How to find your voice for your self-help book

This is the final post in a series giving you free extracts from my book: How to Write a Self-Help Book.

In this one, I give you ways of writing authentically in your own voice.

To start off, have a read of these two extracts from different self-help guides.

From Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, by Elizabeth Gilbert.

‘The patron goddess of creative success can sometimes seem like a rich, capricious old lady who lives in a giant mansion on a distant hill and who makes really weird decisions about who gets her fortune. She sometimes rewards charlatans and ignores the gifted. She cuts people out of her will who loyally served her for their entire lives, and then gives a Mercedes to that cute boy who cut her lawn once. She changes her mind about things. We try to divine her motives, but they remain occult. She is never obliged to explain herself to us. In short, the goddess of creative success may show up for you, or she may not. Probably best, then, if you don’t count on her, or attach your definition of personal happiness to her whims.’

From The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, by Mark Manson.

‘Now here’s the problem: our society today, through the wonders of consumer culture and hey-look-my-life-is-cooler-than-yours social media, has bred a whole generation of people who believe that having these negative experiences — anxiety, fear, guilt, etc. — is totally not okay. I mean, if you look at your Facebook feed, everybody there is having a fucking grand old time. Look, eight people got married this week! And some sixteen-year-old on TV got a Ferrari for her birthday. And another kid just made two billion dollars inventing an app that automatically delivers you more toilet paper when you run out. Meanwhile, you’re stuck at home flossing your cat.’

Now think, how do the extracts compare in tone and voice? Both are to the point, delivering hard-to-accept truths in a humorous way. But they do it differently.

Elizabeth Gilbert’s passage is full of understated humour and comes across as caring, literary, and thoughtful. You can almost see her delivering it while sitting on a sofa, giving advice to a friend.

Mark Manson’s, however, takes a more bullish approach. In my mind I see him holding forth in a bar, drink in hand, while he regales his advice to anyone who will listen.

These differences are important, because when we read a personal development book we’re not just learning new stuff, we’re also getting to know the author.

What kind of person are they? Can we trust them? And would we want to work with them as a client one day?

That’s why your book should lift the lid on who you are.

You might find this idea a little exposing, but I’m not suggesting that you reveal your innermost personal secrets. I’m just saying that it’s helpful if your book reads as if it’s from you and not from anyone else.

And this comes down to your book’s voice and tone.

Your voice

Your writing voice is how you use language. The things you say that are unique to you — those word combinations that are yours alone.

When you’ve found your voice, it becomes one of your greatest assets as an author, because it’s what will animate the stories you tell and the advice you give.

It will make them come alive.

There’s a huge amount of advice out there about how to find your ‘writing voice’ (I know, I’ve looked). But honestly, I think that most of it makes the process seem more complicated than it really is. You don’t need to read a lot of articles or do countless exercises to find your voice; you only need to focus on the following.

How you speak

When you help people for a living, you’re used to talking to them. So the next time you’re writing some advice in your book, just try writing it as you’d speak to them.

When you’ve finished you’ll need to formalise it, making the passage grammatically correct and substituting some words with others so that the sentences flow. You might even need to move your sentences around if necessary.

But whatever you end up with will sound more authentically you than if you had ignored the speaking part of your voice.

Where you stand

Where are you positioning yourself in relation to your readers?

Are you a cheerleader, encouraging them from the sidelines? A leader, drawing them forwards from the front? Or standing next to them, with a hand around their shoulders?

You can see how your tone of voice should reflect the kind of relationship you want to have with them.

If it’s a cheerleader, you’ll want to be upbeat and positive; if it’s a leader, you’ll want to be authoritative; and if you’re standing alongside your readers, you’ll want to be friendly and encouraging.

Of course, you might take any of these approaches at different places in your book — in fact you probably should. But thinking about where you stand can be a big help in forming your voice, because it tells you a lot about how you see your relationship with your readers.

The words and phrases you love

We each of us have our favoured ways of expressing ourselves. Hold on to yours — it’s precious. Don’t ever feel that you must give up on who you are in order to fit a template of what you assume a self-help book writer is supposed to sound like.

I find this happens a lot with my book coaching clients when they first start working with me; they can sometimes write in a stiff and formal way. It’s understandable, because they have a vision of their most feared schoolteacher standing over their shoulder, red pen twitching.

But what really draws our readers to our work is when we abandon the ‘bookish’ approach and speak to them as human beings instead.

If you look at the two extracts with which I started this, you can see what I mean about word choice.

Elizabeth Gilbert’s vocabulary is relatively literary, with words such as ‘capricious’ and ‘charlatans’ making an appearance. She’s assuming that her readers know what they mean and isn’t afraid to mix them up with everyday words and phrases like ‘cute’ and ‘She changes her mind about things’.

Mark Mason’s approach is more colloquial throughout; he uses words like ‘okay’ and ‘etc.’ His phrases are also more conversational, such as when he writes: ‘some sixteen-year-old . . . And another kid . . .’

The point is that after reading even a short extract from their books we feel as if we’ve become acquainted with the authors because they expressed themselves in a way that was right for them.

You might be wondering whether it’s okay for some of your readers not to like your distinctive voice. What if it turns them off?

I can appreciate that this would be uncomfortable for you, but think about it this way. It’s a similar concept to not writing your book for everyone, in that you’ll never please every reader.

It’s far more important to speak directly to the ones who ‘get’ you and who might want to work with you after they’ve finished your book, than it is to cater for all potential readers. Hiding your personality never pays dividends in the long run.

What are your favourite words and phrases? Try writing them down in a list, without judgement. It’s normal to feel a little insecure about the vocabulary we use day-to-day because it can seem pedestrian, but that’s only because it’s familiar to us.

To others, it might be just what they need to help them get to know us.

Your tone

You have a long-awaited evening planned with a friend this weekend and are looking forward to it. An hour before you’re due to leave the house, you receive this text message from them: I can’t see you tonight, let’s rearrange.

It sounds a bit cold and rude, doesn’t it? But what if they’d written this instead? Really sorry, something’s come up and I can’t make it anymore. What a pain. Can you do Tuesday instead?

Now you’re feeling more understood. The difference between the two is in the tone, which in turn is created by the choice of words and the sentence structure.

Your book’s tone is important because it creates the ‘mood’ of your book, thereby influencing how people feel when they’re reading it. Tone also helps your book to be memorable, because your readers have an emotional hook to hang your information on.

You’ll create a certain tone whether you try to or not, so it’s worth making sure that it’s the one you want.

Many successful self-help guides have an upbeat tone because they want their readers to feel enthusiastic about change. When we feel positive, we’re more likely to entertain the idea of doing things differently. Sometimes this can be achieved through humour, but more often it’s created through the use of everyday language, short and simple sentences, and the sense of commitment to their readers that the author puts across.

So how does this work?

Vocabulary — is it everyday, formal, literary, or casual?
Phrases — are they standard, convoluted, short and sharp?
Punctuation — are your sentences long and flowing, or short and to the point?
Imagery — is it humorous, outlandish, traditional, innovative, or something else?

In summary, if you want to write authentically in your own voice, you need to know how you speak, where you stand, the words and phrases you love, and decide what tone to use.

And if you want to buy a copy of How to Write a Self-Help Book, here’s where to click.