Voice: The Underdog

When I was six, my grandfather made this pink notebook for me. “Kathleen’s Love Stories” was its title. I wrote some pretty ratty writing in it. A few years later, he and I started writing together; mostly short stories that I’d make up and that he’d edit.

He had been the editor of a small-time magazine in our hometown. After reading something that I’d written, he’d tell me not to use such big words. “It’s bogging your story down. Your voice isn’t coming through.” I'd muddled this over and decided I completely disagreed, at 11 years old. Using big words made me look smart! I now appreciate the lesson my grandfather was trying to teach me.

Voice is probably one of the trickiest things to master as a writer. In theory, it sounds simple. How hard can using your own voice be? But when you sit down and start writing, the autopilot editor in your brain takes over. Then when you’ve read over what you’ve sat down and written, you see that the voice is foreign. Who is it?

The foreign voice weakens the writing.

If you’ve struggled with “finding your voice” in your own writing, look no further for help than Annie Dillard or J.D Salinger. Both authors have extremely different voices, but both are extremely true to their writing. 

Dillard’s novel The Writing Life is one of my personal favorites. Dillard writes of the trials and tribulations of leading life as a writer. She’s brilliant. Salinger wrote Catcher in the Rye, a story with zero plot lead by the lovable fuck-up, Holden. Dillard is whimsical in her writing while Salinger is choppy and blunt. Both styles work for different reasons. Namely, the form of the writing fits the content of the writing.

Writers achieve these different "voices" not just by what is being written, but how it's being written. A writer's sentence structure, grammar, and use of punctuation all influence how a line is internally read. Experiment with these devices. Read them out loud to yourself and make different variations of the same sentence. But most of all, relax. Let your voice come through. It's the best one you've got.