How to find your writer’s voice through your lived experiences | StoryCraft Advent Calendar Day 11
Whenever I attend a writer’s conference or a workshop, the question I’m asked the most is “how do I find my voice?”
Finding your voice as a writer can be one of the most significant hurdles to overcome. Writing a good book is one thing, but crafting a novel that elevates your world and characters above everything else in the figurative slush pile? Literally an artform.
I like to think of a writer’s voice as an innate quality like a singer’s tone or the style of a painter. It’s the quality of the work that allows you to know whose point-of-view you’re exploring. You know a Taylor Swift song when you hear it. Nearly anyone can identify a Picasso painting.
Finding your voice is a journey, and it comes with exploring who you are as a person and what you have to say to the world. How you write is just as important as what you write, and they’re often intertwined. Your voice is going to be the quality that lifts you above other writers, that allows readers to identity you as YOU. It’s the thing that’s going to get you an agent or a publisher or readers.
We usually start writing because we’re inspired by someone else, and those first words or paragraphs or even novels are often variations. We pull this inspiration from other artists and cobble our own worlds and characters, but at some point, the creation needs to feel unique, especially if you want to stand out in the marketplace.
This comes down to you, your life, and your experiences. How do you see the world, why do you see it that way, and what do you have to say about it? These are really big questions, so it’s important to sit with them for a while if you haven’t before.
Let’s look at Jane Austen as an example. Her work is foundational for a multitude of reasons, but one of the biggest is that she infused her life and her worldview into her work. We can see how the society she lived in influenced the art she created. Many of her novels are about the everyday lives of young women trying to navigate the world, and the main concern for most of them was finding a husband so they could survive, not only just as women, but sometimes to support their entire families.
When we read an Austen novel, we can feel the importance of this central theme. As a woman, I must marry well so I can survive, but can I also be happy? What did it mean to find a marriage in the Regency era, and was it okay to marry not just for status, but for love?
A more modern example of this is author Ali Hazelwood. Her romance novels are witty and biting, and filled with references that add an edge of humor to her work. They also follow intelligent women in scientific or academic fields who are balancing their career goals with complex human relationships.
Every book you read isn’t just a story, it’s a conversation between you and the author. What can you learn about the author’s viewpoint from the way they construct their worlds and characters? What are your readers learning from you?
Finding your voice isn’t just about what you want to write, but what you can write the best. I’ve struggled with this a lot over my writing journey because I have so many different interests and I don’t always know where to place my focus (Hello, ADHD). For a long time, I felt that I HAD to write literary science fiction, that it was what made me ME, and for a long time, I never finished anything.
It wasn’t until I had a flash of an idea that took hold of me and didn’t let me go that I discovered the voice inside that needed to be let out. I wrote a “secret” book that I didn’t tell anyone about in detail until it was finished because it didn’t feel like what I should have been writing. It wasn’t SFF or horror. It was romantic. It took place in the real world.
But when I wrote that book, I found a flow I’d never felt before when writing. Every moment I spent in those pages felt right, because I was exploring my newfound voice. It’s one of those things where “you’ll know when you find it,” and that can be a frustrating thing to hear, because it’s not easy. There is no foolproof way to go about the task other than to experiment and try new things.
There will always be error in trial and error.
You can ask yourself questions, though, to help guide yourself along the way. What kinds of ideas set you on fire inside? What are the intrinsic qualities of your life that belong only to you? What is the point-of-view you can offer that is unique?
If we look back at Jane Austen and Ali Hazelwood, we can see two very distinct world views. Austen had an often biting social commentary built into her work that was inspired by her own upbringing. She wrote stories about the institution of marriage and how love factored into it. Ali Hazelwood writes characters who are in the academic and scientific fields because that is her background. It’s a world she can write about with ease because she knows it, but it also makes her work interesting because readers can get a glimpse of something different they might not otherwise experience.
“Write what you know” is a great axiom, and it doesn’t mean to definitively write about your own life, but instead to discover what it is about you that makes you interesting and unique.
If writing a book is like making a pot of soup, then you are the herbs and spices that add flavor.
As you’re working through your books, it’s a good idea to take a look at how you can sprinkle more of yourself to them. What are the unique life experiences you’ve had that no one else has? What makes you interesting? What are your opinions on the world, and how do you want to convey that through your work?
As you begin to answer these questions and infuse them into your writing, you’ll find that your voice just might begin to speak louder from within you. The more passion and excitement you can feel about the books you’re writing, the more that will translate through to the reader. It’s very apparent when a novel means everything to the author, and that’s the kind of work readers want to connect with.
Above all, life is short, so don’t waste time trying to fit yourself into a box that isn’t you-shaped. Create your own box. Craft your own world. Find the readers who will love your novels for what you can bring to them, and find yourself through your own writing.
Every novel contains YOU, so make sure you’re exploring your own truths. It might not be the easiest element of StoryCraft, but it just might be the most important.
-L.
