#10 - On Finding Your Voice in Writing
Even when we start very young, such as at age 12 or 15, we come to writing with a rich inner life. We have had so many thoughts, ideas, fantasies, and opinions. When we first start writing, what we're doing is practicing giving a tangible form to those thoughts. You can see your inner voice on the page. You're used to talking to yourself inside your head, but now that voice is visible to you and it can talk to others. This will feel embarrassing at times, because this voice makes complete sense inside your head and is an excellent orator. Everything it says is wonderful and easy to understand. When you put this voice on paper or screen, however, things seem clunky, and you might cringe to see what your inner voice looks like when written down.
This is normal. It's like learning to ride a bicycle. You will fall, you will zigzag your way down the road instead of going in a smooth line. Your body is getting used to the movement, to instructing your legs to pedal alternately, to balancing your entire weight on what is definitely not the solid ground. There is no way to get better except pedaling until it comes naturally to you, until you can ride around your entire neighbourhood without thinking about what your legs are doing. It becomes muscle memory. Soon, it'll become as easy and natural as walking. You won't have to think about it. It won't feel clumsy.
The same goes with writing. It is uncomfortable and uncertain at first. But your goal is to keep doing it until you become comfortable seeing your own voice on paper. Does it get easy? It depends on what you're writing. If you ask me to write about writing or about a book I love, I'll have no problems. But if you ask me to write a story or an essay about something personal? I will struggle, I will proceed slowly, and I will doubt myself. As Gene Wolfe once said to Neil Gaiman, "You never learn how to write a novel, Neil. You just learn how to write the novel you are on."
How long does it take to get used to seeing your voice on paper? It depends on you, and how much you practice. The more you write, the easier it becomes. You can't force it; as cliche as it has become to say it, but it is true that your voice develops naturally as you write, just as you learn to sit, crawl, walk, and run as you grow. There are no shortcuts to it; you can't make a 2-month baby walk through training or sheer force of will. You can't force your voice to stop wasting time and grow up already. You have to be consistent and you have to give it time.
And voice is something that's always developing, just like you're always growing until the day you're dead. You won't get to a point where you would have written a certain number of words or essay or stories, and you'll say, "Ah, so that's my voice," and then write that way for the rest of your life. And that's a good thing! You'll always keep getting better, and you'll learn to like what you have to say. Won't it be boring otherwise?
Finding your voice isn't a specific task, like "write a sonnet about bananas" or "fill one page with 'I will' statements. Just focus on writing. Get those 500 words down. Don't look at them ever again if you don't want to. Write, then return tomorrow, and write again, and repeat. Soon, it'll be easy, Soon, you'll like your voice. Soon, you'll have a lot of words that you could or couldn't edit and publish, because you would have understood the fundamental truth of writing as beginner, of working on any piece of writing: all the first draft has to do is to exist. You have to focus on simply bringing the words into existence. That's the only way you will find your voice.