to get their voice down on the page right away. And others will be just like those people you meet who reveal themselves slowly.
So, too, with non-fiction. Sometimes you start writing an essay or an article and it all falls together with a unified voice. And others you struggle to make a cohesive whole out of disparate parts — and make it sound like your writing voice. You know it’s there, you reach for it, but come up short over and over until it finally all comes together.
Honestly, it all comes down to writing. In a pinch, choose quantity over quality. Let it loose, baby. That’s what God invented the art of rewriting for.
5 steps to finding your voice
Keep writing.
2. Rewrite.
3. Write some more.
4. Rewrite some more.
5. Keep writing.
Why does everything having to do with writing always come down to writing? Because it does, my friend. It does. It is how the magic happens.