2020-04-23 How to Find Your Voic

A decade ago I was given my first major magazine assignment. The twist is that it wasn’t actually MY assignment. I had been hired to rewrite an article that had been done by someone else. Poorly, it appears. I don’t know who this inadequate writer was. Possibly William Faulkner. Regardless, the copy filed by the writer was dull and lifeless, and my editor told me that my job was to make it “voicier.”

Take in all the influences

A voice can come in an infinite number of guises. Let’s listen to a few of them right now.
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

Live your experiences and use them creatively

The old writing edict is to write what you know. I remember being told that in Creative Writing class in college. The end result was 20 students all turning in the same short story about a kid who goes to a house party and has a shitty time. We were not the most imaginative lot. Not terribly popular, either.

The goal shouldn’t be to write what you know, but to USE what you know. So you know what it’s like to be somewhere where you’re SUPPOSED to be enjoying yourself, and you know the odd shame you feel when you are not: when the night isn’t living up to the perhaps unreasonable standards you had for it. Okay, now set that party in Nazi Germany. See now? You used what you knew, but you gave it FLAIR. You gave the reader a reason to give a crap.

Allow those influences and experiences to guide you

Now the challenge is to get those thoughts down into words. They don’t have to be pretty. They don’t have to be perfect. What matters is that they are CLEAR, that you are able to get the person reading your copy to understand how you feel and — this is where the magic happens — FEEL what you felt. Scroll back up and read King again:

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.