Finding Your Voice

Most of us don’t write the way we speak. Accomplished writers do write with a “voice” though, a unique tone or flavor that brings character and life to their writing. It’s all about the words they choose and how they put them together. Your writing voice develops with time and practice and will change tone when appropriate; you will use a different voice in a business report than in a children’s story, for example.

What makes a “good” writer’s voice? Well, it depends, and I’m not here to tell you exactly how you should write. We’ve all heard horror stories of editors who flatten writers’ voices, removing anything unique or interesting about the writing. I certainly wouldn’t want to do that, but I will give you some general tips for finding and developing your voice.

1. Be clear—Leave no doubt about what you mean. Don’t make your readers slog through your sentences two or three times in search of meaning and sense. Realistically, only two readers will make that effort: your mother and your editor.
2. Be accessible—Far too many writers confuse “voice” with “fancy words and complex phrasing.” There is a time and place for high-falutin’ words and convoluted sentences, but a romance novel packed dense with such stuff will be intimidating and uninviting to the average reader.
3. Be consistent—This is the tough one. Every sentence, every word you write must fit your voice (unless you are deliberately departing from your own voice for a specific reason). Even a single phrase written inexplicably in another voice can be jarring and confusing for the reader. I learned this the hard way in a writing seminar when one out-of-voice sentence in my essay produced laughter among my classmates—not the effect I was hoping for!

So, keeping these thoughts in mind, how does a writer further develop a voice? Simple. Read the work of writers whose voices you admire and then write, write, write!