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Finding Your Writer's Voice

2014-05-31

So how does one find their writer’s voice? Ahh, let me share the secret. Here’s the answer–and it’s so simple. One’s writing voice is easiest found when it’s closest to how you would normally speak. ... Here’s an example of what the wonderful author, Maeve Binchy, once said of her writing secret in finding her voice.

“I don’t say I was proceeding down a thoroughfare, I say I walked down the road. I don’t say I passed a hallowed institute of learning, I say I passed a school.”

What she’s saying is if we allow our writing to turn too fancy, it can become stilted. Her secret was to keep it simple and closest to how she would normally speak.

Joanne Wadsworth

The true voice of a writer is the nameless fire that burns inside, turning up the heat, licking at mind and heart until it becomes unbearable to wait even a single moment longer before putting pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard.

Not everyone

Some people will be drawn to the dark and others to the light. Few people will be drawn to both. This is important to know because some people will never like your writing. You’ll always have a percentage who love your work and a percentage who hate it. Get over yourself because that’s how it goes. You’ll make yourself crazy trying to please everyone. It can’t happen. Period.

...

Eventually, about a million words in, you’ll find your unique voice. Then you’ll find people who love, and hate it.

Julie Butcher

What is Voice? It’s you, the writer’s unique way of expressing emotions, situations or life events. It shows and reflects your spirit. -- Roz Denny Fox

Try this, just for fun. Go to Itunes and listen to the sample of "Mack the Knife" by an assortment of singers. As you listen, write down a few words to describe the voice you hear. I promise you, try this with five or six and by the end you'll have a new insight into the word, "voice." -- Kitty Griffin

@suddenlyjamie

Tim Yao

aka NewMexicoKid

george in Writing

"You don’t need to find your voice, you already have one! Your writer’s voice is there in your head. It’s what you hear as a constant word track throughout your day. Your challenge is not to find your voice, it’s to put that voice to paper."

Fine tune your Voice. Write something, let it sit, review it and highlight those phrases and sentences that appeal to you and strike a memorable chord. Remove everything else. Let it sit again. Review: your voice will be within the remaining phrases.

C. Patrick Schulze

Write. Discipline yourself to write 2000 words each and every day. Doesn't matter what you write.

“Voice, at its most basic level, is the sensibility with which an author writes. It's a perspective, an outlook on the world, a personality and style that is recognizable even out of context. You could drop randomly into a David Sedaris story or an Ernest Hemingway novel and probably guess the author within a few paragraphs because they have strong, unique voices. An author's voice is often imitated (think: Tolkien), but a truly original voice can never be duplicated.”

Nathan Bransford

Find Your Tribe and Gather Them Around You. Another essential step to finding your voice is locating those writers you truly love and immersing yourself in their work. Both steps -- the finding and the immersing -- involve reading. A lot. Read widely and outside of whatever it is that you believe you are "supposed" to read to be well read, hip, or cultured, and seek the writers who truly excite you. Your list won't look exactly like anyone else's.

Remember that fear is your best friend. "At the heart of everything that you've ever read that moved you, touched you, changed your life, there was a writer's fear. And a writer's determination to say what he had to say in spite of that fear." -- Holly Lisle

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