If you read how-to manuals for writing, one of the frustrations you will encounter is that the term voice is thrown about with abandon. Publishers want "fresh, new voices"; you are implored to "develop your voice"; you will be advised not to "compromise your voice." You know what a voice is in spoken language, but how do you develop one in your writing?
Basically, your written voice is the unique way you put together words into coherent streams of thought. A strong written voice is as distinctive as DNA. A reader can glance at words you’ve thrown together on a page and have a good idea who wrote them without glancing at the byline. For a demonstration of written voice, cruise the blogs and note the different styles of writing. Mark Shea, Amy Welborn, Kathy Shaidle, Jeff Miller, and Tom Kreitzberg are all hugely successful Catholic bloggers with instantly recognizable "voices." I submit that one reason for their success is that they have developed powerful "voices" that set them apart from the rest of the congregation in St. Blog’s Parish. When you visit their blogs, you’re not just there for the links but for their "take" on the day’s events. That’s the power of "voice."
So, how do you develop a written voice? Do you plunge into writing your manuscript, hoping that one will emerge over the next 80,000 words or so? Sure, if you want to remain unpublished. As Jimmy has noted in his recent series of posts on How Not To Get Published, the best way to remain unpublished is to try to write a book before you’ve had any experience at writing.
If, for some inexplicable reason, you’d rather eventually be published, here’s another idea for developing a voice: Start a blog. Even if you keep it as a more-or-less "private" online journal where you write a post or two a day, you’ll be exercising your voice. Blogging will do several things: You’ll be exercising your voice; you’ll be writing on a regular basis; and you’ll be overcoming the "stage fright" that can hinder your writing. The last is one of the steepest hurdles in voice development because if you are timid about how your thoughts sound to others then you are going to be timid about experimenting with your word choice and with how you construct sentences, paragraphs, articles, chapters, and so on. Regular public writing, even for a very small audience, is one means to overcome that.
Or you could pour out thousands of words into manuscript form, stuff the pages in a Jiffy bag, and post them to all the New York slush piles.
Humm.
The problem with this advice is that the voice that does just fine for non-fiction may not work for fiction. And vice versa.
Indeed, whatever the editors say, your best option might be a voice that gets itself out of the way of the story.
And also if you are blogging, you are in public. The experiments you might need to find your voice — you might be less inhibited by the lack of eyes. (You don’t have to send it off to publishers.)
What I would advise for developing a style:
1. Read. A lot. Read works in the genre you want to write, and works outside it. Read in particular writers who are noted for their style — though you don’t have to analyze it. Perhaps even more important, read old books. I don’t advise starting with Shakespeare; you will find his English much easier if you work your way back in time, through the Victorian era, through the seventeenth century, and eventually to the Elizabethean. Gives you an overview of what English can do.
2. Know your tools. This falls into two main categories, vocabulary and grammar.
a. vocabulary is best picked up by step 1, reading a lot, but you want to know words.
b. Grammar is not necessary, in that you don’t have to know a passive voice from a gerund used as the direct object of a subordinate clause to write. However, it helps when talking with other writers. More important, it lets you analyze your sentences.
3. Write a lot. You might AS AN EXERCISE (do not inflict these on editors) write pastiches of other writers’ styles. It can teach you a lot about what English can do, and how to get it to do it.
A few comments…
– Don’t set out to find your voice. Like anything, it’s something that simply happens. If you make it too conscious of an effort, it won’t sound genuine.
– Grammar can be useful if you want to hone your craft. However, it’s more important to develop an inner ear for language. As Mary said about vocabulary, you can develop the inner ear through reading.
– Listen to how people really speak, not how we interpret their speech. As meaning makers, we tend to fill in a lot of gaps, much of it based on the context of a conversation. You have to strike the right balance when you write. Too many details will make a conversation sound stilted. Not enough detail will cause your readers to get lost.
An additional note about vocabulary.
Reading vocabulary is a start, but it doesn’t do you any good to know ‘yield’ and ‘surrender’ when you run across them in other people’s writing, if you automatically grab ‘give up’ for your own. You have to learn to chose between the possibilities.