What Is Voice Anyway?
“But what is this mysterious thing, voice?
One of my favorite oxymorons is the often-repeated phrase “a writer’s voice.” Just how much sound can a bunch of black marks on a piece of paper make, anyway? I don’t know about you, but the only sounds I make as I’m writing are the tap of the keys and various inarticulate groans. Obviously these aren’t the voices that readers, academics, and critics are always talking about.
Simply put, voice is what readers “hear” in their heads when they’re reading. Voice is the “sound” of the story.”
A Quote from Hardy Griffin’s essay “Voice: The Sound of a Story,” from
Gotham Writer’s Workshop: Writing Fiction
Do you ever get confused by what it means to find your writing voice? What is Voice anyway? If you are like many writers, the concept of voice may seem like an enigma. It’s something that on one level makes sense, yet it doesn’t. Perhaps just when you think you know, you hear something else at a conference or in a writing magazine that makes you second guess yourself.
Maybe you even think you’ve found your voice, but then you write a new story and someone says, “Hey! It sounds like you finally found your voice!” Wait a minute, you think, I thought I already found it! Voice is defined in a variety of different ways, but in short, Voice is the sound of the story. Voice is what your readers hear in their heads. Voice is the voice of the narrator, not the character. The writing voice of a practiced writer is unique to that writer. The voice, as Cowboy Poet Jane Morton says, is who you are.
Jane is right. One thing that is for certain is the writing voice is not something the author chooses. It is something the author finds with experience. I would say the voice is there all the time and the author stumbles upon it only with experience and time. In a seminar I teach about voice, I sometimes disappoint my students by telling them if they came to the seminar to find their voices, they will leave empty handed. Finding your writing voice really does take time. That time might come in the form of years, even decades, and it might come sooner.
Finding your voice can also be explained sort of like growing up. A sixteen-year-old girl thinks she knows herself now, however in fifteen years she might never have changed her brand of lipstick, but her experiences in life will have hopefully changed and reshaped her as a person. Writing is the same way.
A good writer is always learning. We learn from life experience and writing experience. Specifically we need to write what we are passionate about and we need to write every day.
If you are on a quest to find your voice, relax and stop worrying about it. There are more than a few published authors out there who are still coming into their voices, so there is no need for you to fear the concept of voice.
What you should focus on instead is the act of writing itself. Just write. The more you write and the more you live, the closer you will be to finding your writer’s voice.
