Finding your Writer’s Voice

One of the fundamental challenges confronting every writer is “finding their voice”, their unique expression in the field or medium in which they’ve chosen to express themselves. When Alasdair Stuart – editor of The Hub e-zine and host of the horror podcast Pseudopod – was asked to identify the quality that defines the stories he’s drawn to, he sited, “a strong confident authorial voice. That feeling of, for want of a better word, swagger. If you can hit that point where you are in absolute control of your story… but it’s still you, then that really makes me sit up and take notice.”

We all strive for that effortless grace and utter conviction that transports our readers to the worlds we’ve crafted. It can’t be faked, applied, or forced. It just is, and the way to achieve such prose is NOT necessarily to write more. While it’s sound advice, “writing more” won’t help you find your voice any more than “running more” will help you run a marathon. Discovering the honest authenticity of Your Voice is not a writing exercise, it’s a quest worthy of any mythic hero.

Keep Your Eye on the Prize
The objective is to write like YOU and no one else. This isn’t about adopting some style, expanding your vocabulary, or applying structure. This is about discovery. Just remember two things…

#1: You already have Your Voice
It’s in you, inherent and hardwired into your DNA. Every breathing moment – awake or asleep – has layered depth and breadth and scope to Your Voice. It rumbles like grinding continents, burns like lightning, and whispers like a child on Santa’s knee. It’s authentic and powerful and it’s yours.

#2: You don’t have to find Your Voice
You don’t have to find Your Voice any more than you have to find your pancreas. All you have to do is understand it (Your Voice, not your pancreas).

The best writers throughout the ages understood themselves intimately. That didn’t stop some of them (okay, many of them) from being psychotic, pathological, depressive, maniacal, or a pain in the ass. But with a pen, some paper, and a few scratches of ink, they could break your heart. Because they wrote from theirs.

What Are You Looking For?
A writer’s “voice” is expressed through the choices made in story development such as sentence structure, vocabulary, character development, dialogue, plot structure, and theme. If you’re thinking, “Dang, that’s pretty much everything,” then kudos. You’re right, which is why the search for the elusive “voice” can feel so daunting. How do you consciously define every aspect of your writing style?

You don’t. You’re not defining anything, but rather discovering what’s already there through intent and focused attention. You’re not looking for some trick to become something you’re not… you’re awakening a connection to the parts of you that feed the fire of your creative impulse.

A Word of Caution
Leo Tolstoy said, “Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.”

Trying to understand your Voice can feel like research, clinical and analytic and sterile. Your initial efforts will be exactly that as you examine the palette of influences and experience that inform your writing style. And that can choke your creative flow into an anemic trickle.

Think of the creative impulse like a garden. You can laydown good soil, water, and sunlight… but you can’t force the seeds to grow. Your creativity works the same way. You can’t control it… all you can do is foster an environment that encourages growth. So balance your explorations with opportunities to apply them creatively. That will connect the tangible discoveries with the less tangible use of them through your creative expression.

Mapping Your Passions
To tell a good story, you first have to understand what makes a good story. Not according to your freshman English professor, but according to you. Stop listening to what other people think is good and pay close attention to YOUR aesthetic tastes. The stories that interest and excite you contain the key to finding what you’re looking for.

• Go to your bookshelf (digital or analog)
  Pretend you have to throw away all but five of them. Take a look at the ones you picked. What are they about? What happens in them? Figure out, very specifically, why these books are so important to you.
• Read with intent
  Pick up one of those books, one you haven’t read for a while, and read it again. Pay close attention to that endorphin rush you get when you read a nice bit of dialog or a sweet narrative passage. Stop. Look at what you just read. Closely. Scrutinize each sentence, each paragraph. Understand what it is about that collection of words that got your pulse rate up.

Rinse and Repeat
For the next week, do the same thing with everything else in your life. Don’t just acknowledge your passions and interests but make the effort to understand them. Stories, actors, foods, music , neighborhoods, plants, clothes… log it all down and scrutinize every one of them until you’ve nailed down the connection they have to you.

After a week or so, you’ll have a tiny section of the map to what connects you to the world. Coincidentally, you’ll also have a tiny section of the map to what connects you to your writing.

Use Your Map
Now that you have the first inklings of where your Voice resides, try putting them to use in your writing.

Find a paragraph that’s utterly devoid of linguistic color. News stories are the best source, so hit your local newspaper or online news source. Find a story about something you have no emotional or intellectual interest in, pick a random paragraph, and copy it onto a blank sheet.

On a separate blank sheet, rewrite it using the elements and discoveries you made in the previous exercise. Turn it into a quote by the type of character you gravitate to. Don’t fuss over it… just write it from that new perspective. Try it again with a radically different character. Apply a genre spin to it, so it becomes a fantasy or scifi passage. You don’t have to be faithful to the original; adapt whatever you need.

Read each of your creations, noting the differences between the original and the other re-invented paragraphs. Identify specifically what changes evoked the strongest sense of person and place. Those are the marks of your craft and the echoes of your Voice starting to become clear.

Mimic Your Favorites
It has been observed that new writers tend to unconsciously mimic the writers and genres that inspire them. Look at your early work and you’ll see it’s true (mine certainly did). We’re subconsciously trying to recreate that heady rush we got when we read the work in the first place.

Something in those stories speaks directly to your inspiration, so drag that subconscious impulse out into the light. Write a few paragraphs like Gaiman. Or Rothfuss. Or Martin. Do it, not to BE like them, but rather to understand the nuances and details of their unique expression.

Immerse yourself in one writer’s work, studying it meticulously. Then, repeat the newspaper exercise above, only this time, re-write the paragraphs in the manner of your chosen author. As an alternative, scifi author David Brin recommended (in a recent episode of the Writing Excuses Podcast) actually transcribing a few pages of said writer’s work. According to Brin, this allows you to be objective and not get sucked in by the prose.

Read Other People’s Reviews
This process you’re engaged in depends upon the ability to analyze and understand your writing ability. But it’s also about expanding your sensibilities and embracing a larger vision of your own expression. What better way to expand your ability to examine your own work than to study those who do it for a living.

Reviews by insightful reviewers are invaluable in expanding your awareness of the elements and craft of storytelling. In each review, you get to look at the writing craft through the analytical eyes of someone with years of experience honed to tease out the underlying structure of literature and examine its strengths and virtues. Don’t worry about the reviewer’s opinion of what’s being reviewed… examine the reviewer’s process and the elements they hold up to the light. These are the same tools you can apply to your own quest for understanding

Try the New York Times, London Review of Books, or Kirkus Reviews. Also, “More Intelligent Life” has a great listing of excellent reviewers to select from (OUR GUIDE TO THE BEST CRITICS: BOOKS | More Intelligent Life).

Final Words
Writers strive to create characters and stories that make our readers forget their world in favor of ours, surrendering their reality for the one we craft with our words.

There are many skills that need to be developed to earn such trust – good prose, strong plot line, engaging characters – but the fundamental quality is honesty. When you write honestly, your stories become worthy of the trust every reader wants to give when they open a book.

The quest for your writer’s voice is a quest for that honesty. It’s about uncluttering your expression of all preconception and pretense. It’s about discovering that you don’t have to be “good”… you just have to be you. Trying to be anything else is not only a waste of time, but also a denial of all the qualities you have that will make you the amazing writer you can be.

Dave Robison and creative writing teacher Brion Humphrey host The Roundtable Podcast, where they invite writers to workshop their story ideas with authors, publishers, and editors.  Writers of all levels and experience are welcome to join… visit the website and sign up for your episode!