A lot of the books I've read on writing talk about voice but the honest ones admit they can't really define it, they just know it when they see it. So if the first assignment in a writing course was "describe your voice," I'd question whether the people who put the course together were competent. It'd make more sense for a course to help you find your voice, rather than making you say what it is at the start.
It can take a while to find your voice. It's something that emerges with time and practice. I think your teacher is probably just looking for how you feel your work and a sense of where you are in your writing journey. It's not really a question with a wrong answer.
Ditto BayView and jannert. The one thing most guaranteed to kill your natural writing voice is focusing upon it too much. I don't think any new writer has ever discovered their voice by trying to establish it. Your voice comes through when you stop having to focus on the mechanics of writing and begin writing as you feel. That requires a degree of comfort and relaxing into the writing role. Analyzing that voice is at least as unnatural as spontaneously deciding to describe yourself while staring into a mirror. It just don't flow, Joe!
It's certainly not a great way to start a beginner writer, is it? I suppose the OP could be cheeky and describe it as "silent"—at least for now.
Yeah, I would wonder if these course-writing people know what they're doing too. As for your literary voice. Same as your voice. If you're false to yourself your stories will sound false. For example: My literary voice is one that says, "I think I'm full of shit, I think you're full of shit too. Now let's see if I can make you smile?" Thanks in large part to help I've received on this board, I'm starting to get comfortable with that.
The voice is the emotional wave that carries the story. That wave is shaped by the author's writing craft. He's like a sieve for the characters/story. Only certain elements get through. He does this almost without thinking because it's just who he is. When you read the author's story, you get a sense for who he is too. Cormac McCarthy is a dark poet, Terry Pratchett's a witty scoundrel, and Rousseau is a naked hippie climbing a tree. The character's have a voice too, but really they're just carefully selected facets of author. The quickest way to kill your voice is through word clutter. Your voice appears when the sentence is invisible. The reader hears the voice/characters/plot rather than the mechanics of the words. It's not so much that you're writing with a minimum numbers of words, but more that every word pulls a specific weight. Crush everything useless in the sentence and what's left will carry your voice. The trick to finding your voice is that you must first be competent with the sentence. And that's easier said than done.
This sounds more like a description of a class of voices, maybe the class of voices that you like. Someone's voice might well BE cluttered, or, in the words of people who like those voices, highly ornamented or ornate or baroque.
It might be similar to my writing "voice" but..... when i see someone else saying it sure sounds depressing. i mean why would even bother reading your work if you have such an attitude.
btw i was advised already on this forum to " find my own writing voice." Such advice can make us too self conscious imo. Now Id say ......let my own writing voice find itself.
This definitely. I once tried to write a second draft of a novel back in the early 2000's to sound like Nabokov. Groan. Huge mistake! It is so cringe-inducing, and such rubbish the only reason I don't send the file to recycling is punishment to remind myself how bad I can write when I try to sound like something I'm not. I've found since then that writing short stories helped me to find my voice because they were many little works - polished and finished that helped show me what always lay hidden in my novels. I like eclectic things but no matter how out there I get there's a strange upbeat vibe running through my work. It's sometimes much harder to spot your style in novels if there isn't that many of them or there's a huge difference in your ability. You might overlook your voice for well, I'm just getting better at my craft. Look over your collection of writing and examine your tone, descriptions, plots, themes for clues and find the patterns.
I haven't read all writings in this thread so I don't know has anyone said this, but... All of your writing is usually not written in your writing voice. So you must first seek for that text that is. 1. Self reflect both your thinking and speaking. Pay attention to structural elements, style and "genres" in your thinking. 2. Read your own writing aloud. 3. Listen to your emotions. Does that writing feel like your own? Do you recognise the emotional style and the social aspects in it as your own. 4. If you do, you have found your writing sound. Listen to it. It's not your writing voice, but it is the sound of that voice. 5. Tell yourself what sounds familiar and your own. Tell it with the same voice that sounds familiar. 6. If your description sounds your own voice, you have succeeded. If not, go to number one and start again. Describing your own voice starts from recognising it. Recognising it starts from self reflection. That you can do only if you are truthful to yourself. (This is absolutely my way of thinking and writing. So I can be sure I can find my writing voice in this writing. Style and genre less, structural elements a lot. Style... Yes in this genre. Genre... Not what I love, but something I do a lot.) 7. Rewrite your description until all of it sounds like your thinking.
