I’m not sure exactly why I decided to blog on this subject because I’m not sure I have anything useful to offer.
Voice is one of those weird things.
Most beginning writers haven’t found theirs yet.
I certainly hadn’t until a couple of books ago.
My first stories and books read like the love-child of Tolkien and Beatrix Potter.
Actually not a good combination.
I’m not sure exactly how I did find MY voice.
By writing, I suppose.
Just that one day after many painful days trying to write in a style that was not comfortable for me, I found it.
And once I had found it, I knew it intimately, and it fit me like a ….well, like a glove if I wore gloves. Like a boot, perhaps.
(And by the way, should we all start wearing gloves again? I quite like the idea of wearing gloves to drive my little, euro sportscar (If I had one) up and down all the windy hills.)
I might not even have noticed except my writing teacher read a 30 page whimsical story I wrote in a frenzy over a couple of nights and said “What a great voice this has!”
And I scraped my sweat-drenched hair out of my face and said, “Huh?”
And realized it was because rather than think about what I was doing, I had immersed myself in this tale and just written it without thinking about impressing anyone with it.
Once you find your voice, you’ll know it, but how to get there? I think you have to try on a bunch of, umm, boots, before you find one that fits.
Recognizing when it doesn’t work is quite easy.
For instance mine was pompous. I am not myself pompous but my voice was all fruity and used big, clumsy words and way too much description. It did not have a self-deprecating bone in its body.
And because it was torturous to capture words in this voice, it was torturous to write in this voice.
I have faced a blank page many a time in my career but never with such finality as I did when I was forcing myself to write in a way that was completely alien to me.
There is a comfort in knowing that the way you are going to tell a story is in a style that is innately yours.
I try to write in the same way that I would orally tell a story (although that is an art in itself). Normally when we are speaking we utilize idioms, cliffhangers, and trickeries, which also have their own individual rhythms and abrupt changes, to engage our listeners.
Once you’ve found your voice all those wonderful idiosyncracies will come out too.
Writing is not flat. It has mood and flavor and hills and quirk.