Develop An Understanding of Who You Are as a Writer
Finding your writing voice can help you reach new levels as a unique, singular author
Every writer offers a distinct voice to their work. It has its unique rhythm, pace, and sense of detail. Voice is how you project yourself artistically — how you see life and use language.
But most writers struggle to unearth their voice because to speak from your voice means confronting your world, your dreams, and your life as raw as it comes. You leave yourself exposed and tell your secrets — unfiltered emotions.
Every word creates an echo, like a signature that becomes infused with the things around us. Each voice is ours alone, constantly seeking its truth.
Most writers feel compelled to write because they want to put parts of themselves into their writing. The words you chose. The pauses you take, how fast or slow you speak, or whether you meander or get straight to the point.
What is the writer’s voice?
A writer’s voice influences how and why you tell a story and how your readers experience it. Without a distinctive voice, stories are just a jumble of words.
Prominent author voices are one of the main reasons that readers have favorite authors. Writers like Toni Morrison, Stephen King, and Ernest Hemingway have notably distinctive voices; you only read a few paragraphs to recognize their signature tone.
But you will not find your voice without the willingness to expose yourself to tell what you know in a new light. To be brave and tell the TRUTH. And YES, you will have shitty first drafts, but find ways to get out of your way, to forget about writing the great American novel.
Developing your voice requires understanding who you are and how you want to communicate with the world, trying to write most honestly and truly. Open your senses to your story’s trajectory. Dig deep and excavate.
In this writing phase, forget about structure and discover the writer within yourself. Throw away the doubts, and engage in the process. Dream. Listen. Penetrate uncharted territory. You’ll be walking in the dark, feeling your way for language and tasting your discovery’s rawness — unabashed truth in all its ugliness, beauty, and repulsiveness.
Give it your all.
Be who you are, linked to your speaking voice and sense of pace. Learn when to run or pause. Learn when to dig deep and when to hold back. And most of all, permit your readers to discover things for themselves. An engaged reader is an engaged follower.
The good news about “voice” is that it’s not something you must develop actively — it develops independently. The more you write, the more stories you tell, and the more your voice refines itself.
It will show in the descriptions you write, the characters you focus on, and the themes you tend to favor. For instance, my love of nature shows up in all my writing as characters. For example, I immediately set the dark mood in the first two sentences of my novel with the following:
“Everything is gray — gray skies, gray buildings, and sidewalks. You don’t have to do anything in Manhattan but smell the late fall rain on the streets to know there’s more of that ire to come.”
Try different voices and see what feels suitable for you and your story. It may be that your writing voice changes over time or changes depending on the type of story you’re writing.
It is how you express yourself and combine personality, perspective, style, or tone. Also, the way you use particular words, phrases, or punctuation to demonstrate your unique voice.
Types of character voice
Authors incorporate a variety of character voices into their work by using the following narration choices:
First-person: Readers often see the character’s internal and external voices in this format. I wrote my last two novels in first-person narrative. I like to write in first-person to create a sense of trust with readers, pulling them into the story by arousing empathy. It feels like I’m personally involved, which makes me care more about the protagonist and their struggles.
Stream of consciousness: This narrative style follows the flow of the characters’ internal voices, pulling readers inside their minds. Not my favorite style of writing because some characters may have a stream of consciousness that is difficult to follow, creating a challenge for the readers.
Third-person limited: This format uses an unbiased, third-person narrator to tell a story. Readers only see the characters’ external voices through their dialogue with other characters. This narrator uses third-person pronouns rather than first-person. This storyline style focuses on one character, so readers see their thoughts and feelings but not those of the secondary characters.
Third-person omniscient: This style uses a third-person narrator to tell the story. However, the narrator acts as a god-like, all-seeing narrator who has access to all the characters’ internal and external voices. Therefore, readers can see the dialogue between characters and know what each character thinks or feels.
Unreliable narrator: This voice makes it difficult for the readers to trust the one telling the story. In Stolen Truth, the story is told from the perspective of someone who misleads the readers. Bree’s version of events doesn’t always align with the truth. I have projected Bree’s way of looking at the world and what she believed to be true onto the reader and how you’re watching her.
Voices and their delivery
A writer with a strong voice might write that their hero “ambles” across a room instead of “walks.” She might use a period where someone else would use a comma.
Writers with strong voices usually write layered scenes and characters. Nuance and detail add layers of subtext, making characters pop.
Perhaps most importantly, writers with strong voices have something to say, a provocative, empowering, divisive, or even universal message that resonates. In my current novel-in-progress, the story centers around a dramatic question. Can Homa change? What motivates her? After transitioning from a life as an intelligence officer to security detail, she is called back into action again. Will she be up to the task? Will she ever learn to let go of her daemons and come to terms with her guilt?
In her words:
“Few of us arrive in this world not troubled by injustice and ghastliness. We’re drawn to it, fascinated, intrigued. Someone has to take care of painful repulsiveness, figure out the why, how, and who, and properly dispose of rotting remains before they further offend and spread infection.”
Not every story has to be elevated, but every story needs some point. This DOES NOT mean that you should use your next story to lecture or try to turn your pulpit. That’s what lectures are for.
Some writers explain every little detail about their plot, writing the same sentence in multiple ways, one after the other. Spoon-feeding your reader is overwriting.
Let the reader have an experience that leads them to your way of thinking rather than spoon-feeding them a lesson. That means learning the right balance in the telling. How much to tell and when. You need to trust your readers to surmise certain things for themselves.
Some specificity
“Voice” refers to the combination of tone, word preference, syntax, punctuation, point of view, and tempo that generate sentences and paragraphs. Novels can have different voices. The voice of the author, the narrator, and the individual characters. You may even break standard grammar rules in favor of the narrative value of voice.
Rhythm: How the writing sounds — in your head or when you read it out loud — is a big part of voice. This includes sentence and paragraph length, the white space on the page, and the use of repetition and rhyme.
Word Choice and Sentence Structure: Whether in prose or poetry, strong word preference can unlock emotions, images, and more in the reader, and the associations and connotations that words bring with them play a key role in this.
For instance, you can write: The SUV drives slowly up the long driveway.
Or you can write: The SUV glides like a shark and continues slowly up the long driveway.
What words you choose and how you construct your sentences will be a part of your voice. Is your language youthful or sophisticated, formal or casual, academic or elementary? Are your sentences complex or short and sweet? Do you use stream-of-consciousness fragments? Do you use cuss words and informal language, including a futuristic slang word? These are all personal choices.
Tone: The tone — humorous, dramatic, old-fashioned, ominous, snarky, peppy, silly — is a huge part of writing voice. You might use an omniscient narrator with a lofty storytelling tone. (Or an omniscient narrator with lots of funny, silly, or self-deprecating asides.) Or you might use a first-person narrator with a confessional, sarcastic, or melodramatic tone.
Remember that voice is intimately connected to who you are, projecting yourself into your characters. It takes time, patience, and work to refine this voice into a polished jewel — a story with fire and spirit.
So, be brave and dig in!