6 Steps To Finding Your Writing Voice This Week

Find Your Writing Voice

By request, for the lovely Laura, who will be reading this in impossibly beautiful Dubrovnik, Croatia.

In a world where content marketing is often (wrongly) considered the only way to do anything anymore, and when we're constantly being told that if we don't blog we'll die, and everybody and their dog wants to get into indie publishing, one of the issues on a lot of people's minds is writing voice.

Are you struggling to find yours?

I have always maintained that if you can competently speak – and by “speak” here, I mean “open your mouth and have words come out”, not “orate effectively with impeccable articulation, diction, and poise” – you can write.

You can write, and your writing voice will be readable.

However, that doesn't necessarily mean that your writing voice is currently readable. For many new content creators, and sometimes not-so-new content creators, their writing voice feels stiff, or stilted, or stale, or perhaps other words that start with “st”. Many content creators are concerned that they sound overly academic, or inaccessible, or frankly, boring.

But these are not overly academic, inaccessible, boring people. Very seldom do they wear jackets with elbow patches, or even corduroy pants. These are nice, interesting, sometimes even fascinating people hitting a block when it comes to writing voice.

So for those people, we present:

6 Steps To Finding Your Writing Voice

1. Put yourself into a situation in which you can formally relax and have a comfortable, engaged conversation.

“Formally relax” sounds kind of weird, doesn't it? It sounds like an oxymoron. But in fact, formal relaxing is exactly what you need to do to make this process work.

We want you in a situation or environment that you already associate with relaxation, but not sleepiness. For many people, this involves wine. For others, in requires comfy slippers and tea. Perhaps you associate your deck with long chats, or your couch, or your mom's kitchen.

We are creating a space in which you can most easily get comfortable and talk.

(Seriously, if you drink? This is the time. Don't get plastered, but a glass of a pleasant gamay noir would loosen things up nicely here.)

2. Find an intimate who you really like to talk to.

This talking has to be talking – the kind you do with your mouth. No internet chat. In person is fine, phone is fine, Skype is fine. Your mouth, their ears.

You also have to be very comfortable with this person. (Husbands work well, if you have one laying around and you happen to enjoy his company. Mothers, ditto. Otherwise, go with a friend.)

To meet specifications, this person should be capable of not interrupting everything you ever say.

3. Talk to them on a topic about which you feel excited, interested, or passionate.

For our purposes today, “topic” is different from “subject”.

A subject might be “hockey” or “the Toronto Maple Leafs”. A topic might be “Pat Flynn was the greatest coach to ever live, almost as great at coaching as George W. Bush was at running America” or “how Tie Domi met his wife” or “why Darcy Tucker should run for office.”

(Yes, I'm dating myself. Shut up.)

For most people, this topic should not be work-related. That's because for most people, their work writing is the writing they're most self-conscious about, and it's going to make the process harder than it needs to be.

We want a topic that you get a charge out of, and one on which you can speak intelligently. If it's difficult for you to come up with a topic on your own – and it might be – show this article to the person you're going to be speaking with and have them come up with a few topics for you. If they know you well, it should be very easy for them.

You should be able to talk on this subject for a minimum of ten minutes, easily.

(If I was doing this with my handsome partner, for example, I would pick “tell me the story of how Harrison Ford got to be Han Solo”, “how to crack an egg like Tony Danza” and “why it's patently obvious that Mary Ann was hotter than Ginger”.)

If you think it would be helpful for the two of you, prep your person on the topic and the exercise, and they can actually set up a more formal interview-style session. They can even ask specific questions they've planned in advance, if that's what floats your boats.

4. Tape your conversation.

Use the recorder on Skype or the voice recorder on your phone or a microphone, and tape yourself talking.

You might have to try this out by yourself a few times to get used to being recorded. Most people feel like they sound ridiculous, which makes them sound ridiculous. The first time Dave recorded me I couldn't take my eyes off the microphone and it was among the more awkward experiences of my life.

(Aside: The actual awkwardest moment of my life was when I was a freshman in high school and my pants fell down in a packed Swiss Chalet on homecoming weekend. Drawstring pants, my old nemesis.)

Plan for the conversation you tape to sound weird and totally roundabout. We are aiming for you to sound just like you do in regular conversation, complete with unfinished sentences, “you know what I mean?” every second breath, and so on. You are NOT trying to sound good, or smart, or logical. You are aiming to sound YOU.

If you were to play this tape to someone who knows you, they should be able to believe that you didn't know you were being recorded. We want NORMAL.

(Your talking partner may have to tell you when you sound forced. Expect it to happen a lot. Just keep going.)

Talk for between ten minutes and an hour.

5. Get the recording transcribed.

We use Rev because they're fast and cheap and don't tend to screw up very much. If you go with them, get the standard, non-verbatim version so that you don't pay extra to have your every “um” and “uh” written down for time and all eternity.

6. Edit the transcription to take out everything that doesn't make sense.

Take out the “you know what I mean?” and places where you didn't finish a sentence, or you went back and changed something, or you repeated yourself.

Edit to the point where it is a reasonably logical progression from beginning to end. Try to make it look kind of like an article, or a diary entry. Nobody will ever read this, so don't bust your butt making it look like something it doesn't have to look like.

If reading the transcription makes you want to die – and it makes me want to die, so I understand – have someone else do this for you. Or drink a lot of wine first. Or drink a lot of wine while someone else does it for you.

This is your most natural writing voice.

The word choices you make in natural conversation are your natural voice. The sentence structure you choose in natural conversation is your natural voice. The examples you give, the jokes you make, the analogies, the metaphors – these are what make up your natural voice.

I use words like “predilection” and “admirable” and “cohesive” in my speaking, and as such, they make sense in my writing. They don't sound forced. My 8-year-old son, Jack, never met a sentence that couldn't benefit from the addition of the word “necessarily” and as such, when he writes, he'll write like that.

You don't decide on a writing voice. You don't pick and choose, or emulate, or aspire. Once you figure this out, your writing voice will become the easiest thing in the world. (Writing won't be. Writing is easy or hard based on any number of factors, up to and including Mars being in Capricorn. But voice will be a piece of cake.)

Your writing voice is like your DNA, or your gait, or your fingerprints. They're yours, and if they're obscured for some reason, that doesn't mean they're gone. You just have to uncover them, and they'll be right there.

What to do after the writing voice exercise

If you are unaccustomed to writing, or to writing naturally, you will still need practice. A singer can find her voice, or a public speaker, but still need a lot of turns at the microphone before they feel confident and secure. So what do you do between now and then? How can you hasten the process?

Your best bet is to get a book of writing prompts and spend a little time each day, or each free day if your schedule is too packed to let you relax, doing some of the writing exercises. Non-fiction or memoir style prompts are better if you're trying to get into content marketing, whereas fiction or story prompts are a better choice for novelists-to-be.

Pick whichever prompt feels easy for you that day. Don't let anybody tell you that you have to do things in a certain order. Go with what's easy, not what's hard.

Don't expect to feel comfortable quickly, but expect it to be quicker than you think. It's easy to think that because you haven't felt confident or assured for a long time, it will take an equally long time to get to feeling good.

Don't worry about that too much.

Silencing your writing voice took a long time, and a lot of concerted effort on the part of the culture, the media, and the school system. A lot of people worked very hard to shut you up, but once you've found your voice?

You get to keep it.

For more on writing, read about the time I had writers' block for four years. For more on reluctant content marketing, read about what to do if you don't want to blog.