I'm fully, entirely, possitotalutely confident in my grasp on the mechanics of plotting, but when it comes to transcribing that plot into words that people would want to read major issues start to crop up. My ability to describe what's happening extends no further than my ability to literally just describe what is happening -- even when I include sensory language, it's just details; very wooden. It'd almost be better off as a script, the conveyance of information is so dry and literal. When it comes to personifying nonhuman entities like the wind, or using metaphors and similes, or just colorfully describing events and senses in general, it always comes off as stilted, awkward or silly. This has started to extend into my characterization; while I'm more than capable of making a conversation flow like a conversation, it's a conversation between two people who speak in the same, wooden language like they oughta be the very same person. And, worst, in first-person narration I try to make the descriptions match the mindset of the narrator, but even that I have trouble extending beyond varying how extreme their descriptions are. Part of this issue, I know, is I have trouble empathizing myself with the characters. I'm no empath -- I have such a hard time placing myself in the place of other people, fictional or real -- and it makes it hard gauging accurately how a character would really feel about a turn of events, how they would react, really just how anyone who wasn't myself would behave. I'm not an interesting person. A bunch of people who act and sound like me would make for a pretty shitty bunch of people to read about. Are there any ways to address this sentimental, artistic or empathic block in my brain so that I can extend my writing into more colorful and expressive realms? Am I doomed to always write like a boring person?
Part of your solution might include varying your vocabulary between characters. I don't mean 'this character speaks in ebonics and this character is from a shakespeare play'; even simpler things like the words they use to describe their favorite food can give you depth. Think of any two people in your life: coworkers, bosses, family members, online friends, business acquaintances. They probably don't speak exactly the same. My word choice is very, very different from that of most people in my life. I'll use words like 'myriad', 'complexities', 'modicum', or 'irrational', but I'm damn near the only person I know who will. If you were writing something using me as a character, you'd use those different words to describe the same situation. As an exercise, pick up a movie like Lord of the Rings (yes, I know it's a book too, don't be pedantic, this is an exercise) or Pirates of the Caribbean, or something with a diverse cast. Then pick a situation, in-universe or real life; describe that event from the perspectives (and using the vocabulary) of two or three different characters. You'll find that Samwise and Legolas don't describe things the same way; Captain Jack and Elizabeth Swann have very different vocabularies and mindsets. Once you understand vocabulary and how it differs between characters, then you can revisit your own writing and see if what you've learned can help. If you already know all that, then good for you. I'm afraid that's the only solution I can suggest, though. Good luck.
Well, to start with, @isaac223 , you have couched your dilemma in very un-boring terms, and your own emotion about the issue certainly comes through. Your frustration and fear that you might not be able to create characters and settings and situations your readers will care about, actually makes us care about YOU. So you've already managed to convey your own emotional background very well. You not only said what is bothering you, but why you think it's happening in the first place. I suspect you're a more interesting writer than you give yourself credit for. Also keep in mind, most authors are not as exciting as their characters. JKRowling was an ordinary single mom, living hand to mouth when she wrote the Harry Potter books. JRR Tolkien was a university professor, who, by many accounts, was actually a boring lecturer. Owen Wister (who wrote The Virginian) was an Eastern lawyer from a wealthy family who loved to imagine the life of a rugged Western hero. Stephen King is a man whose personal life has had ups and downs, but he doesn't experience (for the most part) the situations his characters experience. He just imagines them. Even if you lead a humdrum life, your imagination can carry you anywhere. I was struck by what you said, that you find it difficult to place yourself in the 'shoes' of characters. You know what? I'm the same ...when it comes to stage acting or role-playing. Even when I was a child, I just couldn't pretend to be somebody I wasn't. That is, I couldn't outwardly pretend to be another character while I was in front of people. My attempts to act or role-play were exceedingly embarrassing for me ...mainly because somebody else was watching. It was the audience factor that held me back. Writing? Well, that's different. At least for me. Because I told myself, right at the start, that NOBODY else was going to be reading what I wrote unless I chose to show it around. I might write for years and never let anybody else look at it. So why not just let myself go and wallow in my imaginary world? It's not so much that I got into the heads of all my characters and empathised with them, but I actually pretended to BE them, when I was in the envisioning stage of writing. I remember watching the story play out as if it was a movie. I can still do that, and it's very vivid. I write in third person limited, but I could experience the settings, the weather, share the memories my POV character had, see all the other characters the way she saw them. In her POV, I had feelings for each one of these other people. As 'her,' I interacted with these other people, felt the weather, enjoyed my home, enjoyed visiting other people's homes, worried about stuff she was worried about, got angry when she did, felt longings and intense love for another character. In short, I, had a great time 'being there.' This was BEFORE I started writing, by the way. I often spent several days envisioning the scene I wanted to write. When I actually sat down to do it, it was 'right in front of me,' so to speak. A lot of writing happens away from the keyboard, actually. When I switched POV, I did exactly the same thing with the other main character. Of course I then saw my original POV character as this other person would see them, and had feelings about them that weren't always what the other character assumed. (Excellent