Finding Your Writing Voice
Voice gives your work a distinctive signature
When I left my career as a newspaper reporter to become a full-time freelance magazine writer, I struggled to find the voice of my work.
The kinds of magazine stories I wrote, “sounded” different than the newspaper articles I’d grown up on.
The Sound of Your Writing
The voice of a piece is the “sound” or the vibe of it. The rhythm, soul, style, and tone. It’s personality and authenticity.
It can be hard to articulate what the voice of a piece is, but readers know when there isn’t one because the work feels expected, and uninteresting—something that just about anyone could write, and that might be the worst thing a writer can hear.
When the voice doesn’t fit the material, perhaps it’s too casual or sarcastic for a serious publication or topic, or the language is too formal for lighter content, then it bumps along. Sticks out. It’s like wearing jeans and a hoodie to a black-tie affair. Everyone notices—and not for the right reasons.
But with attention and practice, you can create a strong voice in your work.
Here are some ways to do it. **
Know your audience. Every group is different. Every piece and publication speaks to a unique audience. Whether you are writing for mechanics or mortgage lenders you’ll need to know, what they care about, how they talk, the terminology they use, and even the things they complain about in the breakroom. You’ll need to have a sense of who they are.
Use pacing to create voice. Voice and tone are supported by the pace and can be created by words, phrasing, sentence length, and punctuation. Be deliberate in your choices, and mix them up from time to time. Nobody wants to listen to a long speech read with little inflection and nobody wants to read a piece with only long meandering sentences. Mix it up.
Add a bit of personality — yours. Put in some of your personal flair, a little of your own writerly sense of style. Be careful. It shouldn’t override the magazine’s structure or style guide, but there’s room to do you.
I like alliteration, and the occasional sentence fragment placed for effect. I listen for the rhythm of words and phrases and use clusters of ideas to convey it — in every piece. My personal style can be molded to fit the publications I write for while still keeping my own tone and style within their guidelines.
Read aloud. There are a whole lot of reasons to read your piece aloud before submission — a big one is to catch any errors. But, the bigger one still, is to hear how the words set up. How they play with each other on the page. If sentences are too long, words too technical, pacing slow, you’ll hear it. Writing is a technical craft for sure, but the way you align the words on the page, will either make music or noise. Don’t be a noise maker.
Practice. Voice develops. When writing to publish, we’ve got to learn to navigate the different worlds too and narrative voice will shift with the topic you are writing about and the market you are writing for. But you will also possess an authorial voice—your way of writing about the world—and that will give each of your pieces a distinct signature.
Do the writing and read plenty. Identify the voice in other pieces, and notices what works. Developing a strong writing voice isn’t easy. It requires practice, persistence, and deliberation — it doesn’t work to write like you talk. You must be more precise than that, more creative, rhythmic.
But, when you get it just right, you’ll convey something meaningful and memorable, and connect with readers in a deeper way.
Thanks for reading and remember, Simply Write.
—p
