Already we’ve covered character voice and narrator voice, and now it’s time for the last post of the series—writer’s voice. This is the voice that is woven throughout your entire collection of writings. It’s the voice that publishers and agents are mentioning when they say they want a writer with a good voice. The problem is, writer’s voice is not something easily defined. People just “know it when they see it.” Though I can’t demystify that concept for you, I would like to share how you can discover and hone your voice.
What Is Writer’s Voice?
The technical definition of writer’s voice is the tone, diction, rhythm, and grammar that form sentences and paragraphs. It’s the feeling of the book through its tone, the words you choose, the way you string words together in a rhythm, and the special affects you create through your use of punctuation and word order. It’s how you write.
In my opinion though, the actual definition of writer’s voice is you. It’s your emotions, passions, experiences, and worldview. That’s the wonderful mystery and harsh truth of writer’s voice. It’s not something you can fix or learn. It’s how you express yourself. However, you can improve and grow your voice, and I’m going to give you five steps to do that.
Honing Your Voice
1. Write
Yep, we’re back to that. You have to write. It’s like sports—you have to work on your form before it becomes second nature. The only way to discover and improve your voice is to keep writing. Try playing with different approaches. Change up your POV narration, or try writing a satire. Eventually, you’ll find your pattern, but don’t get too comfortable in it. Writer’s voice is a life long journey that is never finished. You’ll always be growing and changing.
2. Read
I’m not saying read about how to hone your writer’s voice (though I appreciate you reading this post!). I mean read the authors’ works whose voices you want to emulate. If you wish you could write like Edgar Allen Poe and HP Lovecraft, then read their work. Let it sink into your subconscious so it will spill out onto your pages. Analyze how they string sentences together and their overall tone. Describe their writing with a list of three adjectives and look for common areas. You might end up with a list that describes how you want your voice to sound. Then find more books like them and keep reading. What goes into our minds comes out—so take in what you want to produce.
3. Copy
If you want to be really proactive in developing your voice, select an author you admire and copy their work. No, I don’t mean plagiarize, but make it an exercise. Take a chapter or a short story and write the text word for word and comma for comma. It will condition your muscle memory for stringing words together and teach you to think like the author. In the end, you won’t be them, but you’ll be yourself shaped by them. That’s the best result you can ask for when it comes to writer’s voice.
4. Survey
Once you’ve seen what the authors you admire write like, it’s time to see where you are with your writer’s voice. List three words to describe your work. Ask friends or family to give you three words for your writing or even for you. Friendly, spontaneous, and positive. Pensive, informative, and mischievous. The words assembled will help you see your strengths. Practice sharpening those areas or work on developing something new from the list you complied about your author voice role models.
5. Examine
In the end, your writer’s voice is not something you can force. If you write like Andy Weir, you may never sound like William Shakespeare. The big hurtle with writer’s voice is accepting who you are and what you have to give. It’s about being open to showing raw emotion and putting yourself out there.
I think when people talk about a “unique writer’s voice” they are really talking about being genuine. Only by sharing your heart as a writer can you hope to affect the readers. So, at the end of the day, look at your writing and ask if it makes you happy. Does it share your passion or are you too concerned about your sentence length? Don’t try to stifle your unique voice to sound like someone else. We can all improve our writing and shape our voice, but there is a point when you have to realize that you can’t remove yourself from your work and still call it your art. Don’t be afraid to be heard.
Final Thoughts
I almost didn’t do a post on writer’s voice. It seemed too vague for anyone to glean much from what I’ve learned, but I did it because everyone needs to hear this. You have a unique writer’s voice that can be honed and molded, but ultimately the writer’s voice is you. It’s like your fingerprint in the book world.
I have a masters in Forensic Linguistics, and my favorite part of the program was when we studied authorship analysis. In a nutshell, authorship analysis is when you analyze a text to determine who wrote it. I did an experiment where I selected a few newspaper columnists who wrote on the same topics and had similar demographics and backgrounds. I printed a handful of stories from each one and studied them. Then I asked a friend to choose another story from one of them but delete who wrote it. After conducting an authorship analysis, I correctly identified who wrote the article. I could do that because despite the authors’ similar topics and backgrounds, they each had a unique writing fingerprint.
The same is true for each of us. It’s why authors such as Stephen King can’t write under a pseudonym without getting called out for it. Just like how you can recognize someone by his voice or face, our writing is part of who we are. We can’t change it. We can only embrace our unique writer’s voice and strive to always improve our craft.
Thanks for reading!
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