Your Authentic Voice

Novelist, news reporter, biographer, stand-up comedian, ventriloquist…so many professions rely on the performer to find their voice. But what does voice mean for a performer? And how do you find it? The answer is frustratingly vague…and so simple that it’s kind of hard to understand.

The vague answer is that your voice is the manner of speaking or writing that you fall into naturally. Huh? Well, if that’s all, then… But that’s not all. As writers, we spend so much time learning our craft, reading the work of other writers we admire, attending workshops and critique groups, and trying to jam all this style and substance into our craft, that when the time comes to actually write, we find ourselves struggling to find ourselves in amongst all the rest.

As a teen, I read James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small, the true memoirs of an intern-veterinarian’s experiences in rural England. Even then I noticed when, around chapter 5 or maybe later, Herriot’s style of writing took a drastic turn. It went from an informal, conversational voice to a sudden and dramatic turn toward the literary…a decidedly dense and flower literary voice to boot. Later, the style relaxed again, similar to what it was in the beginning. How could I tell? It’s more than just word choice and style, it’s cadence and tone and color and rhythm… Any one of these things alone might not be a noticeable change, but several together make it more noticeable.

Have you ever gone back and read something you wrote in the past and not remembered writing it? It reads like nothing you write now? The strangest thing I ever experienced was reading something I wrote years ago and being jealous of the strong and solid tone and style. Jealous of myself? That was weird.

Your natural writing voice is the style, tone, timber, rhythm, etc. that is most authentically you, and given all of the training we put ourselves through to build our writing toolbox, it can be the most elusive thing you’ll ever chase, because it can get buried in our earnest and well-meaning struggle to emulate those we admire.

So how do you find your authentic voice? That’s the part that’s so simple it’s hard. Blending all you’ve learned with your most natural writing voice can be a challenge. And to add insult to injury, the harder you look for it, the more elusive it becomes. It’s like the yips, a psychological block that baseball pitchers, and sometimes batters, get from getting too much in their own heads, and suddenly they can’t hit the broad side of a barn.

The thing is, once you relax and stop digging so much, things usually fall right into place almost of their own accord. The trick is recognizing your voice once you find it. You may have to write hundreds of pages before you finally discover your voice. My thoughts are that once you find it, you’ll recognize it right away, as I did. One indication is that writing suddenly becomes markedly easier than it was up to that point; everything starts to flow and you feel like you’re writing on rails.

Have you found your voice? If so, share with us what that revelation was like for you, and what you did to find it, in the comments below.