When I first started writing fiction, I desperately wanted to be Margaret Atwood. I read several of her novels and, consciously or not (probably consciously), my writing voice started coming out a lot like hers—only minus the talent and the authenticity because… (wait for it) I’m not Margaret Atwood. I didn’t sell a single short story.
Many years later I decided to write a thing (it was sort of a prose poem but really, it defied genre) completely as “me.” It turned out quirky, funny (if you share my sense of humor, that is), and weird—rather like someone I know. When I finished it, I thought, well, that was fun. Maybe no one will buy it, but who cares? It sold to the first magazine I sent it to and was later anthologized.
Too much has been made of the process of finding your voice as a writer, and I think it gets us into trouble. We believe it’s something that it’s not and then we make it way more complicated than it needs to be.
Contrary to what you might think, voice is not just a way of talking or sounding. It’s a way of being in the world. And how do we ‘be’ except the way we already are?
We never have to think about finding our voice as a person. Our voice is everything about us; it’s who we are, how we see the world. Why would that be any different on paper than it is in real life? When we put pressure on ourselves to “find our voice,” whatever we end up finding becomes more like a persona, a disguise, and then it’s not our voice anymore. It’s fake.
The process is a lot like dating. When we try too hard to be something we’re not, it might work for a little while and then it just…won’t. Because it won’t feel authentic.
Listen to any interview with Margaret Atwood and you’ll notice she sounds in person exactly the way she does on the page. Same with Stephen King. They’re not making up some new entity who they suddenly become on paper. Even though they’ve both created numerous convincing and authentic characters who are completely diverse from each other, we can still identify an Atwood or King novel by voice alone. Why? Because the essential personality of the author shines through those characters. How could it not? They created them.
But is it bad or wrong to copy other writers when you’re just starting out?
Actually, no. It can be a great way to get started—almost like a nudge that coaxes your true voice out.
Another exercise worth trying is to choose your absolute favorite novel and copy it out by hand. I’m not suggesting plagiarism or even mimicry. Instead, this can be an effective learning tool. I once wrote out the first hundred pages of All the Light We Cannot See and was amazed by what I picked up that I’d missed in two readings of the novel. Writing it out by hand allows you to see firsthand how the magic has been created.
But when it comes to finding your voice, the main thing you need to do is stop putting up roadblocks and instead allow the process to happen.
How do you do that? Here are a few ideas.
- Ask yourself: who are your favorite authors? What genres do you like to read? Explore what it is about them that appeals to you. Chances are there are some elements common to all of them.
- Try Natalie Goldberg’s exercises in Writing Down the Bones of keeping the hand moving while you write. What this does is silence your inner critic. If you’re busy writing, they can’t get a word in edgewise, nattering that you should be writing X rather than the Y that you want to write, or telling you that you’re no good or the work isn’t coming out the way it’s supposed to.
- Try Ray Bradbury’s idea in Zen in the Art of Writing of keeping word lists to discover your loves, your hates, your obsessions and fears. This was his way of finding his voice as a writer—which really amounted to nailing down who he was as a person. It might work for you.
Flannery O’Connor wrote: “The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.” What we are able to make live is directly related to who we are and what we love. If what you love is cowboys and westerns, then chances are when you write about them, your voice will sing.
People used to ask Stephen King why he was “wasting” his talent writing horror. Why? Because horror is what he loves. And what exactly has been wasted? He is arguably the best horror writer in the world. If he had ignored his obsessions and tried to be a literary writer, there’s a fair chance he would not have been as successful as he is.
If you want to find your voice as a writer, just be yourself on the page. There’s nobody more suited to the task.
Check out these additional posts about voice!
How Do You Find Your Narrator’s Voice?
Character Voice Versus Author Voice
Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and editor who lives in Vancouver, BC. Her newest book, coauthored with David Griffin Brown, is Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her novel My Long List of Impossible Things, came out in 2020 with Annick Press. The House of One Thousand Eyes was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and won numerous awards including the Amy Mathers Teen Book Award. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have appeared in literary reviews world-wide.
Michelle holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and is a senior editor at The Darling Axe. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Michelle below. Michelle’s books
Yep. pretty much. A guy in a pub asked me about writing a novel. He assumed because I’d written one, I’d know. My zen-like advice was write a million words. Then get back to me. It was probably my greatest writing commission. He bought me a pint.
