How Do You Find Your Voice As A Music Journalist?
The process involves some personal exploration and definitive editing tactics
When I started writing as a music journalist, many of my inspirations were still at the forefront of my mind. Their influence showed up in my work in the early days. I tried to be icy yet truthful, like Robert Christgau. Sometimes, like Ann Powers, I was passionate about being as critical and subversive as possible. Further, I ultimately wanted to have the pop culture knowledge and genre versatility I admired in Maura Johnston’s work.
These were my heroes, and they still are.
However, over time, I made grammatical shifts they wouldn’t have and made sharp opinions they would be vehemently opposed to. In other words, I started to create with my voice. This voice is still being sharpened and refined today, but it has come a long way since the early days.
When I wrote with the most passion about an article, my voice came through bit by bit. The stories I told that were profoundly personal or connected to my loved ones opened up a perspective and style in my writing that was resoundingly mine. Moments when I needed to take a stance against trends I disagreed with or topics that I felt weren’t thought through entirely, I wrote with my conviction, which further characterized my voice far more.
In this article, I will help budding music journalists discover and continuously distinguish their writing voices. I will break down five secrets to unlocking and properly developing one’s voice over time. I will then discuss how I applied each secret to my writing and how it helped me establish a clear writing voice.
Secret #1: Recollect Your Experiences, The Ones You Lived
Many writers focus on technical skills when you begin your journalism career, but you should look inward. Recognizing your lived experiences as a writer will help provide you with the lens through which you write your stories, album reviews, and essays. Please note that your lens will change as you experience new things and consume different pieces of art.
Therefore, coming to terms with who you are as a person and the series of events that have made you think the way you do will help you develop the perspective from which you write. This lens is far more dynamic than your race or what your parents did for work.
Go deeper than that.
Think about experiences that have brought you immense joy, shaped how you view certain situations or broke your heart.
Take these experiences to help verbalize as closely as you can who you are and what you want to write about as a music journalist. People gravitate towards certain writers because they see their experiences in themselves or empathize with them. Before that occurs, you need to know your experiences, so spend some quality time with yourself and note down those formative experiences.
Some of them may surprise you.
Example: I found my music voice around 2020 and 2021 when I started taking Medium more seriously. The free time I had, thanks to the COVID era, allowed me to write essays about my favorite music memories and music history questions. Outside the hours, I would take my Zoom grad classes, sit in my room, and reflect on brighter days when I was constantly at festivals and surrounded by the music and artists I love.
For instance, I once wrote about how Margo Price gave me a rose at the end of her Governor’s Ball set in my early twenties. I have the rose to this day, and I can even be seen in the YouTube video for the performance. My organic style popped out when I wrote from that perspective, and my natural tone as an author became clearer. The positive feedback I got motivated me to write similar pieces thereafter and not to be afraid of telling truthful stories that entertain people and help them learn new things about the music industry.
Secret #2: Fully Understand What You’re Trying To Achieve
Opportunities arise when you write something impactful for your readers. For instance, a company can ask you to consult them after reading one of your articles. Further, a start-up can ask for your advice after sharing applicable tips in one of your pieces.
While all these opportunities must be considered seriously, you should always have your primary goals in mind. What did you want from writing when no one was reading your work? Have those goals written down somewhere you can easily access. Those goals will keep you honest and focused as you become more successful.
The last thing you want to do is start making decisions primarily due to monetary concerns. The act of following money will often make you very sad and uncommitted to the craft. Avoid those trappings like the plague. Your voice will shine when you write about topics that move your heart.
After writing from the heart for years, people will recognize you as someone who is authentic. People gravitate towards authenticity; they can feel it on their skin when they read your work. If you get good at writing with a clear voice, you will start to receive lifetime supporters.
Example: Very early on, when I started writing more about music, I was getting the most precious email correspondence from students from China, New Zealand, and Nevada who would write to me about how an article affected them. Sometimes, they would talk about how helpful the piece was for a class assignment they were making. I remember feeling shocked initially because I didn’t expect anyone to use my articles academically or feel so close to the piece.
Over time, I started to see a trend and reframed my mission accordingly. From then on, I wrote with students in mind. I constantly thought about the people using my articles as sources for their music essays in other music publications and curious casual listeners who need a more concrete breakdown of the music trends occupying our social media feeds. I wanted to be that bridge for folks who aren’t specialists in the field. I can take them to the higher plane of music history knowledge, but I’ll do it in a fun and digestible way.
I will always be working on it, but since I started, I have honed my voice and how I want the reader to soak in the content. That realization is the reason for all of the sections I divide my articles into. Most of my pieces, especially the essays, can be read in bite-size pieces, and folks can scan through comfortably and razor in on the sections they want to learn more about.
Secret #3: Read Out Loud, Even If It Makes You Uncomfortable
When establishing your voice as a music writer, read your essay out loud. Reading out loud will help you better recognize your writing style. This step may seem odd, but as you read your work out loud, you can hear the difference between others’ work you’re just reading and the stuff you are projecting out again from your thoughts.
You should read it back with the necessary inflections and pauses so that your writing reflects the flow you want.
You should also read it back with the right tone (angry, inspiring, cheerful) so your writing projects your desired mood.
When you read out loud in this intentional way, it will naturally improve your editing.
You can also try this method on different kinds of writing, from essays to album reviews to social media posts.
It’s easy to slip into a form of too informal writing when you practice this method, so be cautious of that challenge. To prevent informal writing from happening, pay attention to the correct grammatical choices to emit the feeling you want in your writing appropriately.
If done correctly, folks will hear your voice when they read just the first few sentences of your work. They won’t even need to read who the author is.
