📌 Honing (or Harnessing) Your Writing Voice

Hard-won (or, perhaps, hardly-won 😂) advice for the stymied or stumped

Let me level with you. I don’t do many writerly things naturally, or often even well. When drafting, I tend to emphasize wordplay, “bits,” and plot (vs. character, which is pretty much what everyone and I mean EVERYONE, correctly says is the most crucial aspect). I love the words “just,” “actual,” “own,” and “definitely” so much that I might as well have married them instead of my sweet partner. I am prone to pomposity and opinionated, and I tend to treat my ideas like my children—meaning I think they are the bees' knees, even when they are just lazing around and contributing nothing. I say all this to let you know: there is SO MUCH I don’t know.

But…I do get positive comments on my writing voice and writing style? (For whatever reason in the great googly moogly that might be—I’ll take it! Don’t we all grasp gratefully at *any* positive writing feedback?) I’m definitely not the best at it! Still, and maybe it’s hubris, I’d like to think I have learned a few things that, just maybe, might help you out if you are struggling with honing (or perhaps even identifying) your writing voice.

These are my favorite two lines in this entire film, if you were wondering—an Oscar Wilde-quoting Willy Wonka is just <chef' ’s kiss>. And such delivery!

STYLE. Though it’s a part of voice, style is also its own <waves hands> “thing” that encompasses what words an author chooses and how an author chooses to string them together—including punctuation and line breaks. All the tools a poet would use? THOSE are style.

• Think of your writing as a conversation with the reader(s). I don’t mean write informally (unless the piece would benefit from it, somehow); being sloppy is not the same as being conversational. But consider: how would you tell this story to a stranger with high “potential BFF” energy? How would you try to convey your creative perspective by relying not only on the words you choose, but also the way you wield them?

• Don’t read* and write. Here’s an unpopular principle I have for when I sit down to write: I do not read others’ work immediately beforehand. That may mean I don’t read any texts at all before that day’s work session—or, sometimes, it means I won’t read anyone else’s comp texts that may relate until I feel secure in my own story being in a shareable stage. Talk and think and think and talk—draw, paint, do *anything* that isn’t just reactive to others’ writing—and then write. This is important because we don’t need more echo chambers—social media has that covered. What we need from you, creator, is ORIGINALITY. What have you NOT read, but think? That’s a much better place to start! Of course, do read…at the end of the day, or after you’re done writing. And ideally, read randomly and widely, in addition to your chosen genre(s).
  * unless it’s your own writing; that’s always a good idea.

• Consider your tone. Outside of word choice (which is a huge part of style), what does what you’re working on sound like? Or, even better, what do you WANT it to sound like? WaCkY? P!-E!-P!-P!-Y!? Sly? deadpan? eerie?

• Don’t ignore formatting and punctuation. Line breaks. Italics. Bolding. Parentheses (if you swing that way). And even better—well-placed dashes, strikethroughs, and even ellipses… all these things are like the pauses and inflections you naturally make when you talk with good friends. Likewise, using a mix of short and long sentences often feels more dynamic. And who doesn’t love our thoughtful pal, the rhetorical question?

• Ponder delivery. In stand-up comedy, delivery is crucial, and writing is no different. Example: this joke by the late (RIP) Mitch Hedberg: "I don't have a girlfriend; I just know a girl who would be real mad if she heard me say that." Funny! But, instead of just sharing Mitch’s words, if I wanted to share his style of humor, I might approximate it with something like:

  “I don’t have a girlfriend…
  I just know a girl
  who would be real mad
  if she heard me say that.”
  Whether that captures it fully (or not), I’m hopeful you can see how even a bit of formatting can add stylistic flavor. Even if we took the line breaks out, the ellipses and the italics help emphasize the logical breaks that make the whole thing funny.

• Read it out loud. There’s no better way to test if your style is coming through. And I mean: really read it aloud. Don't just pretend you are doing it, in your head. (Don’t ask me how I know you may be doing that. 😗🎶)

Voice is the person behind the wordy curtain.

VOICE. Here, I mean authorial voice. It’s the “ZHə nə sā ˈkwä” that showcases the author’s perspectives on the topic at hand; the more you read of a “voicey” author, the more you begin to “feel” their specific writing sensibility. Voice also relates to the slant and tone they utilize throughout the piece: the arched eyebrow of a snarky essay or the wonder imbued in, perhaps, a poem. Therefore, while style feeds into voice, and voice can feel a little different piece-to-piece, voice also feeds into the learned expectations a reader might reasonably hold of what sorts of topics an author might write about, and how the author might handle them. It’s the parts and the sum.

• Example: Once, in a webinar, I was asked to write one sentence in another author's voice. When I mentioned Raleigh, NC, and “my sister” in a sentence laced with a wry-sounding “outsider observation,” everyone correctly identified me as attempting David Sedaris's voice.

• The simplest way to showcase your voice (in a “simple meaning the opposite of easy” way) is to make your writing personal by writing about things that stem from your own lived experiences (like David’s well-referenced upbringing in Raleigh) or values you hold dear, like David’s frequent stories about his beloved siblings and his tendency to, if he’s describing anyone in an unflattering way, to make sure he describes himself in an EVEN MORE unflattering way. You have your own writing tics and peccadillos, and I say: learn to love them instead of training them out of yourself. Which brings me to…

• Be selective with Grammarly and other grammar editors. Listen, we all use them (well….I hope)! We need to (often, desperately!) check our grammar! But… don’t “accept” all the Grammarly changes willy-nilly. Go through them, one by one, and consider each as thoughtfully as you would a critique partner’s notes. The last thing we need is for your voice to be slowly drained, accepted change by accepted change, from your work. Make sure the tools are there to help you tell your story, not the most generic version of it.

  

  Don’t let A.I. (or others) do this to you.

In short, tell the story; don’t just “process and present” your writing like an A. I. program would. “MEEP, boop, beeeeeep, ker-BLONK!” beats “bip. bip. bip. bip.” any day.

Let me close out this post with a quote I read on Jane Friedman’s blog in a guest post by Jennifer Louden (which I recommend you also check out). “Developing your writer's voice requires you to know yourself and reveal that self in your writing: this is who I am and this is what I care most about.”

Amen, Jennifer! The corollary to that is that it’s an ongoing process, and you are probably already doing better at it than you think. Just let yourself be “a little more you,” and you will have nailed this.

Your friend in making one’s voice heard,

Elayne

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