Classic Writing Advice Revisited — Find Your Voice

Your voice is not a lost dog. If you walk around the park shouting its name, it’s not going to come running to you.

‘Find your voice’ is not just bad advice. It is advice that completely misapprehends the writer’s work.

Every piece of writing has a voice. Finding the right voice with which to write that piece is an essential part of what writers do. Success or failure in finding it separates good writers from bad. However, it is absurd to think that a writer has one voice which they should apply to all their writings. The hallmark of a good writer is the facility to move between voices. The voice of a personal essay will be different from the voice of a noir detective novel will be different from a comedy of manners. Good writers can write in all these modes using different voices.

People who say ‘find your voice’ don’t understand the fundamental truth of style.

Style is just a strategy. The good writer chooses a writing style that aligns with the aim of the piece of writing at hand.

The opposite of that — ‘finding a voice’ and then applying it over and again to every scenario that comes across your desk — is madness.

Because people harp on about finding your voice this can be a hard fact to realize. I didn’t grasp it until I read a book named Exercises in Style by the French writer Raymond Queneau. The book consists of 99 retellings of a very short story (less than a page long). Each retelling is told in a different style. Some of these are very simple variations. For instance, telling the story in the past tense and then telling in the present tense. Some are more ambitious (and not a little ridiculous) like telling the story in the style of a comedy opera or through the use of onomatopoeia. At the extreme the story is told through mathematical notation, becoming unreadable. What Queneau is demonstrating is that the writer has practically limitless options as to how to tell a story. Even the simplest story invites the writer to choose between numerous ways of telling.

In practice, the writer rarely sits at their desk weighing up the merits of writing in the style of an opera buffa versus in the free and indirect style. But all writers have to make basic choices like what tense to write in. Queneau’s book makes plain what is often unspoken: that these big facts of writing are choices made by the writer. A common observation made of learner writers is that they lapse in between the past and present tense without realizing it. This is a sign that the writer hasn’t even made the clear choice in their mind about how they are going to approach this piece particular of writing. They are writing without first making the choices that will decide the success or failure of the piece at hand.

Writing is choices. Style is a commitment to a set of choices. Voice is a commitment to a set of choices.

This is always true. It is especially true with first person narration. And even more true in books which have multiple first person narratives, like William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

When a book is told in the first person, voice is all the reader has to hold onto. So it is imperative that the writer make a set of coherent decisions about that character and their voice and then stick to them.

Writing is discipline.

I remember watching an interview with Bret Easton Ellis in which he described the writing of American Psycho, a novel which is related in the first person by the protagonist, Patrick Bateman. He said that whilst writing the book he kept a sign on his desk reminding him not to use any similes or metaphors. Patrick Bateman is a narcissist and a psychopath. He doesn’t have a poetic sensibility. He doesn’t have a sensibility at all. Therefore his voice contains no metaphors or similes. Sometime Ellis would reread the manuscript and find similes and metaphors that had slipped in and then he would delete them.

This is an example of good writing.

There are writers who make a commitment to a voice and run with it. Eimear Mcbride. Ernest Hemingway. Cormac McCarthy. Virginia Woolf. This is not a bad thing. But even writers known for having a singular voice are less committed to it than their reputations imply.

Virginia Woolf’s novels are written in a different voice from her essays. This might seem like a moot point. It’s not. Woolf could have written her essays in a stream of consciousness style and written her novels in formal structured English. She chose not to.

Even within bodies of writing that have a very distinctive voice — like Cormac McCarthy’s — there is a lot more diversity of voice and style than surface readings suggest.

You can be certain that these writers didn’t magically find the voice they were known for. They worked on it. That work consisted of making a set of choices and then sticking to them. Think of Ernest Hemingway at his desk, culling adjectives.

A final note on voice.

As you make your way in the writing world a lot of people will comment on your voice and how great it is that you’ve found it.

Do not tell these people they’re talking nonsense. Smile and nod. Move on with your day.