Your Writing Voice

The unconscious influence of other writers certainly comes into it if you read a lot, as you should. Deliberately copying someone else’s style is okay when you’re just starting out, but another writer’s style will never fit you as well as the one you discover in the process of living and getting your thoughts down on paper. If you’re going to succeed, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery; it’s a learning device. It’s the detachable wheels on your first bicycle, and you have to take them off eventually.

Training wheels aren’t all you will have to discard if you want to have a voice of your own. As long as you write what you think other people want to hear, you will be crippled as a writer. We do, of course, write for other people as well as for ourselves. If we didn’t care about the readers out there, we would just keep a private journal, and voice wouldn’t matter at all. If we decide to write to the specifications of a particular publisher, we may give up our own voice temporarily, but that can also be a learning experience. It can give you more insight into what voice means, and how it can differ, depending on the circumstances.

But if you are writing to express your own ideas, your own vision, without the constraints of someone else’s format and requirements, you can’t invent an imaginary reader who’s silently judging you. After all, there are multitudes of potential readers, each with their own interests and biases. Who are you going to please? The only person you can be sure of pleasing is yourself. After that, you simply have to trust that there are others out there who will also be pleased.

But when you come right down to it, it’s not even a matter of pleasing yourself. It’s a matter of what fits. When you’ve worked your way through all the pale imitations of your favorite writers, thrown away all the assumptions of what’s right for you, what you should be writing about, how it should sound, etc., there will eventually come a time when you write something and you know at a very deep level that it’s right; it fits you. It’s what you’ve been looking for.

Even then, you won’t be able to achieve it every time. You have to become familiar with this voice and gradually learn to speak with it as a natural part of yourself. The wheels are off now, and you’ll still take a tumble every now and then. But you’re on your way.