Dear Writer, Here's How You Find Your Voice

Okay, dear viewer, you want to find your voice—and today I’ll show you a few ways to do just that.

A few days ago, I published a piece on Substack that talked about assembling my final thesis for poetry school, a collection of poems that I had written during my two years in the program. While I was reflecting on that experience, I reread the letter my advisor wrote to me after it was all done. 

As she reflected on our time working together and on the final collection that I had put together, she wrote, “I’m always struck by how much manuscripts resemble their owners, and here is no exception. There is a quiet surface here that at times hides a twinkling eye, an anguished heart, and adventurer, a metaphysicist…” and then went on to describe various features she observed in my work, pointing to things like the poems’ “unflinching witness,” “benighted anguish,” “exhilarating, almost effervescent alertness,” “wit and a homely—in the old fashioned sense of like one’s own home—rendering of comfort and pleasure and stability,” and a “deceptively casual-voiced exploration of otherworldly universes of the abyss and the human dread of change.” She then said, “If the voice wasn’t so steady, reliable, and sane, we might really feel a bit vertigo-struck here!”

This is not just a ploy to say nice things about myself under the cover of nice things someone else said about me, though.

Kaput: What’s that? You need someone to say mean things about you? How much time do we have?

That’s a very helpful offer, bud, but we’ll have to take a raincheck.

Kaput: Fine. Somebody get this guy a world-class rainer-on-parades medal…

Anyway, the point is that, my advisor, while navigating the highs and lows and twists and turns of my work, found a reliable anchor in my voice. Great, you might be thinking, we know voice is important, and we want it—so how do we get it?

Well, the interesting thing to me anyway is that I did not set out to find my voice. In fact, if you asked me last week how important I thought voice was, I might even say not very. But the simple reality is that, at least in the eyes of an expert reader, I had developed a voice—and it was doing really important work to hold my collection together. And, though I wasn’t thinking about it at the time, I can look back and retrace the steps that got me there, the practical things that helped me, even unwittingly, to develop a voice strong enough to sustain a variegated collage of poems.

Before we get into that, though, I think it’s important to clarify what I mean by voice. Part of the reason that I don’t find it to be a very useful term is because it’s not used very consistently—so let’s give it a smidge of theoretical integrity so that we can do something with it.

Kaput: Theoretical integrity, huh? Well, I guess even on this show there’s a first time for everything…

Thanks again, bud. But, when we think about voice in writing, it seems like a natural and obvious thing to start with voice not in writing. What is your voice? In a simple sense, it’s the sound that your vocal folds make when they vibrate—the sound of you talking. 

And I don’t know a lot of people who are in the habit of verbalizing language who struggle to find their voice—your voice is what it is, it’s an irreducible product of you, so unavoidably unique that you can use voiceprints for security just like fingerprints. Again, in a general sense, you don’t need to find your voice—from the moment air oscillates in your larynx, you just have one, plain and simple. 

Now, writing is not speaking, but this is the other reason that I don’t find the heartburn over a writer’s voice to be that interesting: my thought has tended to be that every writer has a voice by virtue of being a human being who writes. What do you mean you need to find a voice—you can’t help but have one!

But, like I just said, writing isn’t speaking. And the pressures that we put on ourselves as writers are different from the ones we put on ourselves as talkers. Sure, any number of us for any number of reasons may feel dissatisfied with our physical voice or might try to change it for one reason or another, but, for most of us most of the time, we probably get as worked up about our voices as we do about our fingerprints. 

So, maybe, as a reassuring place to start, don’t worry about finding your voice—you have one already just as surely as you have a fingerprint or unique and recognizable handwriting. But I also get why that’s not a good place to end.

Kaput: Well don’t give up on giving up so soon, bud. We could send these good people and me on our way and still have time to enjoy the day.

Well, no, we’ve barely started, and there’s still good work to do.

Kaput: Good is in the eye of beholder, I guess.

No, I don’t think writers struggling to find their voice don’t have one—I think, if anything, they’re struggling to know how to express their voice. Or, maybe, there’s a disconnect between what they hold in their heads and what comes out on the page. 

So I think of voice as maybe a person’s writerly identity. In my thesis, there was a lot of thematic, linguistic, tonal, and formal tension and contrast—but it was all held together by a consistent voice. The manifestation of my presence, my voice, was, in the eyes of my advisor, enough to hold it all together. All the poems were different, and they were all doing different things—but, even then, they were all unmistakably mine. 

But having an identity and expressing that identity are two different things. Physically, you have a voice—but that voice can be modulated to be welcoming or threatening, quiet or thunderous, energetic or monotonous. And, reasonably, the way you modify—or stylize—your voice will often be a response to the situation you’re in. 

