How Do You Know When You've Found Your Voice?

There’s a lot about writing that seems almost mystical – to people who don’t write, and even to those of us breathing in this damn, frustrating, lovely, mind-sucking, hole of death what we call writing.

One of the things you hear most often is VOICE. Big sparkly letters here, because that’s the onus us writing folk put on voice. It’s kind of like literary fiction – no one can tell you how to do it, but we sure the fuck know it when we see it. And then we get even more confusing about it – insisting that an author not only capture his or her own distinctive voice, but also capture each character’s voice. And the character’s voice has to be separate from the writer’s voice… and each character has to have their own voice so that you don’t have cardboard bullshit characters… oh, and don’t use any petty trickery or overused catch-phrases so that your reader literally rolls their eyes and tosses your book in a moldy laundry pile rather than finish it. We talk non-stop about craft and technique and grammar. We beat other works about the head and ears for feats of stupidity or, worse, purple prose.

Can you hear my voice? I bet you can. I can. I know it’s there and I know what it sounds like and guess what – it’s grammatically flawed as all hell. It doesn’t follow any of the rules. Okay, it follows some of the rules, but mostly by accident. You get to a point where you know them backwards and forwards and have to toss them out the window to get comfortable in your skin and say what you have to say. Because the bottom line in voice is communication. That’s it – plain and simple.

That’s all this really is – saying something. Saying something important, life changing, immortal, embarrassing, consuming, eloquent, clever, or blatant… I like blatant, myself. It often has a dry wit all its own. That’s all we’re trying to do here, whether it’s through articles or blog posts or works of fiction. We’re saying something – and in order to communicate, if you’re really good at it, you need to make sure your audience gets it. If your audience is full of high brow fancy schmancy types… go get a thesaurus so they don’t feel slighted by your mundane language – and leave your fucking profanity at the door. If your audience is full of deep thinkers, be more concerned with the ideas than the way they’re couched – deep thinkers don’t care what it looks like to the outside world. They’re not in it to impress anyone else. They want the essence of a story or idea that will make their mind take off… say it in pig latin, if it’s brilliant, they’ll still go with you.

But what you’re saying seems beside the point when you’re talking about voice, right? It’s part of it, but I’ll get back to that. Voice is most often categorized as the flavor of the way you say things, kind of like an accent on the page. And yeah, I can hear New York or Southern Charm, or an Irish Brogue. But it’s not just that.

Remember when you were in high school? Remember when you wanted all the cool kids to like you, or when you started digging combat boots and dyed your hair and spoke in Violent Femmes lyrics? Remember when you stole little phrases from rock stars or friends that were just too fucking cool? Remember that kid, teetering on the curb, trying to get his bearings and up his courage to walk in the middle of the road, pretty as you fucking please? That kid. The one who wanted to be someone special, but didn’t know quite how to get there so he borrowed bits from here and there and adapted other bits that might have been his or maybe they were scrapped up from somewhere else… and he wore them like a mantle of independent thinking – just like everybody else.

Yeah, well if your voice is that – you’re doing it wrong.

The problem with that kid is he was playing at being someone other people might admire. He wasn’t there yet. His confidence was low and his braggadocio was borrowed. That’s not where your voice comes from. You can’t borrow someone else’s… scratch that, you can, actually… if you’ve got a really good ear for language (and if you’re a writer, we’ll assume that you do), you can, in fact, mimic another writer… another person… adopt it and wear it and put it out there… but you won’t have developed YOUR voice.

And they’ll tell you that no one can help you find your voice. There are no instructions to get there or develop it or bring it out. Which is probably true – every journey seems to be as different as every writer. A writer friend recently told me that he could tell that I turned a corner. That my writing voice was the strongest he’d ever seen it. That I was ready. And I think I am. I am more confident in my writing and my voice than I ever was before. So how did I get there? I stopped giving a shit about any of the people who were not going to “get” me. That was it. That simple. I stopped tempering my language because people who don’t know me might mistake my profanity for ignorance. I stopped rethinking overlarge words that fit or mundane words that weren’t impressive enough, and I said what I had to say… and then I edited the hell out of it. (Anyone who tells you voice is natural and comes with no editing is a moron… writing is more editing than writing… when I find a writer who doesn’t follow that, I don’t want to read them.)

