Author's Voice
First the good news: if you're looking for information on how to develop your author's voice, you can stop reading right now. Your own true writer's voice is already firmly in place and has been ever since you opened your mouth and spoke your first words.
The bad news? That's easy. You've been trained over the years to do everything-and I mean everything-in your power to suppress it.
Oh, come on. You know exactly what I'm talking about. Does any of this sound familiar to you? "Maybe if I sounded more like Grisham or Clancy or Anne Tyler, I could sell my first book."
You think?
Well, you're wrong. There's plenty to be learned from reading terrific authors (pacing, structure, the pure pleasure of losing yourself in a great story) but not even the best of the very best can give you the one thing you need most of all: the freedom to write with your own voice.
Most of us mistrust our real and genuine voice. It seems too easy, too uncomplicated. Have you ever handed over a ten-page outline to an editor or agent and had her look up from your neatly printed pages and say, "Tell me the story. Pretend we're sitting across from each other at the kitchen table and just tell me your story."
A friend of mine named Deborah Hecht, who is a wonderful writer, first used the Kitchen Table analogy one day at our local diner. We were eating Greek salads and talking writing and Debbie remarked that every important thing she ever learned she learned at her kitchen table. I think she's right. (In fact, I'll take that one more step and say that most of life's truly important decisions are made at the kitchen table too.)
The Kitchen Table voice is your real voice. It's the natural voice of the storyteller. How many of us have sat spellbound as our mothers or grandmothers or aunts told family stories and shared gossip-those dramatic pauses, the punchlines, the conspiratorial whispers! They didn't stop to think about it or agonize over how to present it: they just told the story.
Let me give you another example. I was sixteen years old when I first learned I had a recognizable writer's voice. It was the summer of 1966 and I was madly in love with the boy I would marry two years later and not at all interested in spending two precious weeks at Lake Placid with my parents. I tried to convince them that I could be left home alone, but they weren't buying it so the three of us schlepped north from Queens to Lake Placid where I did my teenage best to ruin their good time.
I wrote to Roy every night while I was away, long letters on pink Montag stationery with little roses along the top border. I can't even tell you what I wrote about but we can safely assume the letters were filled with the requisite teenage angst and passionate diatribes about my parents and their appalling lack of faith in me.
Cut to our first day home. Our heroine is reunited with her hero and what are his first words to her? "I loved your letters. They sound just like you."
Well.
I'm here to tell you that I had never been more insulted in my life. What did he mean they sounded like me? They weren't supposed to sound like me, they were supposed to sound like the sexy, sophisticated twenty-one year old fashion model/Pulitzer Prize winning novelist I was in my imagination.
It took me many years-and many false voices-before I finally saw the light.
You are your own greatest writing resource.
Your own life is your best reference book.
Your view of the world and the people in it can provide the fuel to fire up your writing engine every single day for the rest of your life but first you have to figure out how to get out of your own way long enough to be able to access those riches.
A few tips:
- Write letters. Write emails. Bet you never thought emailing your friends was a creative opportunity but it is. Carve away the LOLs and I'll bet you're using your authentic voice without even trying. Ever have email writer's block? I didn't think so. We tell each other a thousand stories through our emails and never once struggle for the right word. The right words are always there, in the right order, waiting for us.
- Keep a journal. A writer's journal or a personal journal, it doesn't matter which. What does matter is sitting down every day, preferably around the same time (I've never been able to manage that) and tell yourself about your day. What you did. How you did it. How you felt about it. Don't pretty it up. Tell it conversationally and without that damned internal censor who thrives on telling you that you stink.
- Julia Cameron recommends Morning Pages in THE ARTIST'S WAY. Three pages handwritten first thing in the morning. A stream-of-consciousness that can serve to kick start the creative process.
- Natalie Goldberg fills notebook after notebook with what she calls writing practices that actually serve a much greater creative purpose. Goldberg also does much of this writing practice in cafes and restaurants, places where people gather, where life happens. Sometimes we isolate ourselves too well. We're so intent upon using our writing time wisely that we cut ourselves off from the stimuli and experiences that feed a writer's imagination.
I'm reminded of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz who battled witches and testy trees and flying monkeys in her quest to find her way home to Kansas. Finally, after the Tin Woodsman and the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion and even the Wizard himself had been granted their heart's desire, Dorothy turned to Glynda the Good Witch and said, "I guess you can't help me find my way home," and Glynda laughed and pointed toward the ruby slippers. "You've always had the power to find your way home," Glynda said. "If that's true, why didn't you tell me sooner?" Dorothy demanded. Glynda had the answer ready and waiting. "You wouldn't have believed me if I had," she said. "You had to find out for yourself."
You don't need Dorothy's ruby slippers to find your natural voice. It's the one you use every day. The one that's been part of you since the day you were born. Trust me. Trust yourself.
Trust your voice.
