By BookBaby author Lee Purcell

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

How do you find your Voice as a writer? This question is right up there with perennial questions like, “What should I be when I grow up?” There are no easy answers to either question, but some helpful guidance might steer you in a profitable direction.

Starting out, many budding authors emulate their favorite writers, much the same way that beginning guitarists try to capture the sounds of the artists they admire. Cloning the Writing style and approach of Ann Patchett, James Lee Burke, Toni Morrison, or Neil Gaiman might teach you something about writing, but you can expect to always come out of this exercise as a weaker version of the writer you admire.

What are the primary qualities of a writer’s “voice?” You can start reading a book by Mark Twain, Virginia Wolff, Edgar Allen Poe, or Agatha Christie and likely detect the distinctive voice fairly quickly. The voice of a writer is a blend of point of view, syntax, tone, rhythm, vocabulary, and phrasing. Together, these elements — and others — establish a consistent, recognizable writing style. In a book with multiple characters, though they may vary in their individual speech patterns and personality, the framework of a book becomes the stage, the creative platform, on which the storyteller’s voice emerges.

Give yourself time

Recognize from the start that an authentic voice as a writer is not something you can acquire in a couple of weeks by just experimenting with different writing styles and picking one you like best. We’re talking marathon and not sprint.

Step one is becoming familiar with your own approach to writing and deciding what parts are inauthentic baggage, likely purloined from another writer. It doesn’t hurt to pull elements from those writers who have captured your attention, but overreliance on devices that other writers have used will hamper your long-term efforts to find your own voice as a writer.

In Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury says, “After millions of words of imitation, when I was twenty-two years old I suddenly made the breakthrough, relaxed, that is, into originality with a ‘science-fiction’ story that was entirely ‘my own.’”

Learn to know the difference between those times when you are emulating the style of someone else as opposed to systematically constructing an approach based on your own writing instincts. Is this difficult to do? Yes — it’s supposed to be.

Cultivate a point of view

Maybe you like to write in the first person and have a protagonist with his or her own slant on life. It might be a violence-prone anarchist; a zany, unpredictable clown; or a skittish individual ruled by obsessive-compulsive disorder. Or, if you write in the third person, your approach might involve contrasting different points of view in the characters, woven into your storyline. Be deliberate and aware how the point of view shapes your story and use it mindfully.

The third-person narrative voice can be limited in scope (as seen through the eyes of a single character) or omniscient, or even seen through multiple characters, which gives you a wider palette of options to frame scenes, present ideas, and advance the plot. Some works lend themselves to a simpler approach, and this is often an easier way to control narrative flow. Other works can benefit and become richer through different points of view, if the writer is skilled enough to maintain this approach without disrupting the continuity of the tale.

Draw on the deep passions in your life

Those interests that draw your passions and stir your blood could be elements of your voice as a writer. For example, in her quest, Amy Lee Dillard found the energy and release in punk music translated to the written page. As she said in an article for LitHub,

… in my reading life, I found the rage of punk. I discovered the fury of Sarai Walker in Dietland, an explosion of a book about diet culture, rape culture, beauty culture. I found the ferocity of Chris Kraus in I Love Dick, embracing raw desire as an antithesis to male-dominated art. I found the transgressive brilliance of Alissa Nutting in Tampa, pinpointing the lines that are drawn around women’s sexuality and behavior (and the hypocrisy when compared to men). I found the destruction of gender in Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl.

Your passion doesn’t need to be manifested in nerve-shattering, primal-scream moments — quiet passions work, too. Think of Emily Dickinson’s passion for nature, often an element of her poetry, in her collection of pressed wild plants, which can still be viewed today in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, complete with Latin names and accompanied by Dickinson’s drawings.

Some level of detectable passion is an inherent element of most successful fiction and nonfiction. The writer’s voice should be able to express this passion, whether it is the drive to solve a crime, cope with the challenges of a hostile alien world, scale the peak of a treacherous mountain, or thrive as a musician in the fierce competitive world of entertainment. Insert your own personal passion in this list.

Master the tools of your craft

There is tremendous variety and a wide range of options available to writers, particularly as offered by the quirky, inconsistent English language. This doesn’t mean you should spend years diagramming sentences and memorizing the mechanical devices of the language, but when you’re reading the works of others, pay attention to how they structure sentences, choose the level of description, apply dialogue to complement or completely carry the storyline, use sentence length to pace the action, vary vocabulary to suit the story, employ vernacular phrases or idioms to achieve effect, and so on. Developing a good ear and good instincts is an important step on the road to writing excellence.

Rhythm is a key ingredient of your writing. It goes beyond simply varying sentence length (although this is important) and extends to approaching writing much as a composer creates music. The way characters speak sets a certain rhythm. Listen to conversations around you and become sensitive to the different forms of emphasis, to the pattern of words, to the poetry — both harsh and soothing — of everyday speech.

Striking a balance between dialogue and description is another telling example of a way to apply language to establish a consistent voice. Certain writers excel at telling their story with lengthy descriptive sequences and craft scenes with intricate detail (think of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life). Others carry the storyline almost entirely with dialogue and reserve narrative passages for places in the story where the dialogue isn’t enough (Cormac McCarthy’s Stella Maris is a good example). Which approach suits your style, and do you want to make that approach an element to shape your voice as a writer?

Make your voice disappear

In some instances, the less your ‘voice’ impinges upon your writing, the better. In The Atlantic, Noah Berlatsky says:

Because the truth is, if you want to get paid as a writer, finding your own voice can be a distraction — even a hindrance. The bulk of writing opportunities that will actually provide you with a living wage are work-for-hire — writing textbook entries, or exam questions, or website content boilerplate. And when you’re doing work-for-hire, no one cares about your voice. Or rather, they do care, in that they actively don’t want anything to do with it. The point of work-for-hire is to make your voice disappear into the house style.

Rely on your own voice

In an article in Writer’s Digest, indie author Roland Denzel writes, “First, don’t be afraid to write in your own voice, even if it’s more casual and funky than your English teacher taught you. There are lots of books with similar stories or topics, but the readers who become your true fans will do so because of the personality you put into your books, not just because of what you write.”

The quest for authenticity

If there were a single handbook that gave full instructions for definitively establishing your personal writing voice, this quest would be simpler. Instead, we have a laundry line full of viewpoints that can seem contradictory and overwhelming. What does seem to be a constant refrain is: Keep writing, write as much as you can, write every day. As P.D. James says, “It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.”

If you’re still flailing, struggling to figure out how to construct your writing voice, Neil Gaimin advises,“The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.”

Meg Rosoff, winner of numerous literary awards for her novels (including the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2016 and the Carnegie Medal in 2006), sums it up in these words:

Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.

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Want To Be A Writer? Let Your Imagination Run Wild.

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