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Week Two: writing in your authentic voice
This week’s prompts are at the very end of this post. Please welcome back guest editor Saalon Muyo who tweets as @saalon and blogs at Saalon Muyo. If you have any questions or need any clarification on today’s topic or prompts, please feel free to begin a discussion in comments.
If you’re here just to hang out, click here for the yeah write #65 hangout grid.
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finding your voice
I want to apologize, because this post is a bit of a dodge. I’m can’t tell you how to write in an authentic voice. I’d love to, but I’m just not sure how. Because —for me, anyway— the real challenge hasn’t been writing in an authentic voice. It was finding that voice in the first place. You can’t create, manufacture or affect your voice. It’s something you discover and explore. Your voice as a writer has to be unearthed, refined, polished. It’s found beneath layers of accumulated debris built up through English classes, term papers and interoffice memos. It’s contorted by how you think you should sound. It’s been tortured and mangled and ignored. Your voice isn’t just hiding. It’s raw and ragged.
There’s only one constant when you’re developing your voice as a writer: You have to write a lot. You have to write a lot for a really long time. You aren’t just finding your voice. You’re clarifying it. Making it stronger and clearer and, as you do, learning to own and control it. We’ve spent our whole lives talking. We get immediate feedback on everything we say. When what we’re saying is crap, we can see people’s eyes glazing over. The best we’re used to getting back from our writing are red marks on a page and an arbitrary grade.
Discovering your voice is research and development. Be willing to experiment. If you write serious, emotional pieces, try comedy. If you write comedy, do the opposite. Being out of your comfort zone shows you things you miss when you feel safe. Something that’s worked for me is to try on the styles of authors and writers I admire. After finishing Catch-22, I wrote a short story aiming for a bit of Heller’s comic flair. It wasn’t a very good short, but in writing it I found a bit of my own sense of humor. Exploring Heller’s voice helped me loosen up and learn that my voice can be pretty silly, too. It may seem counterintuitive, but how you incorporate someone else’s voice highlights your own in ways you don’t expect.
Eventually, you’ll gain the confidence you need to stop second-guessing yourself. Fear is the most brutal voice-killer. When you’re cautious, you fall back on the survival tactics you honed in school. For me, that means meandering (but with big words, but with no point) toward my word count. Fear will make you uptight and clenched. Think about how well all those interviews and first dates went when you were tense. Exactly.
Remember: This is a process. If there’s an end to it, I haven’t found it. Everything new you write – every shift in genre and medium and tone – means more discovery. More refinement. It gets easier, but it never gets easy. Which is good. Easy is so boring.
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all your story are belong to you
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- Read the summer FAQ page for other details: the grid is being moderated and if you’re missing an element outlined in the summer FAQ, your post will not be published on the grid
- Let the prompt lead you, but do not include the prompt in any way in your post, not at the beginning as an intro, not at the end as a footnote. If you reference the prompt in your post, your post will not be published on the grid
- Remember: no more than 500 words. If your post exceeds 500 words, yup, you guessed it—no publish for you
- If the prompt takes you from thunderstorms to watching TV at your grandma’s house to how much you love Pat Sajak to the oldest person you’ve ever kissed, we want that story the furthest away in your imagination from the original prompt. Let your imagination loose
- Keep your writing style! Do you tell stories with humor? Prose? Verse? Photos? Illustrations? Keep doing that. We’ll read Shakespearean drama on our own time
- Cut away at everything unnecessary to your story
- Not ready to add your entry today? Still perfecting and reading other posts? No problem: you’ve got until Thursday at noon EDT [-4GMT]
- Don’t forget to badge your post
- Have fun!
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[divider_header_h3] This week’s prompts [courtesy of Tom Slatin] [/divider_header_h3]
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- What is the one thing you cannot live without?
- What is your favorite chess piece?
- What is one thing nobody knows about you because nobody’s ever cared to ask?
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Yeah write #65 summer grid continues…
Love this, Saalon! Particularly the analogy of being tense on a first date. Bc yeah, that goes SO WELL. 🙂 It’s taken me years and plenty of feedback to recognize the pitfalls you speak of… But it’s still a struggle to avoid them. Excellent piece. Well done!
This is a great series – I’d love it if at the end of the summer, the tips appeared with their own header, so they would be easily accessible well after this summer’s series had ended!
This is some super advice! I write for several different audiences weekly and find that looking at the same/similar topics in three different ways to be a really good way to get my brain working. I try to avoid overlapping, so it really gets me thinking about stuff from all sorts of angles. Plus, it is loads of practice. Not everything I write is awesome, but if there is something interesting in everything I write, I feel good.
Well said. Wasn’t I just talking about fear and intimidation? You know all of my best roadblocks. Hopefully, they’re much less original than my writing.
These posts have been very useful. Thanks, Eric.
Great advice. I love that you remind us all that good writing takes practice, takes work. I love too that you point out that writing is NOT just talking: it takes a lot more work to write as if you are having a conversation than it does to actually have the conversation. Of course, there are many people who should spend more time working on their talking (hello Fox News talking to you).
It’s so difficult, because in your head you know that eventually you want to get to the place where your writing sounds sorta-kinda like the way you talk, but you can’t get there by writing the way you speak. It’s something you get to in increments, and usually not directly. You’re so right about writing as if you’re having a conversation vs. actually having it. It’s one of those things that, once you have it down a bit, the result *looks* easy, but was *so much work*.
Another slight problem with “write how you talk” and I am a huge proponent of “write the way you talk” is that most people aren’t very eloquent talkers. So when they take their everyday speech and put it to digital paper, it doesn’t read well at all. But there are workshops for that. There are libraries for that. If someone really wants to learn the craft of writing, he or she should put down the remote and 50 Shades of Grey and get serious about it. Like you said, it takes practice practice practice.
Saalon: That. Was. Awesome. SO helpful in big huge ways. Thank you.
Thanks, Melisa! I really hope it helps, even in the smallest possible way.