Sound like yourself but only like the writer inside you.
“When did you start writing for that company?”
The question caught me off-guard. Like my colleague who was asking it, I’ve focused much of my career writing in and about the professional beauty salon industry. She was referring to an article I’d written for a beauty product distributor, but I knew that the piece had no byline.
“How did you know I wrote that?” I asked her.
She laughed. “Of course that was you,” she said, taking for granted that I knew I had an identifiable writing style. But until then I did not know that my “writer’s voice” was recognizable. And I wasn’t entirely pleased, because I didn’t want everything I wrote for different clients to sound the same.
It did explain why writing had become so much more effortless as I grew more experienced. I just wrote the way I wrote, evolving over time but always sounding like the writer inside myself. By this time, my writer’s voice had become indistinguishable from my brand.
Start with Confidence and Be Yourself
Every time you receive positive feedback when someone reads what you’ve written, you gain confidence. It’s that confidence that leads you to writing in an authentic way that inherently communicates your perspective on, well, everything. Being yourself when you write is the key to finding your writer’s voice.
Think about the essential you and how you would describe yourself not as a writer but as a person. Place yourself at a point on a continuum between opposites like formal/casual, dramatic/low-key, extravert/introvert, teacher/learner, proper/disrupting, obeying/rebelling, cautious/adventurous, traditional/unconventional—I’m sure you can come up with more. As you get to know yourself in this manner, you’ll let your writing reflect your personality.
There’s No Shortcut—You Must Write a Lot
The more you write, the smoother the process becomes. I think that’s what happened to me. Because writing is my career, I’m always writing. I never consciously developed a writer’s voice, but as my work has taken me into different genres, I’ve brought along the thread of me, so even though each project is different, there’s something about it that sounds consistent.
So write! Even if you’re in the middle of a writing project such as a memoir, take a break and write something else. Catch a friend up on what you’ve been doing by sending a long email. Write some flash fiction or poetry. Write an op-ed or letter to the editor—you don’t have to send it anywhere. Or give yourself an assignment such as writing about the funniest thing that’s happened to you this week.
Of Course, Read
Always have something you’re reading. Whether it’s a memoir, a biography, a book of fiction or just a magazine feature article, every piece of writing gives you access to the author’s voice. Maybe you love a particular mystery writer or author of historical fiction. What do you like about the writing?
Try two exercises. First, write a few paragraphs in a style as close as you can to an author you enjoy. Second, take those same paragraphs and “make them your own.” Examine what you’re doing that changes the work to transform it, and that may be your “signature style,” your voice.
Your Voice May be Quiet in the First Draft
My first draft gets the story out, and in that draft specifically I do not consciously write in any voice. Only when I edit and polish and rework the writing do I begin to at least notice some of my own classic writing habits.
For example, I really try not to repeat random words not essential to the topic, or at least not use them close together. So when I read that I wrote, “I stared at him for the longest time,” and three sentences later I say, “She couldn’t stop staring,” you can be sure I will change one or the other. Maybe I glared or she couldn’t stop gazing. The funny thing is that when I do this, I often end up replacing the original word—“stared/staring” in this example—in both instances. I find two preferable words and use those.
So which is my writer’s voice? The first draft when I write to get my ideas down or the more polished version when I’ve put on my editor hat? You may believe that the free-flowing first draft is more representative of my true voice, but I would say it’s the edited second—or tenth—draft. As I read what I’ve written, I hear the cadence and can tell when it’s off. I think about the precision of the words and know when something is not up to my standards. So it’s subsequent drafts that contain the identifying markers of my writer’s voice.
Finally, Don’t Overthink It
Your writer’s voice is already in you. It may not be on paper/screen, but it’s in you. Write frequently and stay aware of signs that you’re developing a recognizable style, but don’t force it. If you keep writing, keep reading and know the essence of who you are, the voice will emerge. As I found out, it may take someone like a friend or colleague to point it out.