January 18, 2022

Your Writing Voice

Daily Writing Blog, General Thoughts

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Voice Concerns

In the last article I wrote, I talked about having a test run for every new project. Something I talked about was developing a new voice for each niche.

There are two issues I’m going to talk about today:

  • Your voice. Who you are as a writer and what that entails.
  • Your fake voice, pen name voice or whatever you might call it.

 

It’s a tricky subject and I don’t know exactly what I’m going to write yet, so we’ll be learning together.

 

Your Writing Voice: Complex Jargon From The Ivory Tower

 

If you’ve been to one or a million writers’ workshops, then you’ve probably heard lecturers talking about “voice.” Raise your hands if “voice” was described in ultra-weird, ultra-vague terms.

 

At least in my experience, voice seems to be something entirely elusive: an abominable snowman for academics to explain inconvenient things away with.  It’s a mix of vocabulary, phrasing, grammar and all those things that make your writing different from someone else’s. (Or a computer-generated piece of writing.)

 

Ultimately, the advice you get is, “let your narrative voice out” or whatever – but here’s the thing – you don’t really have a choice.

 

When it comes to your “narrative voice” or “writing voice,” all of the aspects I mentioned above are mostly too engrained to ever be fully quantified, and you can’t express yourself without using your own subjective experience to carry out that expression.

 

So you can’t eradicate your writing voice, no matter how much you try.

 

Sadly, creative writing workshops everywhere will tell you in flowery language that you should suppress your voice. This is even more true when it comes to business writing, where you are often expected to come as close to an automated article deliverer as possible.

 

Don’t do it.

 

I made the mistake of trying to iron out the kinks in my writing voice for years. I tried to sound professional and make sure all my sentences were as perfect as possible. That was a waste of time. The articles were also worse. When you make yourself indistinguishable from an article spinner, your articles are worse than they would be if you just threw them together with your regular spoken word, let alone your writing voice.

 

So, essentially we’ve covered three things so far:

 

  1. Your writing voice is a mixture of all the separate elements of language which you put together in different ways.
  2. Your writing voice is largely immutable, as it’s taken you years of language training to get it to this point, and it’s subtle.
  3. Even if it weren’t, eradicating your writing voice almost universally makes your writing worse.

 

Hopefully you’re asking yourself the question, “But Jamie, yesterday you said you needed to practice a new voice?” Because that’s where we’re headed.

 

Developing A Pseudo-Voice For Pen Name Projects.

 

When it comes to your writing voice, superficial changes make a whole lot of difference. Those are the changes you can make, and they’re largely a conscious decision or afterthought.

 

Here’s a terrible pseudo-theory: Humans aren’t really designed evolutionarily for reading. We’re not designed for monologues and we’re not designed for concentrating on pages and pages of the same voice over and over again. So when we read, our brains are doing something unnatural.

 

Where does this fit in to the article?

 

Members of my family probably sound very similar in conversation. We have similar accents, talk about similar things and are obviously very similar genetically. From a conversation transcript without any indicators of who was speaking, you’d probably get confused very quickly.

 

In writing, the minute differences in voice would become quickly apparent. For instance, my Dad would never say “quickly apparent” and he’d never say, “For instance.”

 

In a quick conversation, you’d never notice. But if we both had to write a book, those small differences would be obvious, despite their relatively insignificant nature.

 

Back to the topic at hand: Pen names and voice changes.

 

You’re probably never going to write under a pen name where it’d be impossible to work out that it was you. The majority of your writing voice is too unique a blueprint. But you can change your voice for a different audience by being conscious of the small things. That’s what you need to practice.

 

Two things to do immediately when thinking about a modification to your writing voice:

 

  • Lexicon of the niche.

 

I dare you to go on a Tabletop Gaming Forum. It’s all just acronyms, words and point scores for things that you won’t have any idea about. But whilst the people are talking in gobbledegook, they’re also using English – just with a different lexicon.

 

You’ll sound just as alien to a non-tabletop gamer if you use the lexical choices of your market.

 

  • General psychology of the niche.

 

This is the second thing that’ll change your writing voice most drastically without requiring much effort, but you do have to do a bit of “method acting” with your writing here.

 

What is the general impression of the average person in the niche you’re going for?

 

Here are two examples:

 

  1. A person who is losing their hair.
  2. A person on a make money online forum.

 

Two completely different psychologies – if you go on a hair loss forum, you’ll find that every single member seems to give off a “the world is literally ending” vibe. Whereas if you go on a making money forum, a person can lose thousands in a month on a daft venture and still be upbeat because it’s like there’s only a matter of time until they’re rubbing shoulders with Zuckerberg.

 

Copy the general attitude of that psychology, along with the lexical choices and you’ll still have your original writing voice, but that voice will come across as completely different to the casual observer, as well as the target market.

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