Ten Steps to Finding Your Writing Voice© by Holly Lisle
All Rights Reserved
Your job as a writer is much more than just selling your books,
believe it or not. Your job -- if you want to make a living at this,
anyway -- is to sell yourself.
You are selling your unique perspective on life, your unique collection
of beliefs, fears, hopes and dreams, your memories of childhood
tribulation and triumphs and adult achievements and failures . .
. your universe.
Anybody can sit down and write a story or a book -- that is simply
a matter of applying butt to chair and typing out three or four
or ten pages a day until the thing is done. But not every book is
salable, not every salable book will find an audience, and not every
book that finds an audience will be able to bring the readers back
for more of what the writer is selling.
Your goal is to achieve all three of those milestones:
- To sell your work;
- To reach first-time readers with it;
- To win these first-time readers over as repeat readers of
your work.
You do that by offering them something they can't get 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 romantic scenes. Put together
a western character and run him through a fight scenario. Try fantasy,
try SF, try romance, 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. You might
think you have the entire future of your writing planned out until
you try your hand at something offbeat and discover that you can
make that surprising subject sing. You might produce your first
salable work completely outside of your previous area of specialization.
(I wrote a few smartass SF sonnets as an exercise when I was first
getting started, just to take a break from the hard SF that kept
getting rejected -- and out of the five I wrote in one day, I sold
two. My first paid sales ever.)
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.
When I was just getting started, I tried to write short stories
and essays in Mark Twain's voice, but on subjects current at the
time. I wrote sonnets that were deliberate takes on Shakespeare,
but also on current subjects. "To An Android Lover" and "Ruminations
on Impermanence in a Technophilic World," two of my attempts, sold,
demonstrating that these exercises can be profitable as well as
fun.
They also let you get a feel for writing in a voice that you don't
have to be responsible for -- if you're writing as "Mark Twain,"
(or whoever your choice of writer will be) 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.
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 -- don't just 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:
- Childhood memories.
- Dreams and nightmares.
- Ten gifts I'd give myself with magic.
- If I could spend a million dollars, I'd buy...
- What I want most in the world.
- What I'd do anything to avoid.
- Things that are creepy.
- Things that are sexy.
- Best foods.
- Best times.
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 and start freeing up things
that you have kept hidden even from yourself.
5. Challenge your preconceptions.
You don't know everything about yourself. You only think you do.
The more you trust yourself to write without correction, the more
you'll discover that you're a lot deeper and more interesting and
more complex than you imagined.
But you'll find out a lot about yourself by pushing some of your
own buttons, too, and I recommend that from time to time you do.
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 free abortions
on demand. If you're strongly science-oriented, write from inside
the head of a modern mystic who makes a living as a professional
psychic, and who strongly and passionately believes in his or her
work. If you're strongly religiously oriented, write from inside
the head of a person who loathes all religion, and has good reason
for doing so.
Your job in this exercise is to become, although only temporarily,
the thing that most frightens, angers, or bewilders you. To do it
right, you have to allow your enemy to convince you of his rightness
-- you cannot allow yourself to convince him. For example, the strongly
Christian writer cannot have the character he is writing experience
a conversion to Christianity or see the error of his ways -- he
must, instead, have the agnostic prove to himself that he is right
in his choice to be agnostic.
I'll tell you right now that this is some of the toughest writing
that you'll ever do. Don't try it when you're tired or cranky or
when you have a headache -- you'll probably get one from this particular
exercise even if you felt great beforehand. But do take the leap
and do this. It is the absolute best way (if you play fairly) that
I've ever found to start developing characters that aren't either
transparent versions of yourself or pathetically weak straw men
that you can triumph over as villains.
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.
This isn't the time to be shooting for commercial viability. When
your internal editor switches on, hit him over the head with a frying
pan, preferably a cast iron one.
7. Write from passion.
If you don't care about the things you're writing about, you will
never discover your true voice. Your voice does not exist
when you're trying to write a book in a genre you hate because you
think it will be an easy way to make a quick buck. Your voice does
not exist in the thin and cheap places of your heart or the shallow
end of your soul. Voice lives in the deep waters and the dark places
of your soul, and it will only venture out when you make sure you've
given it space to move and room to breathe.
8. Take risks.
Choose to write about themes that your internal editor insists
are too dangerous, too controversial, too embarrassing to be put
on the paper. Imagine that your mom (or your other toughest critic)
is looking over your shoulder with a raised eyebrow and a prudish
expression on her face. Now shock her.
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. Persevere. I've never
written anything that I've really loved that didn't have me, during
many portions of the manuscript, on the edge of my seat from nerves,
certain that I couldn't carry off what I was trying to do, certain
that if I did I would so embarrass myself that I'd never be able
to show my face in public again -- and I kept writing anyway.
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 what you're doing, you're doing right.
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.
A Little Bit of Me, A Little Bit of You>>
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