Your Voice

In classes and how-to books on fiction writing, there are dozens of exercises dedicated to helping a prospective writer “discover your voice.” I recently talked with a writer friend about how there are several skills in life that people either “just get” or they won’t really ever approach to any degree.

I’m wondering if one’s “voice” is one of these.

Because when I think about it, my voice is merely a series of writing tricks that I’ve built up over the years. I like short sentences. I got that from E. Annie Proulx (The Shipping News). I like those standalone, single-sentence paragraphs like the one above, which aren’t grammatically correct, but that I use for emphasis. These are my voice, just as much as what I’ve chosen to talk about is a product of voice.

So I think you CAN learn voice, and yet, I think what makes voice interesting is how you choose to use it. I have a friend, Geo. He has 50-something websites, one of which is My Own Private Revolution. He has a unique voice. I enjoy it immensely. I couldn’t teach that voice to you directly, but I can witness the various iterations of it, and I could probably parrot it to some extent.

Is there value, then, in my voice? Or is there value in what I cover, and how I cover it? Do you find yourself reading for the person or the material? (Don’t answer, as you’ve already told me this one).

And what about your voice? How are you using it? What makes your voice useful to me, or interesting to me, or important to me? How many blogs do I read, or podcasts do I listen to or watch, where the voice is the ONLY thing that matters to me? Plenty, actually.

What’s so special about your voice?

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Michael Bailey

I geek speak about 90% of the time.

It used to bother me that people didn't have a clue about what I was talking about most of the time.

I have noticed (because people have told me) that what I talk about now, often comes up in conversations which they have with other people.

So, I'll continue to speak about what I find interesting, even though I'm usually 2 years ahead of everyone else.

rox

i actually think the medium affects the voice. old time writers were very specific about the type of pen and/or paper they would use, manual v electric typewriter. today, some are natural text bloggers, others come to life in audio and/or video. for me, text is OK, audio a distant third, and video is where i found my voice.

Mark Day

I often find that the more subclauses, not to mention sidebars and tangents (oh look there goes another one), I can squeeze into a sentence, the better. Of course, my voice and my accent are sometimes inseperable. When someone tells me they love my accent, I have to wonder if they'd pay half as much attention if I didn't have one.
Then, when they tell me they "hear" it even when they're reading something I wrote (not everyone says this, but enough....) I figure I must be onto something.

What, exactly, remains to be seen.

Or heard.

(disclaimer: everyone has an accent - you just have to be in the right place for people to notice it)

Bill C.

My pingbacks/trackbacks don't seem to be working, so... :D

I think there's something more important / useful than learning voice. That would be learning to listen to yourself and discover your own voice.

Learn your own patterns, your own perceptions, your own priorities and values. The more aware you become of your own personal "voice", the more efficient you'll be in expressing yourself and the more you'll enjoy what you're doing, which makes it easier to write A LOT in a short amount of time.

Then again, it depends on what one is writing about... I can't write about surfing, because I don't surf. I've seen "Point Break" and other beach movies, and I've even watched a competition or two on television, but I have no personal experience with surfing, so A) it would take me a long time to write something about surfing, and B) whomever actually surfs would know that what I'm saying is completely inauthentic. If the goal is to write horror films or stories about people flying around on brooms, then, yeah... I think that needs to be learned! :D

Your (Chris') particular voice may very well be 'merely' a series of writing tricks..... except it's YOUR collection of tricks and you deploy them in your own particular fashion. The individuality is in the selection and use of the tools, not the tools themselves. The 'value' of your voice is found in the same place. Your perception is what separates you from the next writer. It's all about how you perceive things and then how you express yourself to the reader. I see a table, you see a chair, someone else sees a collection of wood. Making others aware of a different way of seeing things is value right there.

Person vs Material is an interesting question. I think the first time, people in general read for material... After that, they read for the person... assuming it's the same material. I think that if they disagree with or just plain wouldn't like to believe what you have to say about things, they won't return to read more, even if it's on a topic they're really interested in. OTOH, if you have an interesting take on people flying around on brooms, they might click on your new article about auto repair.....

I think that what makes someone's 'voice' useful to someone else is relevance and competence. If you're talking about issues that are interesting or important to that person and they respect what you have to say about it or how you see it, you've gained someone that sees you as an authority on that topic. If that person decides to check what you have to say on other topics, they may gain respect for your views in general and not just on that one topic that they clicked on from a search engine that one time.

Interestingly enough, IMO, it all comes down to individuality, and perhaps the luck of the draw... How much life experience is someone bringing to the table to be able to talk about certain issues? How much training did someone pursue to learn "writing tricks"? How often can you say about that person "he/she has a point there!"? How narrow does that person's range appear to be in different topics that they can talk about intelligently? Where has this person gone and what have they put themselves through in order to formulate the concepts they're expressing right now?

I've actually learned some of this over the last few months. The 'value' isn't in the production values or the writing tricks & gimmicks. The value is in what YOU take for granted that other people have no idea about and have no way of finding out about unless YOU tell them about it, take them there and show it to them.....