15.1: What is Voice?

'Voice' refers to the individuality of your writing. It's also referred to as 'style' i.e. writing style. Just like you can distinguish different people's voices in a room, you should be able to distinguish different authors' writing voices out of a pile of texts.

Sol Stein says voice has two components: 'the originality of what is said and the originality of the way it is said.'³⁰⁵

Like speaking voice, there are a multiple indicators of writing voice:

1. Vernacular, formality/colloqiualism, syntax and figures of speech;
2. More reliance on concrete or abstract language;
3. Inward looking (e.g. 'I' focused) or outward looking ('others', 'objects' and 'outsides');
4. Serious, detached, emotional or light, witty, jovial;

If you want an even clearer indicator of 'voice,' take different works and try reading paragraphs out loud (or listening to someone else read them out loud). Some styles sound natural spoken, whereas others do not survive the leap from thought to speech.

Ben Yagoda³⁰⁶explains: There was a spoken language before there was a written language, and good writing has always been intimately connected to the ear, whether the short sentences of Hemingway or the near-endless periods of Samuel Johnson and David Foster Wallace.

Another term for this is the 'middle style'; sometimes it's claimed to be “transparent” prose. That's because it's clear, precise, and concise and doesn't call attention to itself.

William Hazlitt gave it some other names, and a good characterization, back in 1821:

He also gives an example of voiceless – soulless – writing:

It has all the telltale signs of mindless writing: wordiness, clichés, and catchphrases poorly used; subjects and verbs that don't line up; incorrect use of words; faulty parallelism.

The purpose of style is not merely to sound “amusing or lyrical or emotive or profound or fun” but to:³⁰⁸

1. Gain the audience's attention
2. Hold their interest
3. Win their long-term confidence so that they keep reading.

15.2: How to Create Voice

You create your own writing voice/style in two ways:

(1) Writing

The only way you can critique and develop your own writing is by actually writing and read and critically appraise what you've written, sometimes months or years after writing it. By doing so, you will attune yourself to your existing style and be able to decide what you like and dislike about it. This will inform the styles which you subsequently are inspired by.

For instance, if you are concerned your writing waffles too much, you might take special notice of concise writing styles, and make effort to emulate them.

(2) Reading

Read and expose yourself to different writing styles. The styles you incorporate will include writers you naturally write like, and writers you wish you wish to emulate. Somewhere in between you'll find a happy medium. If you read a lot, you will also pick up lots of writing tricks and techniques from different authors - who, you won't particularly wish to write like - but which you will minutely be inspired by in very select ways. You will also critically learn the styles you don't want to emulate, and you should take note what those styles did which made you dislike them.

15.3: Be Quiet

The best voice/style is the least noticeable. Like symbolism, voice is not something you want shoved in your face while you're reading – it's something you appreciate in afterthought.

Bickham says:³¹⁰

Mittelmark and Newman agree, saying:³¹¹words which draw attention to themselves draw attention away from the story you are telling and remind the reader that they are reading a story.

Writing only works "when both parties [reader and writer] agree beforehand on what words mean."

They advise to choose only the word/s which are the best to express the idea.

There's no point consciously striving for style, William Sloane says.³¹²Your style should recreate your tone of voice. The paradoxical thing about style is it's like an accent; you shouldn't be aware of your own.

Don't worry too much about actively modifying your writing style (and if you are consciously striving to write in a ‘voice', then it isn't your real voice). Focus more on writing in a natural, comfortable way, Also, realise that writing style may surface as much in your editing technique as your writing technique – which words you remove and how you rearrange and re-write your sentences.

15.4: Contrast

If you're interested in learning what your writing voice sounds/reads like, try these two activities: Get a book by an author whose voice you're familiar with, choose a random chapter and attempt the write the subsequent chapter. If you already know what happens in the subsequent chapter, your chapter will probably mimic that, and the difference will be the pure writing styles of the author and yourself.

If you haven't yet read the subsequent chapter, this activity will still work, but it will also show you as the differences in structuring, plotting and pacing, between the author and yourself, which is also informative (works better if you haven't read the subsequent chapter).

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