Finding Your Voice
Seven Tips To Develop Personality in Your Writing
Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.
— Charlie Parker
Musician Charlie Parker knew something about personality in art. He was one of the pioneers of bebop — a form of jazz known for technical difficulty, complex improvisation, and rich, fluid harmonies and rhythms. What does that mean, though? If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn? Or, in our case, it won’t come out of your pen?
Whether you’re writing a critical essay, a technical how-to book, or a sci-fi novel, writing is an art. Done well, the personality is evident. Sometimes it’s even memorable. You can hear it in music when, for example, you recognize a Charlie Parker solo or a Beatles’ song you’ve never heard. You see it in art. You can probably tell easily if a painting is by Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dali. For that matter, even food has a personality. What comes to mind if I mention Mexican or Thai food?
It should be no surprise that personality and voice is also important in writing. The trick, however, is figuring out how to develop that voice and personality.
✨ If you want the short, magic formula version, it’s this: read a lot and write even more. ✨
But magic formulas always have more going on than what the viewer sees.
Parker spent countless hours practicing and learning so he could translate his experiences into music. The Beatles honed their craft by playing four to six shows a night at a club in Hamburg, Germany in 1960.
What Is Voice In Writing, and How Does It Apply to Technical Books?
The website Literary Terms states that voice “expresses the narrator or author’s emotions, attitude, tone and point of view, through artful, well thought out use of word choice and diction. A voice may be formal or informal; serious or lighthearted; positive or negative; persuasive or argumentative; comical or depressed; witty or straightforward; objective or subjective — truly, voice can reflect any and all feelings and perspectives.”
Let’s make an important distinction here. There is character voice and author voice. Character voice most often refers to the characters’ personalities in fiction. Author voice, on the other hand, refers to how the writer tells the story. An author’s voice comes across in fiction (think Stephen King or Toni Morrison) and in nonfiction (memoirs, newspaper editorials, or even technical books).
For now, we’ll focus on the author’s voice. Following are some examples of authors who convey a distinct voice in books from The Pragmatic Bookshelf. The first is from Build a Binary Clock with Elixir and Nerves, by Frank Hunleth and Bruce A. Tate. The book takes readers step-by-step through the process of building a “working project using the techniques used by experts who build software for hardware every day.”
Here’s how the authors introduce the section titled “Build a Blinker Boundary.”
“This section with an awesomely alliterative title will build a boundary on top of our LED layer to blink an LED one time, and then multiple times.”
At the end of the section, they quip:
“The blinking is simple, but the time honored computer-controlled flashing is almost enough to make a budding maker weep for joy.”
Clearly, these authors have a sense of humor and a relaxed yet enthusiastic approach to sharing knowledge.
In Pythonic Programming: Tips for Becoming an Idiomatic Python Programmer, author Dmitry Zinoviev offers his own distinct voice. In discussing “two programming approaches to coding an operation that may fail,” he contrasts the optimistic and pessimistic approaches. He ends the section with this statement:
“Whether to be an optimist and try, or be a pessimist and check, depends on the complexity of the check, the penalty of trying, and your programming philosophy. The former two can be estimated. The latter one is a matter of how you were taught. I cannot help you with that.”
Compared to our first example, his style is much drier, although, in my opinion, quite hilarious. Here’s another example of Zinoviev’s voice from the introduction of Resourceful Code Reuse:
“Code reuse puts into practice the advice of none other than William of Occam (or Ockham, depending on whom you ask). If you and I were philosophers, that alone would suffice.”
Again, there’s an obvious dry wit on display here. And all three of these examples are from very technical books.
Seven Tips To Develop Your Voice
Okay. Here’s the hard part. In order to develop your writing voice, you have to get over yourself a bit. Set aside the ideas that writing has to be a certain way or that it has to be “correct.”
Yes, there are elements that you need to abide by, most of which are there to make your writing more understandable and readable. You need paragraphs. You need periods at the end of sentences. (But you don’t need a double space after periods!)
Those elements have to do with the mechanics of writing, though. When it comes to developing your voice, try these tips.
1. Write like you talk. You may need to forget some of the rules of formal writing for this tip, but it’s important. Write like you’re having a conversation with someone. You aren’t writing a legal opinion or a contract. You’re trying to convey information or a story.
2. Feel free to spread things out. For instance, your paragraphs don’t necessarily need to be three or four sentences.
A paragraph could be just one sentence.
3. Write for someone. Pick someone or even a small group to write for. It could be your neighbor, a student from a class you’ve taught, or your sister-in-law. It doesn’t matter who the person is. The important part is that you can imagine writing specifically for this person. Think about how you can write in a way they’ll enjoy and understand. Think about having dinner with them and telling them how to manage an open source project without their eyes glazing over.
4. Get over the idea of writing something everyone will like. This is another way of saying, just be yourself. First of all, it’s impossible to write something that everyone will enjoy. I promise there are people out there who don’t like reading Ernest Hemingway or Franz Kafka. Beyond that, if you’re writing for everyone, you aren’t writing for someone. You’re not serving your audience.
5. Include your own story. Your readers enjoy getting to know you. You can be a source of knowledge and expertise and still share some of yourself. Personal anecdotes are a wonderful way to connect with readers, especially if that includes some learning experience. How did you get here? Why are you writing this book?
6. Share your mistakes. This may not sound like fun, but it’s also one of the quickest ways to a reader’s heart. Sharing your mistakes makes you human. It shows that you can grow and change. Check out The Hero’s Journey to get a little more in-depth with this idea.
7. Add some humor. You don’t need to be a stand-up comedian. However, a little humor can lighten the atmosphere and help readers get comfortable. Look at the examples from the authors mentioned above. Will they be featured on the next comedy special? Perhaps. I can’t say. Do I feel like I’d be comfortable making a programming mistake if they were watching? Sure. We’d have a good laugh, correct things, and move on.
🌈 Bonus tip: Don’t get defensive or try to explain yourself if a reader doesn’t understand your work. Criticism will be difficult to take. However, you won’t be there to explain what you mean to every person who reads your essay or book. If your readers have questions or aren’t following your thoughts, it’s your job to correct that.
🥇 Extra bonus tip: Don’t get hung up on perfection. You will make mistakes. Your editor will make mistakes. It’s okay. Even Charlie Parker made mistakes. He also made magic with those mistakes.
If you’re interested in submitting a book proposal to The Pragmatic Programmers, read through our Become an Author page and get in touch!
