Finding your voice: re-released

This post was originally published on Red Pens and Playwriting in June of 2024. I'm now republishing it for new subscribers who missed it the first time around, with an extra bit of spit and polish while I'm at it—because the editing brain never switches off! Enjoy this wee flashback, and make sure to tune in next week for something new.

I was recently reading a discussion about authorial voice—specifically, the feeling of not having an authentic one. The general consensus in this conversation seemed to be that not only is having a distinctive and honest voice an important aspect of writing, but that a writer discovering their own particular voice is a long process, and a difficult one.

This was news to me.

Of course, I’ve always had a strongly individualistic personality, so expressing a unique sense of self comes pretty naturally to me. (Perhaps it's the ADHD?) I also give a lot of credit to Douglas Adams, who was rather formative for me in matters of style; very few writers have as easily identifiable a narration as his. So I suppose I had a bit of a leg up as a young writer with regard to finding my voice, though I must confess it was never something I put much intentional thought into—it just happened.

It seems odd, really, to think of the struggle for an authorial voice as being this universal rite of passage, a way of knowing you’ve become a Writer. Surely it can’t be so much different to developing skill in other aspects of writing such as description, succinctness, or plotting: certain features will come more easily to individual writers than others, and the ones that don’t can be improved upon with practice. After all, what is a voice but the idiosyncracies of syntactic choices and preferences of vocabulary?

A lot is made out of wanting to be unique, and trying not to mimic other writers; I wonder if perhaps this level of emphasis is overthinking things. It’s good to learn from writers that you admire and pick up some of their tricks, and I don’t think that means you’re copying their voice. In my experience, mimicking other writers is tricky enough to do on purpose that I don’t see much danger in doing so unintentionally; unless you are doing it on purpose, a hefty helping of “you” is bound to sneak through. And if your voice sounds awfully similar to another writer, so what? Does that make you less skilled, less yourself? Are you consigned to a life of meaningless derivation? I doubt it. And anyway, if you read and draw significantly from more than one author you’ll end up sounding like an amalgamation rather than any one specifically, and that sounds pretty individual to me.

It’s probably also worth noting that the tone of your authorial voice will also change with context, just as a matter of course. The way I write at work as a technical writer is different to how I write for Red Pens and Playwriting, and my creative prose and my poetry are quite different again. None of these voices are any more nor less authentically mine, they just reflect different moods and styles of writing. There are inevitably some similarities and individual quirks that pop up across the board, but each piece or series of pieces I write is a slightly different combination of quirks and techniques and assorted bits and bobs, filtered through my current purpose and my mood at the time.

If you are, however, still worried that your writing doesn’t really sound like you, the best advice I can offer is to keep experimenting. Try new authors, try new types of writing, try new genres or techniques or tones. Maybe you just haven’t found the right things to click with yet, or maybe you just need to keep practicing until you develop those idiosyncratic habits that make you stand out. Just don’t get too lost in the weeds, and you’ll figure it out.