Raise Your Voice

A post about being yourself on paper

So, back when I was first starting to get serious about writing I read a lot of writing books. Hell, if I had more free time, I would probably still be reading a lot of writing books. Some of that, I think, is just wish fulfillment—the idea that if I can just constantly hold certain rules in my head that my writing will be more successful. Some of it is the joy of mastery—”Look, here’s a thing I already knew!” And some of it is the genuine hope that I will find something new—an insight or tool that I haven’t encountered before and that one day I can put to use.

But anyway, back when I was first learning about narrative structure, and characterization, and dialogue, and all sorts there was one topic which these books always seem to skirted around: the idea of finding your voice.

Those books (and blog posts, and web forums, and podcasts…) all seemed to imply that an authorial voice was critically important, but almost never went further than that. Often, they didn’t even define an authorial voice. Mostly their advice could be boiled down to, “keep writing and you’ll find it.”

To be fair, and in their defense, this has proven to be an accurate summation of how I actually did find my authorial voice. However, it wasn’t very satisfying advice, so I am going to at least attempt to break some of this down further.

So, first of all, what even is an authorial voice? Well it’s a lot of things. Maybe that’s what makes it hard to define. At an abstract level, it’s the sum of the choices you make about your writing. It’s word choice. It’s the pacing of your sentences, and the rhythm of your paragraphs. It’s what you choose to write about and how you choose to write about it.

Basically if you and another writer both had to write 100 words about McDonald’s French Fries, then the difference between the two pieces of writing would be your authorial voices. What you both uniquely brought to the same topic.

Hopefully this definition is good news, because it means you already have an authorial voice. You are already making choices when you write, even if unconsciously.

“Ah,” my friendly neighborhood straw man says, “but what if my authorial voice sucks?”

“Well,” I reply, “that’s a bit harsh.”

I am, though, quite possibly, being nice. I mean, my authorial voice definitely sucked early on. But that’s because I wasn’t that good of a writer at that point. I had to work out all the technical kinks. My lack of understanding of the effects of some of my choices was getting in my way.

But—and I think this is important—those technical flaws are not your voice. They’re the things getting in the way of your voice. Once they’re gone… the voice that was there all along starts to come through.

I’m realizing that, at this point, there’s a chance that I have just spent several paragraphs just re-writing “keep writing and you’ll find it” in a more long-winded way. But I swear there’s more to it than that.

What I’m trying to get to, is that once the kinks have been worked the biggest tool for enhancing your voice is confidence. Because your voice is there already. Your idiosyncrasies, your quirks and ticks, your little oddities. They’re your voice. Be confident about them.

In the end, that’s why “keep writing and you’ll find it” worked for me. Because I kept on writing, and I got more confident about not trying to iron out my own oddities. I got more comfortable leaving the weird—quintessentially me—stuff in.

I think I’ve said before that the advice “dance like nobody’s watching” is great advice for writing, and I’ll repeat it here. Because when you’re not worried about what everyone else will think of you, you can just lean into being you. And that’s when your voice will come through. That’s when you’ll best reveal what makes your writing unique, and what makes what you have to say interesting. Or quirky. Or funny. Or insightful. Or… whatever your voice is.

Now, if you don’t mind, I’m off to dance around in front of the mirror like an idiot…