Finding Your Voice
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Originality often gets talked about as if it’s a rare trait among artists, which I find strange. In my experience as a writer and teacher, originality seems more or less unavoidable. When I assign 15 fiction students the same writing prompt, without fail I get 15 different stories back. If I tell my students to write a story about a couple having a fight at a carnival, I might have two students both show the couple waiting in line for a ride or talking to each other through clenched teeth as the roller coaster clicks up its first hill, but the issues at the center of each argument, the specific words and details each writer uses to explore those issues, are always as unique to that writer as a fingerprint.
Reading these types of assignments, you pick up quickly who is fascinated by what, who is afraid of what, who is angry or joyful about what. Much more so than if you were to ask these students about themselves directly. The truth about yourself that ends up creeping out as you write is your voice. It’s something that emerges on its own whenever you’re so engrossed in the act of completing a story that you relax your sense of focus and do what feels natural to you. The reason your voice is so inescapably original won’t be due to an act of cleverness on your part. It will be a simple result of the fact that no one else has been you before.
So why then does finding your voice feel like such a struggle when you’re starting out as a writer? I know my own process of learning to be comfortable and confident on the page was a bit messier than I’ve made it out to be so far. Below I’ll try to unpack the biggest challenges I encountered when finding my voice in the hopes of making this process of self-discovery as easy for you as it actually is.
You’re working on projects that don’t actually interest you.
This is a common problem for new writers. Before you’re comfortable using your own voice, there can be a tendency to imitate respected stories in your genre regardless of whether or not those stories speak to you as a writer. If you doubt how common this problem can be, just do an internet search for “George Saunders” + “Hemingway boner.” I strongly recommend you use those quotation marks when conducting that search, btw. I may have never fallen into the Hemingway trap, but thanks to William Faulkner many of my early stories included words like “saxifrage” and “ramshackle.” I was miserable writing those stories and I can’t imagine anyone was excited to read them. The point is that it’s a eureka moment for a lot of writers when they realize that their work can be like the stuff they’re actually excited to read.
I also want to put emphasis on something I’m not saying here. I’m not saying that imitation is bad. In fact, I think imitation is a crucial stage of any artist’s development. I’ve had students push back against this idea out of the fear that their work won’t be original if they allow themselves to be overly influenced. I try to be respectful of other writers’ processes, but the idea that an artist’s job is to reinvent human expression in a vacuum doesn’t make a lot of sense. Imitation gets us working and our voices emerge as an almost involuntary result of that work, often just through the ways our writing differs from what we’re trying to imitate.
Make sure you’re embracing influences that energize you. And keep in mind that those influences might not be books. Continuing with Saunders as an example, he has mentioned in interviews that artists like Steve Martin and Monty Python helped him get past the dry, literary influences that were stifling him early in his career. Any artist who excites you or makes you feel understood is someone you should be drawing strength from as you’re looking for your own voice.
You’re working on projects that are too interesting to you.
If you find it surprising that this piece of advice is diametrically opposed to the last piece of advice I gave you, then let me be the first to welcome you to the dynamic field of creative writing. But there is some nuance here, so let me explain: Sometimes a specific idea is so clever that it makes it harder to write a first draft. It’s like when you buy a gorgeous Moleskine and the thought of writing in it feels like an act of vandalism. Early drafts are by definition messy, so a good idea can occasionally be an inertial barrier that makes our first attempts to get it on the page seem unacceptable.
There are two ways to get around this. The first is to force yourself to accept the nature of early drafts. First drafts are supposed to be bad. You have to give yourself space to fail and experiment. Another thing to realize is that the reason your good idea seems so good is because it’s largely undefined. Without the specifics of a draft, that idea is free to be amorphously perfect. When our ideas first come to us, it can seem like they’re going to be about everything. But creative work is about making specific choices to create specific objects. So even when we’re doing good work, it can at first feel like a loss. It can feel like we’re destroying something big and expansive in order to bring out something pretty small in comparison. But — get ready for the twist — it’s typically only when you commit to making something specific that you’ll be able to evoke anything universal.
Here’s the second approach: Embrace writing prompts that are arbitrary and stupid. Tell yourself that you’re going to write a story with a saber-toothed tiger in it or a story in which someone drops a cup of coffee on their boss. These are not clever ideas. Imagine announcing to the other members of your dinner party that you’re going to write a story in which someone eats a piece of paper. There would probably be some concerned looks around the table. But in 2017 that was all I had going into the draft of a story now called “Trezzo.” I knew one kid was going to coerce another kid into eating a piece of paper. Not to chew my own wad of paper, but that story was eventually published and went on to receive a Pushcart Prize. Compare “Trezzo” to another idea that came to me in a flash one night. The idea was fully formed and said everything I was sure I needed to say about the world. I have pages and pages of notes about all the different aspects of this idea and how they might grow into each other. But in terms of actual drafting, I haven’t written a word. Maybe all I’m doing here is describing a character flaw of mine, but, in my experience, embracing a goofy fraction of a thought can free you up to write the mess of a first draft.
