What is a writer’s voice? Dictionary.com defines voice this way: “The distinctive style or manner of expression of an author or of a character in a book.” It’s a writer’s distinctive style. It’s his or her identifier. It’s his or her “brand.” Every best selling author has a voice so unique that a reader, after having read a few of that author’s books can identify him or her as the author of a book without looking at his or her name on the cover.
Steven King has a unique style/voice. Tom Clancy has one. Agartha Chrisite had hers. Every successful writer has their own unique way of handling description, their own unique way of handling dialog, and a reader can identify the author by their unique style. Every writer needs to develop an identifiable voice. It doesn’t matter whether you write fiction or nonfiction, you need yours. It takes time and work to develop your brand, you’re identifying style, but you need to do it if you want to be a successful, published author.
A writer’s voice or style develops naturally over time as one writes but there are a few things that a writer can do to speed up the process. To begin with, every writer needs to write from his or her heart. Write with feeling, allowing your characters to express your feelings and emotions. You will still have edit and rewrite but let your true feelings and emotions emanate from the pages of the final draft of every piece you write. If you write from the heart you voice will evolve naturally.
Just as you need to write from the heart, you need to write like you were writing to or talking to a close friend. Clarity evolves naturally when you write the way you talk. By writing as you talk your character’s dialog will sing forth with honesty and sincerity. If you are writing a murder mystery, let your feeling about murder and the people that commit them sing from the mouth of you hero or heroine.
Writing is a lot like public speaking in that you have to speak to or write to your audience. When I first joined Toastmasters International and was working towards my first certification level, the Competent Toastmaster level, I was told to pick out a few friendly faces in the audience and speak directly to them while still letting my eyes take in the entire audience. Ok, as a writer, we can’t see our readers but we can visualize what they look like in our mind’s eye. This becomes easier if we study the audiences that we are writing for. If you are writing for the do it yourself market but aren’t a do it yourselfer yourself, talk to a few do it yourselfer to find out what they look for in an article. Every writer is a salesperson too and like any salesperson, we have to do our market research if we are to market our product, our writing, successfully.
Every writer is a reader. I should have said that every successful writer is a reader. Successful writers read everything that they can get their hands on; not just material that applies to what they currently write about. No knowledge is wasted knowledge because you will be able to apply it to your writing eventually. I once read a short story written by a friend of my wife and I told her to read a book on astronomy. She looked at me like I was crazy for a long time before blurting out, “why the hell would I want to read about astronomy, I write fiction, not science textbooks?” my reply was, “If you knew a little bit about astronomy you wouldn’t have had your young lovers gazing up at Orion in the wrong part of the sky for the season.” If you write murder mysteries, knowing a little bit about gunsmithing and ballistics will keep you from putting a silencer on a double-action revolver because you’ll know that revolvers can’t be effectively silenced the way semiautomatic pistols can be. Knowledge is never wasted or useless to a writer.
Experiment with different genres. Experiment to broaden your horizons and to open new markets for your talent. I started out writing adult fiction 35 plus years ago because it was an easy genre for new writers to publish in but I knew that it wasn’t the genre that I wanted to stay with. I wanted to write about electronics, home remodeling, auto mechanics, photography, aeronautics, science, pets, you name it I wanted to write about it, but I had to start some where. While I was making a name for myself writing adult fiction I was writing and submitting to other markets at the same time and over time started selling to them as well. Today writing adult fiction is nothing more than a happy memory.