Oh, and what you have to say… remember? I said we’d get back to that. Voice and theme go hand in hand as far as I can tell. And some writers have more than one theme that they work with, some may not pay any attention to it at all… they’re just telling a story and don’t notice that their stories all have the same finite number of themes. YOU have something to say. You wouldn’t be writing if you didn’t have anything to say. There is something deeper to this profession than sheer love of words… and yeah, that’s part of it, but it’s not the whole. If I only loved the words, I’d be perfectly content to devour great works by other authors. But it’s not only that with us, we have something to say, and that something, whether deep or frivolous, something to move us or move mountains, something just to make us laugh, that’s as imperative to our voice as the way we turn a phrase. You just can’t have a voice with nothing to vocalize… it would just be a hum, or a moan, or a whimper.

So how did you find your voice? And what have you got to say? Figured out your themes yet?

The Voices In My Head

Writers talk a lot about voice. VOICE - if I could do big sparkly letters that jump off the screen and slap you in the face, I would. That’s how important voice is. Writers know this. It’s the one thing you can’t just learn. It’s outside of craft. I’ve seen writers with natural voices, ones that pull you in the second you read the first sentence – voices that make you smell and see and feel every nuance of where you are and who you’re with in their story. A lot of people call this, ‘natural talent’, but I think it has more to do with trust. They trust their voice. They don’t make any apologies for their voice. They don’t try to change it for the market or hide it from people who are more intelligent or poetic or whatever. They trust. Those people still have to work on craft. They have to tackle plot, and pacing, and all of the variables that mean you need to put your ass in the chair and do the work, but they’re a few steps ahead of the game, because they already trust their voice.

Voice. Everyone has one. Notice I didn’t say every writer has one. That’s not accurate, it’s like saying that anyone not pursuing writing doesn’t have a voice, and they do. Choosing not to use it doesn’t mean it’s absent.

So, what happens if you can’t find your voice? I think it’s a little different for everyone. Some writers will tell you to keep writing and eventually you’ll get to where you know it, hear it. But some of us miss it completely for a long, long time. Again, I think it has something to do with trust.

Now, here’s something that they don’t talk about often – every character has a voice. Erica Orloff just wrote this post about the character’s voice. If you’re a writer, you’ll definitely want to stop there. Your writing should reflect your character’s world, not necessarily your own. Does this mean you have a different voice for different novels? Yeah, kind of. The meat of who you are is still there – writers have tells in their wording here and there, but if you’re switching from urban commercial fiction over to middle grade, well, there better be a pretty significant change in the way you approach it. Your characters have to be whole, and they have to have their own voice. And that voice, your character’s voice, should permeate the novel.

For me, voice was a hard thing to find. What I realized, rather belatedly, was that my best voice, the most authentic voice I have, is guttural. Yeah, you read that right. I kind of knew this, knew that I’m at my most powerful when I’m bringing where I come from to the table – but it hit home more completely for me when I did the My Town Monday posts for Travis, especially this one. I wasn’t trying, it’s not edited – my blog posts often aren’t. Besides all of the wonderful comments, I had emails on this one; it was even linked in a message board for people from my neighborhood. I get visits weekly on that post, from people looking up Cicero on search engines. I’ve had people message me on facebook to tell me that they liked it. So it speaks, it speaks louder than some of the things I’ve agonized over in revision. Not because it’s polished, but because it’s authentic. Because I wasn’t thinking about the audience, I was just being, without worrying about being judged. Trust.

So why the hell did it take me that long? First, I read voraciously. I know, this is actually a good thing for writers, stick with me here. I like novels where the writing disappears and it’s all about story. I like novels where the language wraps itself around you and infuses your senses. I love classics, commercial fiction, fantasy... I love literature and language, and voice... all sorts of voice. So the first part of this is easy to answer. When I started writing, I was mimicking a lot of what I loved in reading... you can see where that might get confusing as I didn’t stick with any one thing as far as what I liked.