Write a million words is probably the best advice you can give anyone. It’s exactly right. Our expectation that we can be great writers from the moment we first put pen to paper is kind of crazy. We’d never expect that kind of immediate success if we took up the violin or carpentry.
Thanks for your comment.
Not only did I enjoy the article, but I believe you are right. As a kid I wanted to be Isaac Asimov. A physics degree later and a masters in Polymer technology, all the while writing short stories; I was set. I did sell a few tales to niche mags, few and not often but I had my start, became an editor of a couple of sci-fi Mags which did well, a respected writer but I never seemed to “catch on”
Then, in my forties, I fell in love for the first time in my life.
I wrote a short novel about meeting my love; romance, fantasy, and philosophy liberally mixed in an odd concoction of broken stories. Suddenly the critics loved me, readers loved me. I assume the success was due to the feelings I portrayed. Suddenly an emotional person rather than an aesthete. I cannot tell, but am glad it happened. I think you are right.
What a great story! You wrote from your heart. Thank you for sharing!
It’s funny –we all pressure ourselves to try and become great storytellers as quickly as possible when it takes time to develop those skills, and I think this same pressure is in place regarding voice. We think if we write like author X or Y, that’s the ticket to success, but really, we just need to give ourselves the same space to figure out our own voice as that’s what makes our writing special. Great post!
Thanks, Angela, and yes, we’re all in a hurry (myself included). Finding your voice definitely takes time. I took a workshop once where the leader said you have to write a million words of crap before the work starts coming out right. It never occurred to me at the time, but your comment makes me think that at least part of what they meant was related to finding your voice as a writer. You have to write, a lot, before it happens.
Thank you for this post. It good to read something that says, “Be Yourself.”
You’re welcome! Glad it spoke to you.
Dear Michelle, Loved this post; full of sensible, practical advice. I loved the tip to write out a novel you admire. [I have given away at least 15 copies of All the Light to my students.] I do have a question about voice. I, recently, undertook to give feedback to a beginning writer on a few of her stories. Stories were invariably about sad women, depressed women, depressed enough to weep a lot, but not enough to attempt suicide, or to change their lives. The sadness, predictably, came from disappointment in love. In one case, the promise of a bright career stifled by marriage and children. [She was writing about a traditional society.] I told her that these characters were lifeless, dead even before they started. They were whingeing and moaning. I told her to give these characters “agency” (popular word these days), get them to DO something to take control of their lives. A week later, she submitted another story which was really the same story. Was I interfering with her “voice”?
Interesting question. It sounds to me like you were on the right track with the suggestion of agency. Maybe these characters are too passive. Maybe there’s too much time being spent in their heads—which yes, can speak to voice, but no one wants to read a story about people sitting around thinking. A helpful way to think about both showing and agency is to imagine the story unfolding on a theatre stage. If all we see are people sitting around and thinking about how sad they are—well, that won’t work on the stage, which means it also won’t work on the page (ugh, unintentional rhyme, but hopefully makes sense). Voice is important, but it only goes so far. Fiction also requires characters with goals and something at stake if they don’t get what they want.
Thanks for this awesome post, Michelle! There’s so much pressure to nail voice, because great voice is in high demand, but is so hard to teach (vs. pointing out plot holes that need to be fixed).
Just be yourself on the page is such a great way to look at it.
Yes. Voice is a make-or-break element in a novel for sure. And there’s no denying it’s scary to “just be yourself on the page.” It’s risky. But in the end, isn’t that what makes writing so powerful?
Great advice! I especially love the idea of copying part of a favorite novel by hand. It’s interesting to note how your “hand” will sometimes attempt to inject your own thoughts in lieu of the author’s. That’s very likely your Voice pushing its way in.
I do think – in these days of almost everyone writing a novel – that too much has been interpreted, explained, diagrammed and blue-printed, and that Voice is no exception. As an innate over-thinker, I understand how some things are best left unexamined – or, at least, examined but left untouched. Voice is definitely one of those.
I love the idea of your voice pushing through another author’s words.
And I agree that sometimes we need to keep it simple and get out of the way. There’s so much of craft that can be learned, but there are a few mysteries too, things that take shape on their own. This is an art form, after all.
Michelle, this is brilliant. I think we DO tend to overcomplicate the voice aspect of storytelling. Keep it simple!
Thank you, Becca. I think it’s like most things. When you just relax and allow yourself to be who you are, things tend to be so much easier.