Example: I do an out loud reading for all of my pieces before and after I publish. I remember doing it for the piece about artists I share a birthday with and constantly working on making it sound casual but well-informed. I wanted the content to be there but didn’t want it to cloud the style of the piece. The article needed to feel personal, even with all of the deep historical background I was provided for each artist. I also wanted the astrology fans to have something to chew on and be completely wrapped in.
I accomplished my goal because it’s one of the 2024 articles people love to go back to and discuss. I read the article out loud after it’s out because there’s always something I miss or a sequence of sentences that doesn’t flow the way I originally intended it to. A pro tip for Medium and Substack writers is that the sites read the articles out loud for you, so you can opt for the article to be read in a different voice than yours, which may allow you to catch some more grammatical and flow mishaps.
Secret #4: Ask Close Friends And Family For Input
Your friends and family know you exceptionally well, sometimes better than you know yourself. Our relationship with them leads us to ask them for advice. We typically don’t ask because we don’t know what to do.
We know know what to do.
We just need to hear those steps from outside our heads so that we have no choice but to make the right step. It’s an accountability practice where we need someone else to check on us.
The same works for writing.
While the above steps will get you where you need to be in building a voice, asking a friend or family member for their input further validates the voice you are attempting to project. Family members can also surprise you and tell you that you’re entirely off base because you sound too much like someone else or you’re hiding your true thoughts behind formal writing techniques. Coming out of these handicaps many of us fell into requires someone to throw the buoy your way.
What better person than your friends and family?
What I’m about to state should go without saying, but you should seriously take their advice. Don’t just ask to go back to doing what you were doing. If they passionately try to read your work and give some feedback, at least apply some of it, especially if it’s stuff you knew you needed to do but were too hesitant to change it.
Example: When I talk with artists about their careers, I usually leave time to discuss tough decisions that helped their careers and issues they had to overcome. These interviews are informative for struggling musicians looking to fix frustrating and seemingly immovable career problems.
Many artists tell me how they benefited from mentorship and advice from musicians who were more experienced than them. I always reserve my last question for artists to describe profound advice received and how it affected their careers. I spent significant time looking back and breaking down the lessons from these conversations for my article about finding new audiences for young musicians.
Most of these lessons are from their fellow musicians a little further in their careers. Translating that knowledge and making it accessible to more musicians worldwide is one of my missions as a music journalist. Even after the post was made, some musicians even chimed in with more helpful tips, which I found tremendously valuable to the longevity of the article.
Secret #5: Focus On Quantity At First, Then Move On To Quality
There’s a reason so many people moved west and to the south during the 19th and 20th centuries when gold and oil were projected to be in the ground there. They were willing to dig and excavate every inch of land, hoping to grab some of the liquid and shiny currency for themselves. People dug far and wide across several states to unearth even the tiniest bit of gold or oil.
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The inner workings of your mind work the same way. You can capture your voice, but you must dig behind many walls of self-doubt, judgment, and fear. When you write and publish your work, those inhibitions get softened, and your confidence grows stronger. Your ability to take risks grows, and you look for more opportunities to take on greater challenges. Early writers sometimes mistake the lack of attention they are getting for the lack of quality of their work.
So much of getting eyeballs on your work has close to nothing to do with the work’s content. It’s about marketing, self-branding, finding the right audience, and getting your work in front of the right people. To develop your voice, you have to keep creating, and eventually, you will see some trends you want to keep, trends you want to drop, and trends you want to improve.
Example: In my first couple of years of writing music articles online, I published around 100 articles a year. These pieces would be posted in different Medium publications or isolated online music blogs I ran.
The goal was to develop muscle memory so that I knew how to produce quality content in quick repetition. In the beginning, though, the pieces were just alright, and I was still developing my sound. Focusing on quantity also allowed me to see from afar which articles were collecting the most attention and getting the most clicks.
There would be a dozen or so pieces I could look back on after a week or so and really analyze which ones were doing well. I would take that note, replicate the best practice, and continue producing a lot of content the following week. These small incremental changes helped me build my voice confidently as a writer and gain a following who knew my voice and kept coming back for more of my essays.
The Secrets Are Already Inside Of You
When you combine your experiences, opinions, and preferred grammatical style, you get your writing voice. Take your voice with you everywhere so that even if you’re writing an album review, conducting an interview, or writing an opinion piece, your followers immediately know it's you.
Over time, it will become more natural for you to write in your own voice. Soon, your inspirations will fall to the side, and the most inspired voice you’ll hear in your head while you’re writing is your own. No one can develop a writing voice solo, and you need to learn how to work with your fellow writers, take advice from your friends and family, and soak in the feedback from your readership.
All of their insights will become informative to forming your writing voice, good or bad.
In this piece, I shared five secrets you should adopt to develop your writing voice:
- Secret #1: Recollect Your Experiences, The Ones You Lived
- Secret #2: Fully Understand What You’re Trying To Achieve
- Secret #3: Read Out Loud, Even If It Makes You Uncomfortable
- Secret #4: Ask Close Friends And Family For Input
- Secret #5: Focus On Quantity At First, Then Move On To Quality
When I think about my own voice, I think about how analysis is frequently at the heart of content. I also always prioritize multiculturalism in my work and write with a global tone that often and easily connects disparate genres, periods, and artists from different corners of the world. I write with an urgent sense of unity and togetherness that I’ve lived through as someone who has worked and studied on three continents. I write about the common ground I instinctively know and feel whenever I pen to paper.
Identify your own instincts and project those in your writings. It’s easier than you think—the ideas on the first ones to pop into your head. Just quiet your mind and listen to the voice inside of you, independent of what you watch on TikTok or see on the news. Think about what you believed when you were little, when you first woke up, or when you meditated. Let that voice be the one you share with the world. Once we read that voice, we will finally see you fully as a writer.
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