Writing With A Voice

If there is one thing for me to focus on in my career, education and life, it has been to become a better writer. Pieces capture me most because of the voice that they portray sometimes.

As a Journalism student trying to indulge myself in all sorts of styles of writing, what always sticks out, no matter how mundane or insignificant the subject is, is the writers ability to pull off a compelling voice.

I’m sure we as readers all know that voice. The voice is intelligent. The voice makes you chuckle. The voice is charming. The voice speaks out in your head with a confident and captivating tone. Spending long nights trying to perfect written pieces and spending work days churning out regular mundane news writing has made me become obsessed with the voice.

I heard the voice in a New York Times report on the latest Ebola outbreak. I heard the voice on a article on programming and email. I heard the voice on a Reddit commenters story about the time he was stabbed by a crazed man wielding a Katana on a particularly unfortunate night out.

There are different kinds of voices, some are particularly funny, others filled with intellect and large vocabularies.

But the common factor in all those pieces was that I didn’t know anything about the subject in particular when iI took the plunge and decided to go ahead and read them. The voice in them was that of a skilled story teller though. The voice managed to capture my interest, and it rewarded the time I gave it by giving me some anecdote of knowledge back. Both the writer and the reader gained thanks to the voice.

This seems to be the height of Journalism to me. To report on something so left-field, so out there that you probably never gave it an ounce of thought, but to do it in a way that is memorable simply with how it was written and delivered.

So I wonder, is the voice something that just comes naturally to some people? Is it as effortless as just typing out the words on your computer in an endless stream. Is the voice something that can be learnt or forced? What can I do to be one of those brilliant writers who can pull off such a compelling narrative in a well ordered set of words. All of it on a subject I’d never given a care for, and one that I can be guaranteed to care about later on.

To take it further, it makes me wonder, the voice is great because it captures your attention and your interest and provokes your interest. It does it universally I assume, with thousands of readers if your medium gives you enough publicity. But it does it all in a way that is entirely forgettable.

I think I achieved the voice just once. I tried my hand at writing columns for hte first publication I worked for. The first couple were trash. I assume they were trash because if there’s one thing I understood about the voice at the time, it was that the perfect voice found a balance between being cheesy and being dry. The voice was quirky, but not dumb. Knowing that, my problem was that being afraid of writing cheesy nonsense, all of my work was jsut stoic and boring, even after hours of reading through them and trying to figure out what I could add to throw in some pizazz.

My editor offered the advice of giving up and writing horribly cheesy stuff because typing it out always felt cheesier than it would to a random reader.

I tried that for a bit, but my true experience with the voice was when my own perfect idea for the weeks column popped into my head, and I immediately started writing it out. Within 20 minutes I had the only piece of Journalism to this date that I’m proud of. And it was a measly little column on a silly internet trend of posting videos of jumping in the snow nude in Southern Canada. Talk about forgettable.

This entire post has been one of those 20 minute endeavours of seamless uninterrupted writing. I cherish these special moments. They come at unpredictable times, tonight’s came at 1am while I couldn’t sleep.

Most importantly, I cherish them because as a verbal story teller, I’m one of the worst. When I tell stories out loud, I forget the main points, put emphasis on the wrong bits, and throw in terribly abrupt endings that welcome uncomfortable silence. So naturally, I take to writing so that I have more time to properly articulate myself.

To leave you with anything from this jumble of words, it’s that anyone can achieve writing with a voice. The voice is in all of us, we all know how to be dramatic in our own unique ways. For some, the pursuit is in honing your writing skills so you can write with a better voice and achieve the charming narrative as often as possible.

But for me right now, and many others, the true beauty of the written word comes when you grab any second of inspiration by the throat, like I did with my column, and like I’ve at least tried to do right now. Those split second thoughts and ideas, they are true art of the mind.