How to Find Your Writing Voice

WHEN MY HUSBAND asked me to marry him, now so many years ago, he did not offer me a diamond ring. Nor did he offer me a ruby, emerald or any other precious or semi-precious stone fixed in a band. What he offered me was far more valuable to me than any setting from Tiffany, Cartier or even Harry Winston. What did he slip on my hand as he asked me to spend the rest of my life with him? It was his childhood Roy Rogers ring in the form of a miniature chunky silver western saddle. What it meant to me and why he did that makes a really good place to talk about how to find and value your writing voice.

That skill — finding and valuing your writing voice — is a form of marriage. After all, in both marriage and writing, after first looking around, you must make a good match and then do the hard work to nurture that match. And within that setting lives both the story of my ring and some hard-won advice for you on how to find your writing voice.

How to Identify Your Writing Voice

I grew up in New York City, and among the many residual effects of that heritage is the obvious one of fashion influence. Manhattan is literally wall-to-wall visuals, including those of its countless display windows, in front of which any young girl, then adolescent, then teenager-turned woman can reflect on who she wants to become. Some of these windows front some very high-end places that like to suggest who we might want to be as reflected by what we might want to buy inside their doors.

In my twenties, and working at The New York Times, I spent a considerable amount of time in midtown Manhattan, a part of the city that includes the diamond district, as well as some of the higher-end jewelers of the world.

Walking those streets every day, I began to notice in myself a fairly strong aversion to the traditional engagement ring. It was the messaging – the voice, if you will – of the settings I disliked. They seemed to say, “I am someone else’s.” It also nagged at me that the message was conveyed to the world by merely wearing such a ring. I wanted to be loved, sure, but what I came to understand was that I did not want to be so easily defined. Something prescribed was not for me. If ever I was to be engaged, I decided, I wanted my very own ring that was not easily identifiable as one of my engagement or married status. I simply did not want to be that easy to spot.

Having the Confidence to Have a Writing Voice

At the same time, I was trying to find my writing voice. And it is here that I see a common strain. Your writing voice is something that needs first to be found, then deeply felt, then used to express who you are to the public.

Along the way to both my ring and my voice, some very hard questions had to be asked. After all, my mother had a traditional engagement and wedding ring, as did her mother before her, as did millions of women on the planet. Therefore, a lot of rejection of tradition stood between me and my decision. And it’s frightening to engage with rejection. It’s a whole lot easier to be like everybody else than it is to make hard, discerning decisions.

These days, as I read across the online world, searching for pieces on how to find your writing voice, I see little but “Ten top tips for finding your writing voice,” and other such nonsensical, non-productive pieces that won’t get you where you need to go.

Why not? Because they do not address the fear it takes to get there.

And fear, my writing friends, is what you are up against here if you are ever to reject the other models of voice for one of your very own.

After all, finding your writing voice has an evolution that is far more reflective of character than any quick tips can bestow. Again, in terms of my ring, instead of saying to the world, “I am his,” I thought my Roy Rogers ring stated nothing at all about my marital status, but a thing or two about who I am. Maybe it did.

Finding Others Who Like Your Writing Voice

A few months after my engagement, I re-entered The New York Times building, a place I had not been in the five years since I had left the employment of that great newspaper to set out to live my vision of a writing life. This time, I was there for a memorial of a friend. As I entered, a beloved former colleague, who had heard that I had gotten engaged to another New York journalist, ran over to congratulate me.

I well-remembered her engagement some years before, while we were both still brand-new to the newspaper. In fact, I had been part of that occasion, helping to plot how to make sure she was home for the arrival of a singing telegram to ask for her hand. And I well-remember her astonishing ring of three chunky stones that her soon-to-be fiancé had made for her, and how utterly it suited her then. Fashionable, half-French and literally without peer in a newsroom of less-well-dressed journalists, she had rock-solid taste. She and I were good friends. We knew one another well.

On getting through the crowd at the memorial, she grabbed my left hand and raised it up to eye-level.

“Engaged!” she cried.

And she looked at the ring which I wore on my middle finger. Then she looked into my face.

“It’s his Roy Rogers ring from his childhood,” I said. To which she replied, “Perfect.”

It was.

Feeling the Assurance of Your Writing Voice

And that’s the way you might want to start thinking about your writing voice.

The bridge from here to there – from not having a writing voice to having one – is crossed when you confront your fear of being heard for who you really are.

By the way, I have no prescribed notions about others’ rings, and ogle those of my friends all the time, sparkly and engaging as so many of them are. They are exquisite. They are just not me. They are you, if that’s what you chose, but they never have been me. I feel similarly about many things in fashion, as do you. And that’s where this metaphor lives and breathes.

Who are you when you write? How is that communicated to the reading public? How much fear are you willing to confront to truly sound like you?

Those are questions I want you to ponder. Because finding and valuing your writing voice is all about honesty, meaning that the road home is all about shedding your dishonesty. And the route from one to the other, of course, is blocked by nothing more or less than fear.

Are you ready to make that move?

Here is what a wise friend said to me recently on the topic of creativity and voice. It’s what got me thinking about this. I give it to you here since it’s not mine to keep. She said this:

“We are only dishonest when we are afraid.”

Think about that. What would it take to shed your fear? How can I get you out from behind the shadow of Ernest Hemingway or Mary Karr? They worked damn hard to get those voices of theirs. But their voice is not yours, nor should you try it on for size. Trust me, just like all those rings I eschewed, it will not be a good fit.

Ask Hard Questions About Your Writing Voice

What is your Roy Rogers ring? Find that and you are on your way to knowing how to find your writing voice.

Are you a skeptic? Like me, are you someone who finds some rituals perniciously reductive ? Well then, you’ve got some rebelling to do, don’t you think? And that is the voice you want to encourage. Maybe you thought motherhood was an unending series of dirty diapers and boredom but that every time you tried to voice that your older sister-in-law with the four blonde children scowled you back into your quiet cover. Are you a hard-core romantic whose high school poetry education infused in you a sense of the sentimental? Are you afraid to write from there in these days of one voice screaming down another? As a result, have you gone silent?

Well, no more. Raise that voice. Value it. You do so by using it.

Much of conforming is about fear of being identified as our very own selves. And writers are many things, but the good ones are, in fact, their very own selves. You know that about other writers because you wait to hear those voices again and again by buying their new books. And you miss those voices between books.

Those writers honestly use their voices in the world.

Use yours.

Want more? Please join me for an online class in how to write memoir. 

Photo by __ drz __ on Unsplash