The Other Invisible!

My newest visitor for the Writer's Weekly Question was someone named "Knowwriter." Being the curious blogger than I am, I looked at Knowwriter's information and discovered her journal Amazing Adventures, which seems to share a common bond with my journal--a weekly writing assignment meme. This week, she asks about the voice we as writers seem to have for ourselves.

Edgar Allen Poe and Dave Barry are at opposite ends of the writing spectrum but if you read their prose, you'd never mistake one for the other. They have distinctive writing voices. My question is how did you develop your writer's voice? Was it a conscious thing that you had to work at or did it come naturally?

This is a great question, but a difficult one to answer. One of the things that my readers (not just the ones online) often comment on, especially with my fiction, is that my use of voice is one of my assets. I do have my voice, and it shows primarily in my academic writing and in my journal writing. My voice changes based on what I am writing.

If I am writing academically or professionally, I tend to sound more serious, more like I do when I'm in the classroom. I also tend to use more complex words and ideas. If I am writing for the journal, I still have a sort of intelligent tone (or at least I attempt to do so), but I also have a "fun" voice that sounds more like me with my friends. I developed my voice by listening to how I sound normally. My writing, particularly my online writing, sounds like I sound everyday. It's my actual real voice. I've met online friends in person before and gotten comments like, "You sound the same as you do online."

When writing fiction, you have to construct other voices as narrators. I like doing this, and because I already practice the listen and write method, I simply listen to what my narrating character is saying and how he or she says it. If I'm the narrator, then I try to keep my voice as unobtrusive as I can and let the characters' dialog do the work. Their voices tell the story much better than I could.

The second part of Knowwrite'squestion is equally challenging. It's hard to know if developing my voice was a natural progression or a concious, learned thing. I've been writing since I was 11, and I've always heard my voice and wrote with my voice going. I've also always heard my characters' voices (yes, it's true--I hear voices in my head.) and made sure they make it to the page. So, I guess it was natural, but I also would guess that as my skill as a writer improved, and my POV changed through the last thirty years, my voice has changed too. I some how doubt that the voice I had in 7th grade, when I wrote my first SF short story, is the voice I would use now to narrate my more mature stories. Unlike in the 7th grade, I now have been exposed to many great authors, and know the true power of voice. I think voice is a continual process. So, at least from my perspective, voice is comes naturally for good writers, but it can be honed, sharpened, and even reshaped by time, experience, and education.

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• #1 Comment from knightbek 
  6/28/06 8:37 AM | Permalink

  What's really interesting about your reply here is that you're talking about how you found your "voices."  Suppose to write well, a person has to have several of them.  Very cool entry, Jess.
  
  Bill, the Wildcat
  http://journals.aol.com/knightbek/TheWildcatsLair/
  http://wildcatslair.blogspot.com/