Pro Tip

A personal connection to the story you want to tell can help you create engaging promotional material when your novel is published.

Community Conversation: Finding an Authentic Voice

The Writer Unboxed community weighs in online. Please consider adding your voice by visiting Writer Unboxed. Join the conversation at writerunboxed.com/your-unique-story, and use the password “aip” (all lowercase).

CG Blake: For a writer, finding one’s authentic voice is perhaps the most essential, yet difficult, skill to develop. It can be a multiyear process that requires a deep personal commitment.

I was always attracted to family sagas. Anne Tyler’s work, in particular, resonated with me. Years ago, I did what Robin recommends here and asked myself why. The answer was personal. I was blessed to come from a loving family, but we didn’t do well when it came to sharing our deepest feelings. This can lead to misunderstanding and hurt, something I’ve explored in my own writing. I realized after completing my first novel that subconsciously the book was about me and my hopes, dreams, and fears, though the story doesn’t resemble my own at all. A writer’s voice must be his own. As Judy Garland said, “Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.”

Robin LaFevers: CG, thank you for providing such an elegant example of exactly what I was talking about! And we are so in agreement about the multiyear deep commitment.

I am struck by your journey to find answers to these questions and how hard it can be to identify our own issues when we come from a happy family background. It can feel like digging up dirt on people we love—but it’s not. It’s exactly as you said—a way to find why certain themes and issues resonate and a way to see how those issues color our worldview and personal journeys.

Vaughn Roycroft: I’ve received feedback in the past about my wordiness or the density of my prose. And although my gut told me it was correct and that I needed to simplify, a deeper part of me mourned the possibility that I would somehow lose an essential component of my voice. I’ve been working on a rewrite with this in mind, but at the onset I’d decided that I would focus on the essence of the story itself, voice be damned.

Now, with the illumination you offer here, I’m starting to see so many elements of my voice that extend way beyond wordiness. I can see how my setting embodies both my hope for the enlightening power of civilization as well as my almost primal desire to withdraw from it. It reveals my faith that there is something real and pure in “legend,” that something fundamentally true can be found in ancient cultural lore.

As for theme, I’d known I was delving into issues of finding loyalty and honor even amongst the ugliness of an era. I’d kept a one-eyed side view on what I call “rescue love”—the deepening of romantic love for someone who’s somehow rescued you. But after reading this, I’m seeing a throughline of issues for my protagonist that I know are born in the dark stuff I normally hide, from bearing high expectations to then feeling lucky (and thereby a fraud) and finally to feeling undeserving. This brings one back to a need to prove oneself worthy of those original expectations—a wonderfully vicious circle for series work.

Robin LaFevers: Vaughn, I think you’ve identified one of the key epiphanies about voice: realizing that it is not just the words we use and our syntax but so very much more. And, as you’re discovering, the words might even be the least of it.

I am struck by the voice elements you’ve discovered in yourself, as they are elements that speak to me as well. And I know I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: Writing will frog-march us, kicking and screaming, to the very edges of our soul and back. I’m not sure whether to apologize or wish you bon voyage!

Paula Cappa: I was struck, Robin, by your comment: “Think about how your voice changes when you talk to different people.” Is that ever true! But that’s me as a person. In fiction, I, the author, tend to vanish. I feel like voice comes from and is created by the character’s vision and style on the page. Your piece makes me wonder if I have a voice outside of my characters. Maybe there are two parts to voice: the character’s voice and the author’s voice. Then there’s writing style.

Robin LaFevers: Paula, this flummoxed me for a long time because I wrote such distinctly different books, for different age groups and with wildly different tones. I couldn’t understand how I could have an author voice when my story voices were so different. And that’s when I realized that our voices change radically when we talk to different people or when we talk about different subjects, relaying a joke versus conveying a painful childhood memory.

I think there are three distinct layers to voice: the author’s voice, the story voice, and the character’s voice.

The author voice is our universal voice, the one that infuses everything. Even though I think I write wildly different stories, people who know me well can always “hear” me in all of my work, although it sounds invisible to me.

Story voice is the type of story we’re telling and to which audience. The thing is, we all have many aspects to our personality: funny sides, serious sides, dark sides, places where our deepest fears reside. To me, it makes perfect sense that our body of work will cover more than one side of ourselves; thus, we’re able to produce different flavors of stories.

However, while we might vary in whether we want to focus on humor or seriousness or hope or despair, what makes us laugh or cry or hope or despair is part of the essence of who we are, and that will very likely remain constant throughout the body of our work. Whether it is center stage or part of the backdrop is the variable.

Then, lastly, there is character voice, which I think is probably the most conscious voice we’re aware of, at least initially.

Dee Willson: If I am not enthralled by the characters, if I can’t hear their distinct voices or feel their plight, their story, then how can I expect someone else (a reader) to feel it? Life is too short to spend countless days, months, or years writing a story you aren’t so deeply invested in that the only way out is to get it down on paper. Love every minute of it.

Robin LaFevers: Yes. So very much yes to that, Dee! In fact, that needs to be quoted and shared and posted and tweeted.

Donald Maass: When I ask editors what they’re looking for, the most common response is “a strong voice.” It’s a vague term, but it means style, strength of prose, and distinctive storytelling that remains consistent from book to book.

For writers in our age of intimate point of view, though, voice in a practical sense means characters’ voices. Like everyone, characters can be lazy. Their voices can be like easy-listening radio, lulling and unchallenging. Thus, it’s wise to push not just yourself but your characters out of their comfort zones.

Same goes for making a story personal. Like authors, characters will avoid what is uncomfortable to reveal. What are they failing to see or accept about themselves? What do they not want to admit or own? We have layers to peel through. So do they.

Also, an author’s reasons for telling a story may not be a character’s reasons for being in that story. Writing the story can, in a sense, be a dialogue between author and characters, each arguing points and insisting on the story’s meaning. What do you need your protagonist to understand? What is your protagonist trying to tell you that you don’t want to believe?

Robin LaFevers: Wow. Wow. This is something I’ve been in the process of recognizing for the last couple of years. It is one of the most fascinating aspects of writing, and the most terrifying: to realize the journey you created is not precisely the one you’ll end up going on. And, yes, the discovery of that as it unfolds on the page between you and the characters—characters whom you were supposed to be in complete control of—can create some very interesting revelations.

Vijaya Bodach: Robin, while reading your analogy of peeling layers of skin, I kept thinking how this applies also to each revision I make. I am bolder, truer in my writing. I have a story that is in its seventh draft, and although all the elements were there, now it has a depth that wasn’t in the exploratory draft. And it was during revisions that I was able to cut to its core.

I discovered my voice by writing a lot. It began early in childhood because of our fractured family, but thus began a lifelong habit of writing letters, sharing myself, and clarifying my thinking through writing. I wonder if that is why I am afraid of giving words to a story in my head that frightens me. Perhaps I do not want to discover something dark and horrible within myself, and whatever it is can stay buried if I never write it.

Robin LaFevers: Or, Vijaya, perhaps it’s a searchlight, showing you where you have some deep personal work to do in order to truly free yourself of something and begin to move forward. That seems to me to be one of the functions of engaging in a creative form like writing. The act of creating changes us and makes us stronger, draws us closer to wholeness.

Pro Tip

Be authentic. Write what you are meant to write, the way it pleases you to write it. Our chemical wiring programs our attraction response to others. In this same way, we are attracted to the books we love, the programs we watch, and the colors we wear because we are meant for them. The same is true for the art we produce.