If you’d like to try some arbitrary and dumb writing prompts, feel free to check out my Twitter bot, which I’ve programmed to tweet out a random story prompt every hour or so.
There’s something about your voice you don’t like
Whenever you have negative thoughts about your writing, it’s important to ask yourself what’s bothering you specifically. When you criticize your writing without going into detail — “This is all so corny.” — it’s rarely an honest assessment of how your draft is going. More often it’s a coping mechanism resulting from the fact that writing is difficult and your rational mind is trying to come up with an excuse for you to stop. These intrusive thoughts are powerful. They can be so convincing that they might seem like genuine insights about your inability to write. They’re not. A great way to get around this coping mechanism is to force yourself to come up with focused, concrete criticisms for a piece before you let yourself give up on it.
You tell yourself, “This story is corny.” Well, in what way? Which part? Okay, the thing with the starving kitten out in the rain sadly pawing at the narrator’s window is a little cloying. Great. Now we’ve identified a specific thing we can work on. Let’s unpack what makes the kitten corny. It’s because it’s all so sad. Rain, starving, pawing to get inside. Even just the word kitten is a bummer in this context, since it’s something that’s simultaneously small, vulnerable, and adorable. All the emotional arrows are pointing in the same direction. It feels easy and manipulative. Let’s reverse some of those arrows by making the animal older and something that’s adept at living outside. Now it’s an adult squirrel sitting on the narrator’s windowsill. It’s still raining, but the squirrel isn’t sad. It’s alert. There’s a crack of thunder, but the squirrel doesn’t move. To this squirrel, danger and existence are intertwined in a way that isn’t cruel or evil. The world has as much right to be dangerous as its own heart has a right to beat. Looking at this squirrel, it’s the narrator who’s sad. He isn’t sure he’s ever been that alive.
Okay, I’m not saying this bit with the squirrel is brilliant, but we’ve gone from a kitten starving in the rain to our narrator having an existential crisis centered around a vigilant squirrel. To put it another way, we’ve gone from an image a lot of people could have come up with to an image that’s more specific, which is important because our voices live in the specifics. Also, keep in mind that it wasn’t bad of you to write that kitten in the first place. You needed the kitten so your reaction to it could get you to the squirrel. That’s how writing works. That’s the job.
If there are other parts of your draft that are bothering you, just apply this same approach. Get specific about your concern, then use that concern as a writing prompt. I know this sounds like revision, which is counterintuitive, since we think of our voice as coming out more during the generative stage. Lots of creative writing catchphrases have helped reinforce this idea (first thought, best thought; write drunk, edit sober). But there can be just as much spontaneity and discovery in this process of reacting to what you’ve written.
You’re afraid of sharing your voice with the world.
It’s understandable if the idea of expressing yourself in writing makes you feel a little vulnerable. What if the piece you’re working on ends up getting read by your friends who don’t know you write? By family members or coworkers? After all, good writing is almost never polite. It often touches on uncomfortable truths that fly in the face of the social conventions you’ve been using to navigate the people in your life.
So what can you do as a writer to feel more comfortable about your art coexisting with your social self? A lot of it comes down to boundaries. I remember I was once at the birthday party of a writer I admire. I saw this writer as she was introduced to someone for the first time. When this man learned she was a writer, he invited her to tell him about her work. Instead of indulging him, she laughed and said, “I’m off duty for the night.” I remember being blown away by that. I hadn’t known you could do that.
Before that night, when someone asked me about my writing, typically using the same tone of voice you might use to ask a child how old they are, I would panic, trying to come up with a socially acceptable explanation for what I was up to in my work. Now I just tell anyone who asks that I wrote whatever novel won the Pulitzer that year. Then they’ll tell me with a shrug that they’ve never heard of it.
Or, honestly, maybe just use a pen name? That might be a bit tidier than this whole maintaining your own boundaries thing. Here’s something I learned from a prolonged brush with office work in the 2010s: No one can hassle you if they don’t know what you’re doing. Here are a few pen names I’m giving away in case you need one: Ramp Ledgecliff, Josie “Two Pens” Booch, Stubby Brunchkiss, Eleanor Rugby, Trish Trishstopherson, X.L. Deathblow, Dax Touché, Deborah Harobed, Santa Proviso, Cabbage Man, and, of course, DJ Indent. I encourage you to use any or all of these pen names in good health.
More important than all of this, just remember that your voice is already in there somewhere. Be patient and optimistic as you learn to bring it out. This is different for everybody, but paying attention to what interests you is always a great place to start. This will be a long process and — not to overcomplicate things, but — your voice will likely change over time. So stay alert in your drafts, like our squirrel friend on the windowsill. Learn to listen as closely as you can to your own reactions to what you’ve written. Do that and you should have no problem finding your voice again and again, even in those exciting but uncertain times when it’s in the middle of becoming something new.
Also, if any of this was helpful, consider checking out my course on short stories up over at Skillshare.