Ten Steps to Finding Your Writing Voice

What is your unique perspective on life, your unique collection of beliefs, fears, hopes and dreams, your earliest memories . . . your universe?
You write a great essay or story by offering something that cannot be found anywhere else — and the only thing in the universe that readers cannot get anywhere but from you is . . . you.
Which means you have to put yourself on your page. This is what is known in the writing business as developing your voice. Voice isn’t merely style. Style would be easy by comparison. Style is watching your use of adjectives and doing a few flashy things with alliteration. Style without voice is hollow. Voice is style, plus theme, plus personal observations, plus passion, plus belief, plus desire. Voice is bleeding onto the page, and it can be a powerful, frightening, naked experience.
But your voice is your future in writing. And here is how you develop it.

1. Read everything.
You cannot be a successful writer if you don’t read. That isn’t opinion; that’s fact. All writers read, and all good writers read a lot. Read fiction, read nonfiction, read in the genre you love, read outside of it. Read WAY outside of it. You cannot be a snob — don’t write off any genre or type of book as being without redeeming qualities or lessons to teach you. The more you read, the more you will acquire a visceral instinct about what works for you, and an equally compelling instinct for what doesn’t. You’ll discover how stories are put together, get a feel for how good novels are paced and plotted and how bad ones fall apart, and you’ll start developing a hunger to write specific stories, because you’ll come across areas of fiction where nobody is writing the kind of books you want to read.
Reading is magic. It’s your bread and butter. Don’t neglect it.

2. Write everything.
Try your hand at non-fiction. Write sentimental scenes. Put together a western character and run him through a fight scenario. Try fantasy, try SF, try historical fiction, try mainstream. Write a sonnet, and some haiku, and a few limericks. Remember the first rule of writing:
Nothing you write is wasted.
Whether you use what you’ve produced or not, you will have learned from the experience . . . and you can never know too much. 

3. Copy the best.
Do short exercises where you sit down and not only copy the style of your favorite writers, but also some of their themes and passions. Get as much into their heads as you can.
VERY IMPORTANT: Do NOT copy their characters, their worlds, or their stories. Never ever plagiarize.
Your objective in finding your own voice is to loosen up your writing muscles by writing your OWN work in someone else’s voice, simply to shut up your inner critic. Try the style of Dr. Seuss, Shakespeare, Roald, Dahl, Aesop, Tomi Depaola.

You can get a feel for writing in a voice that you don’t have to be responsible for — if you’re writing as “Mark Twain,” (for example) you’ll be a lot less critical of yourself, and you’ll free yourself up to experiment with content and structure in ways that you might resist when you’re writing as yourself. After all, you have nothing to lose. If the stuff flops, it wasn’t really you, it's Dr. Seuss (for example :-).

4. Play games.
Make endless lists — one-word lists of the things that excite you, the things that scare you, the things that you dream and fantasize about and hope for, the things you dread and fight to avoid. It is absolutely essential that these words have some special meaning to you — do not go through a dictionary and pick them out randomly, or you’ll find yourself staring at a blank page more often than not when trying to play the games that follow. Great topics for lists are:

1. Childhood memories
   
2. Dreams and nightmares
3. Ten gifts I’d give myself if I could have anything
4. Things that are creepy
5. If I had to spend a million dollars in one day, I’d buy . . . 
6. What I’d do anything to avoid
7. Things that are sentimental to me
8. Best foods
9. Best times
10. What I want most in the world

You can come up with endless other topics for lists, too. Use these lists as triggers for writing games like the following:

• “Three Words”   Randomly choose one item from each of three lists. Use these words to create a title — you’ll get something weird like “Lake Bones Ice Cream,” or “Naked Broken-Glass Monkeys.” Without allowing yourself to think about these words or censor what you’re putting on the page, just start writing, letting the words conjure images and stories for you. Write for ten minutes without allowing yourself to stop or correct anything.

• “Chasing Your Tail”   Start with a random word on one of your lists. Write for two or three minutes on that word, not allowing yourself to stop writing, to back up, or to correct. Immediately choose by random means a second word from any one of your lists. Start writing again, connecting this word to what you were writing about before. Write for two or three minutes; then pick another word which you connect to the subject you’ve been writing about with the first two. Run with this pattern of choosing and following for as long as you wish, or can.

• “Theme”   Randomly choose only one word, and write for ten minutes on just that word, exploring everything about it that matters to you, why the subject is compelling to you, what memories it stirs in you, what hopes or fears it shakes loose in you, places, sounds, scents and tastes that appear as you’re writing. Don’t censor, don’t stop writing for any reason, don’t correct.

Again, you can come up with endless variations on these games that you can play by yourself or with other writers in writers’ groups. The idea is to dig beneath your surface.

5. Challenge your perspective.
You will discover that your writing can become more interesting and more complex than you ever imagined. Here is a link to an example of what I mean in pictures. When it comes to writing, perspective can change everything. Try to write from a different perspective. Go ahead, I double-dog dare ya.

• If you’re a staunch Republican, write an essay from inside the head of a liberal Democrat who is in favor of the thing you most despise, whether it is entitlement spending or gun control or ? ? ? ?
• If you’re strongly science-oriented, write from inside the head of a detective who relies on hunches and luck. 
• If you love the arts, write from the perspective of a robot who has no understanding of aesthetics. 

6. Dare to be dreadful.
When you’re finding your voice, you’re going to be doing a lot of experimenting. Some of what you write, frankly, is going to be lousy. Some of it will shock you with how good you really are. But the only way you’ll get any of the good stuff is if you allow yourself to put whatever comes into your head down on the page without demanding salable prose of yourself.

7. Write from passion.
If you don’t care about the things you’re writing about, you will never discover your true voice. 

8. Take risks.
Choose to write about themes that your internal editor insists are too dangerous, too controversial, too serious, or even too silly to be put on the paper. 

9. Remember that complacency is your worst enemy.
If you’re comfortable, if you’re rolling along without having to really think, if you haven’t had to challenge yourself, if you know that everyone is going to approve of what you’ve done — you’re wasting your time. Writing done from a position of comfort will never say anything worthwhile.

10. Remember that fear is your best friend.
If your heart is beating fast and your palms are sweating and your mouth is dry, you’re writing from the part of yourself that has something to say that will

be worth hearing. Keep writing.
At the heart of everything that you’ve ever read that moved you, touched you, changed your life, there was a writer’s fear. And a writer’s determination to say what he had to say in spite of that fear.
So be afraid. Be very afraid. And then thank your fear for telling you that you just might be treading into very cool writing territory.
Your personal writing voice is born from a lot of words and a lot of work — but not just any words or any work will do. You have to bleed a little. You have to shiver a little. You have to love a lot — love your writing, love your failures, love your courage in going on in spite of them, love every small triumph that points toward eventual success. You already have a voice. It’s beautiful, it’s unique, it’s the voice of a best-seller. Your job is to lead it from the darkest of the dark places and the deepest of the deep waters into the light of day.


Sources:
Soutenus and
http://hollylisle.com/ten-steps-to-finding-your-writing-voice/