way to build conflict into a story, by the way. Two different perspectives that clash.) Ditto my other two minor POV characters. One particular beauty of this approach was that I could actually envision all the other characters speaking. I knew exactly what they would say and how they would say it. They were individuals. They spoke slowly, or quickly, or loudly or softly. They hesitated. They were forthright. They were sometimes provocative, sometimes soothing. They used careful language, or crude language. Sometimes they were thoughtful, sometimes they spoke without thinking first. They could be teasing, or serious, when they said their lines. And the people they were speaking to reacted to all of these clues, not just to the words that were said. I was able to create this because I was watching it happen, not just writing a plot-driven script. Envisioning helps to bridge the gap between what you, the author, needs the characters to say, in order to move your well-conceived plot along as briskly as possible—and that magical moment when the characters break from the plan and say what they actually WOULD say, if they were real people in that situation. Other writers often maintain that a character 'took over' their story and started to change it. That's not scary at all, actually. It's wonderful when that happens. In fact, when that happens you KNOW you've nailed your characters. Yes, it may end up leading your plot to places you hadn't planned, but that's again, wonderful. Go with it. NOBODY is going to see this but you, so if you screw up, nobody will be the wiser. However, I pretty much guarantee you won't screw up if you let your characters take over. That's when your subconscious takes over, and you will start writing more realistically and more emotionally. It will happen if you loosen control a bit. And take your time with each and every scene. Don't try to push things along too quickly. There should be no such thing as a boring bit of the story. If your characters are truly real, these quieter interludes won't be boring at all. The key to all this, I found, was fearlessness on my part. I didn't give a damn what my eventual readers might think of me. I was in quite a lather to bring this story to life so I could read it again some time, and re-live the whole experience. And I did not subdue my feelings because I thought they might be silly, or that other people might think they were silly. I went straight for silly. Even melodrama. All that can be edited back, later on, once your story is done. Use beta readers to help you pick out the parts where you might need to rein in the schlock a bit. But it's very very hard to edit emotional content INTO a flat bit of writing. The emotional reality actually appears during the envisioning part of the process. So step back from your mechanical plot creation, envision a few scenes from your 'movie' and let whatever happens happen. The fun comes later on, when your 'real' plot emerges that is actually truer to your characters than the one you originally planned. Take your time. Build your story scene by scene, moment by moment. BE THERE in those moments. And good luck.
Think of everything that you put on the page as subjective, not objective. It's all viewed through the eyes of the viewpoint character, and the things that they notice are important to them, and they feel emotions about those things. There should almost always be some kind of conflict driving things, which ramps up these perceptions. Different characters who are on the stage at the same time will perceive the world around them differently.
You have friends, right? You have family? I'm assuming so, and I'm assuming they're all very different people with different ways of speaking. Even if it's skipping certain words like one would say "something" and another would say "somethin' ". I usually base the way my characters speak off of real people I interact with. None of them speak the same, so that really helps with the character's voice issue. As for the descriptions and all that, they do come off as silly or sometimes even useless for me as well. I just go with it, because chances are, at least in my experience, you'll eventually end up with a pretty decent sentence. Then, once you read that back and like it, you'll be much more confident in your descriptions and from there forward it won't be as odd. And also it would help to describe things as someone who's just seeing it for the first time. That way it won't come off as wooden, hopefully.
There's a lot to voice. (Imagery, diction, word economy, grammatical structures, complexity, humor, aggression, etc.) I've heard it said that voice sounds like you, only better. I'm not sure what exactly you're after, but your true voice has tendencies that are very difficult to hide. It's your authorial thumbprint. Voice is based on how you speak and what you read. So in many ways, it's already been decided. You were born with some aspects of it (or at least learned it without a conscious choice) and you chose others on your own based on which books you picked up. If I were you, I would make a list of your favorite authors. There's probably someone who reminds you of yourself but pulls off their writing with perfect skill. You might even have a couple candidates. I have several, and they're difficult for me to read. Their skill points to all my flaws. You might feel something similar with that one perfect author of your own. Read everything they've done, especially their early books. You can compare those to their ideal works. It's good to see the progression. In a journal/notebook, rewrite effective paragraphs of theirs. Rack up hundreds of them and memorize the best ones. Get to the point where you can write blocks of text by these authors. You'll find that you start to to bend those paragraphs into new forms. Those new paragraphs won't match the original author perfectly (what would be the point in that?), but they'll carry elements over. If you're learning more than one author, they'll start to combine into some unique forms. Which is why you need to chose your ideal author(s) carefully. It's something of a silly exercise and may seem like a waste of time, but I cannot stress enough how much it will improve your voice. It also helps a lot with flow and sentence cohesion. It has to be paragraphs though. Voice lives in the paragraph. You need more than just a line or two to really hear it. You're not going to just absorb a voice by casually reading. It takes a very particular kind of effort. Forcing yourself to write with pen on paper lets you move slowly enough to appreciate details, so don't try to find a shortcut with a word processor.
