What is your 'voice' and how do you find it?
What is your 'voice' and how do you find it?
Get ready for a lot of single quotation marks...
This concept of writing having a ‘voice’ gets thrown around a lot. People generally comment that they like work with a ‘voice’ and will give a note if they feel something ‘lacks a voice.’ Teachers, mentors, those who are supposed experts, tell you to ‘find your voice’ and suggest that you ‘use your voice.’ Usually starting early on in your creative journey you learn that having a ‘voice’ is really crucial.
But ask someone to define it? And it’s all a lot of nonsense. It reminds me of the scene in Reality Bites when Winona Ryder gets asked in an interview what the definition of irony is and she answers, “Well, I can’t really define irony but I know it when I see it!”
Define Irony clip.
And then of course Ethan Hawke defines it smugly in the next scene. However the difference is, irony is something with an agreed upon definition that you can look up in the dictionary whereas what people mean when they refer to a writer’s ‘voice’ could be all sorts of things.
I think it’s vague because when it comes to good work, work that connects and excites, there’s something… kind of magic happening. In the face of magic, ‘voice’ is like a catchall for whatever it is that an author is conjuring - that divine extra something that comes from being in touch with who you are. And how that shows up can be mysterious - often even to the authors themselves.
Which is cool and all, mystery can be thrilling I suppose, but I think if we zoom in, there are elements that make up this ‘voice’ quality that we can investigate.
If we suppose that the ‘voice’ is ultimately the ‘you’ that shows up in the work, then we can break that down into the millions of little choices that you subconsciously make when writing that no one else would. It’s your stamp that no one else can replicate.
In this context, those choices seem to be often thought of in terms of word selection, equating a ‘voice’ with a personal style - the way something is written. However, I would argue it’s so much more than that. I think it’s not just the words and how you put them together, but the themes, the characters, the story and everything else. It’s not just how you wrote it, it’s why you wrote it to begin with.
There are five things I’ve kind of zeroed in on when trying to understand how and where the voice shows up:
Ease and Flow
Tone and Genre
Ideation
Character
Style
I’ve got lots of thoughts about each of these and some tools I use to help me get in touch with that magic sauce in each area. The magic sauce being ‘me’ and not what part of mind is currently pretending to be me at the moment.
Which brings me to why writing in your ‘voice’, which seems like should be the easiest most natural thing to do, is so damn hard. It’s because your mind won’t shut the hell up. It wants to protect you - from failure, from judgement, from financial ruin. It wants to figure things out, analyze the best strategies, make the smart moves. But, guess what? These are all things that flatten a script and make even the coolest ideas blahsville. Don’t get me wrong, your mind has a really important job in the writing process, but I think that’s editing and refining. When it comes to this magic voice stuff? Your mind is like an overprotective soccer mom, wrapping you up in shin guards and sunscreen and making sure you have your epi pen, to the point where you can’t concentrate and you miss the ball.
I’ll explore those five areas in individual posts as well as the things I try to do to help me connect with my voice when I’m focusing on each one.
Why is any of this important?
if your goal is to connect with people through your writing, which is the goal for most writers I think, then there’s no other way to do it than by letting your freak flag fly.
Robots. If your goal is just to write a generic blockbuster, that’s all well and good but guaranteed, there’s already an AI out there that can write a pretty decent one of those. Having a ‘voice’ I think is more important than ever.
Our passion, creativity and vulnerablity are probably our greatest commodities.
Yeah, trusting yourself is a big part of it and has always been a huge hurdle for me as well. It's one of the things I plan on writing about. Being too busy or drained to feel like you have the headspace to write is another thing I've always struggled with too.
This is a great topic, Jen and I'd love to hear more. One of my greatest personal barriers to writing, or being creative in anything, has always been trusting that voice. Is what I'm saying really that interesting, funny? Is it derivative or obvious? Forget the audience, what will my friends think? As I get older, I tend to give less fucks. I just wish I had more time to write now.