As a short story and novel dabbler, I often wonder how my voice can come through in some sections of a story and then totally fall flat in others. Am I not being true to myself? Am I not tapping into the muse? Are the writing gods forsaking me? What other myths can I use to convince myself there is an easy track to developing my own voice as a writer? For this post, I am going to look at what is typically recommended for writers to develop a distinctive writing voice.
Developing Your Voice as a Writer
Before we get there, we should get a concrete sense of what writing voice is in a theoretical sense. In so many ways, you want to be able to engage with the text you are writing by developing languages associated with that style of writing. Through that, you come up with a specialized language and then a more universal and specific language. In other words, know your genre and know your tone. If you can lock down the language associated with a particular topic, then your voice becomes apparent.
Yet, we can go even farther than that and explore a few traditional methods of developing voice. There are a few main recommendations I see often, and they fall into two categories:
- Emulation
- Immersion
Emulation
Emulation is the focus of writing using the style of an author you like each time you sit down to write with the sole purpose of taking the things you enjoy from their style. An example of this would be your 13-year-old self sitting at a desk and trying to write a pulp story because you think the author’s diction and syntax is interesting.
By doing this, you are practicing another author’s tone in order to perfect your own. Allegedly, Hunter S. Thompson engaged with this sort of writing technique by emulating Faulkner.
Another example would be a musician listening to a record and playing the music back. Eventually, the idea is that the musician (or writer in this case) will adopt the nuances of the person they are emulating. Then, that will mesh with an existing skill set (or other emulations) to create a new style of writing wholly original to the author.
Other writers have talked about this very thing.
Immersion
Immersion is literally just a writer focusing on a style and in a genre for a sustained amount of time until a style grows from trial and error. That is, if you read and write in sci-fi for long enough, you will adopt a style that is beneficial to explain science fiction ideas or that adopts a voice you are comfortable with.
I like to think of pulp writers during the turn of the 1900s. You could tell there were a lot of good writers there, but you could also tell a lot of them were adopting a style befitting a pulp writer (a style beneficial to quickly cranking out prose for money). This goes for any other genre of writing as well.
Other Ideas Regarding Voice
There are other ways and explanations, too. Writer Leah McClellan states that a writer’s voice is a combination of “Attitude, tone, and personal style.”
“Attitude is about emotion, values, and beliefs,” she writes. “ … Tone of voice in your writing is similar to tone of voice while talking … it’s not what you say—the facts—but how you say it (or write it).”
Furthermore, personal style are all of the little choices one makes when writing. These choices include diction, syntax, structure, mood, tone, and so much more. I think these are definitely fair points and if it’s beneficial for you to think of writing as an extended metaphor, I think you will find her advice useful.
Final Thoughts on Writing Voice
Writing is a skill that you have to practice. You have to learn the rules and use them to the best of your ability, and outside of the application of prescriptive grammar, you have to practice conveying a message to people who probably understand descriptive grammar. That isn’t to say that prescriptive grammar is the right approach or the be-all and end-all. I’m also not saying because we live in descriptive grammar bubbles online that we should simply throw out the rules.
However, you as a writer have to start with the mechanics and then learn how to break the rules. This will extend your writing in more digestible ways and impact your audience awareness. In other words, if you have a new and unique style, can you explain why it works without saying “It just does.” You also don’t have to say that it comes from some special place from beyond the pale.
Rationale does wonders for development and progression.
With that being said, you also have to dispel the myths of writing, which include things like “writing is a God-given gift,” “writers are depressed geniuses,” “substance abuse makes writing better,” or “you need a degree in writing to be a writer.” Similarly, you can implement poetic strategies to engage your readers more and spice up your writing.
All of these ideas inhibit creativity and get in the way of style and voice, and these myths perpetuate crappy narratives about an otherwise normal skill that needs to be practiced and honed if one wants it to develop into something better—like a piece of writing with an original voice.