I also had an easy grasp of advanced literature from an early age. What got me noticed by teachers was not going to be the same thing that would get me noticed in fiction... Lots of heavy concepts and over-large words... I understood it and loved the flow of that academic voice, but it’s not my fiction voice. And then a lot of the fiction that really resonates with me is on the heavy side. It’s poetic or layered, even the more mainstream fiction that sticks with me for ages, has some bit of something – this spark of brilliance in thought, or concept, or theme.

So there’s the first thing. I adore other authors, but I had to learn to admire their work without squelching my own voice. Instead of forcing poetic prose, I had to get comfortable with what I am, and realize that lyrical is not the only kind of poetry... sometimes blunt and gritty can be beautiful, too. And sometimes pretty words don’t speak nearly as loud as authentic truth.

The second thing is a little deeper. That voice I told you about – I hide it. In my real life, I hide it. I learned fairly early that if you’re outside the neighborhood and can’t speak in a more intelligent way, people think you’re an idiot... actually, worse, they think you’re low class. My accent jumps out when I’m angry, or annoyed. It thickens when I’m around other people who have one. Okay, I’m around a few ‘suburban moms’ and will occasionally let it slip out because I know it’ll make them uncomfortable... I never said I wasn’t a ball buster. But from high school on, I learned to adopt a professional voice to be taken seriously. So that’s in there. There’s an automatic fear in using that voice that I’m opening myself up to judgment... but hell, I’m going to be judged anyway. I just got to the point where I figured, just because they’re judging me, that doesn’t make them right.

So, will I always write in that voice? No. It works for this wip - these characters, this story and most of all, this place. And maybe it’ll be a setting I revisit in future works, but for now I’m keeping my horizons open. There are other worlds and stories I’d like to capture, too. Other things to be said and voices that need to roam.

How about you? If you’re a writer, does your voice change in different novels and settings? If you’re a reader, do you notice a voice change from novel to novel in your favorite authors? And I’m thinking that this might be a good premise for a writing contest. Anyone interested? I think I can even muster up a few prizes.

There really is such a thing as ‘too tight’, or Dammit, I’ve lost my voice!!!!

It should come as no surprise to my regular readers that I’m knee deep in revisions... some days better than others and I thought I was making a good deal of progress... okay, I’m getting a little loopy, and I keep changing tracks to include some short story and essay time (oh, came up with a good essay for a particular publication that I love, hopefully it’s as good when I go to edit it next week)... are you all still with me? Sorry I’m a bit scattered here and I keep losing the damn point....

It’s a constant state of writing that you’ll look at the very same piece one day and think you’ve really hit it, but at another time you’ll want to hang it up for good and pick a more sensible career path. So, I’m barreling through revisions, cut a character, found a running theme that needed pulling out, am thrilled with the way some previously more cardboard than flesh and blood characters have come along... yada, yada... but I decided yesterday to start at the beginning and give it a quick read through – what did I find? There is such a thing as ‘too tight’.

I revised and re-revised my first two chapters in light of much research and some great commentary from both a critique group and my regular writers circle. I spent a good deal more time on those two chapters than the whole, as I was gearing them for final publication while still working on some major points throughout the rest... and the crits were good, don’t get me wrong. I do have a habit of including too much back story, I do break into a bit too much telling at certain passages, and of course there’s always room for improvement. But now, reading through those same chapters – my voice is absent.

I knew there was something wrong immediately, and the voice I’m getting in the first chapter is, well, staccato... and I’m not partial to staccato. In the aim of cutting out the unnecessary back story, I seem to have left a good deal of my own voice on the cutting room floor as well... and I like my voice – it’s got a good beat, I can dance to it...

I think it’s important that I pay attention to criticism, because there’s only so much you can see when you’re that close to your own work – and I don’t think the crits were wrong, I think I went too far over one way and lost some of the flow of my own writing in the process... I’m leaving off on those two chapters for now – I don’t want to get stuck obsessing over the first pages of my manuscript forever – so I’ll keep going where I am and see if the fix pops to light by the end of the journey.

How about you guys, have you ever gone so far in revisions that you lost a bit of your own flavor? Have you ever revised so much that you can’t see the glaring mistakes? Have you ever eaten an entire spice cake in sheer frustration? (Okay, two big pieces, but it might as well have been the whole thing). Feel free to vent if you’d like.