Which means, if you’re keeping track at home:

Voice is your unavoidable and more or less inherent identity as a human and writer. But that voice gets expressed in your writing and can be manifest through things like your choice of subject matter, your style, and intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic tendencies among other things. And that means that you don’t need to find your voice at all—you just need to practice expressing it.

Lucky for you and me, practicing your skills of expression is so much easier than trying to discover or define your transcendent writerly identity. So, rather than embark on dark-night-of-the-soul navel-gazing, let’s just talk about a few practical things you can do to get better at translating your incomparable voice to the page.

Task number one for finding your voice is to write—to write a lot and to write widely. When I started poetry school, I kind of expected to be corralled into a regimen of writing specific poems about some specific theme for some specific project. Instead, though, my professors set me—and my fellow poets—loose for the first year to write whatever came into our hearts and heads. 

More than once, we first-year poets wondered if we were doing something wrong: we were learning a lot while writing random poems, but we didn’t feel like we were making discernible progress towards a thesis, and, even though we had just started, time was already running out!

Then, when the ominous second year arrived, I met with my advisor for the first time, and my first assignment was to collect all my poems into a single folder and then send them to her. And, to my surprise, as I pulled all my random, individual poems together, I began to realize that they weren’t as disparate and unconnected as I had thought. 

This might come as a surprise, but it turns out that, since they all had come from me, they all bore traces of me and all cohered around ideas and themes that were important to me. I went into it thinking that I had an unruly and disjointed pile of stuff only to discover that I was a much more consistent writer than I had thought. 

But I wouldn’t have realized that—couldn’t have realized that—if I had only written five poems or was only thinking about my last poem or the one I was currently working on. For me, it was only after doing a sufficient volume of writing that I started to recognize the recurring patterns in my writing. When someone asks what my latest poem is about, I might say moths or Sunday dinner or anglerfish—when some asks what my poetry is about, I can more confidently say things like displacement and alienation, language, landscapes, and faith. Moths is not an essential element of my identity, of my voice, but alienation probably is—and the idea of alienation has only become apparent now that I’ve written a whole heap of poems that all find their way to that topic. 

But writing a lot to find your voice isn’t just an exercise in forensic reconstruction. You will recognize elements of your voice more easily when you reflect on your work in the aggregate, which we’ll talk more about later, but producing that writing will also give you more practice in expressing your voice. You will, in other words, get better at it, by doing it. 

And you’ll get even better at it if you write not just a lot but also widely. Don’t just write a hundred sonnets—write sonnets and prose poems and short stories and blog posts and lyric essays and professional correspondence and scripts for comedy sketches. 

I understand that you might have your sights set on being a novelist. That’s wonderful. But let’s imagine, just for a moment, the possibility that you don’t actually want to participate in the world of contemporary fiction. When I was deciding whether I wanted to go into a creative writing program, I read a lot of fiction that was being published at the time, and none of it resonated with me. When I read the poetry that was being published, however, I felt like I had found what I was looking for. 

Then, when I was in poetry school, visiting prose writers occasionally came to do workshops with all the students, and, more than once, I heard them tell the students studying fiction or nonfiction that the best thing they could do for their prose writing would be to take a poetry class. In other words, not only does writing widely expose you to kinds of writing that you might not have thought about before—kinds of writing that actually support your voice better—but it can, at the very least, force you to practice things that you might not practice otherwise. 

Again, I think it’s wonderful that you want to write fiction, and I don’t hold it against you if you think it’s the premier art form there is. But there are writing skills that you could stand to gain from writing formal poetry that fiction will just never press you to develop. And the reverse could be said, too. I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I liked to sneak out of poetry world and take classes in creative nonfiction—probably unsurprisingly, my advisor once mentioned that my poems often had an essayistic quality to them. Writing nonfiction taught me things that writing only poetry wouldn’t have—and it helped me to express my own voice in poetry more effectively. 

The writer John McPhee has said:

Young writers find out what kinds of writers they are by experiment. If they choose from the outset to practice exclusively a form of writing because it is praised in the classroom or otherwise carries appealing prestige, they are vastly increasing the risk inherent in taking up writing in the fist place. It is so easy to misjudge yourself and get stuck in the wrong genre. You avoid that, early on, by writing in every genre. If you are telling yourself you’re a poet, write poems. Write a lot of poems. If fewer than one work out, throw them all away; you’re not a poet. Maybe you’re a novelist. You won’t know until you have written several novels.

If your voice is the identity that reflects the goings-on in your mind and heart, it’s to your advantage to write prolifically and widely. Write a bunch of stuff so that you can, by the sheer volume of evidence available to you, find out what you have to say and how you tend to say it. And write a bunch of different stuff: either you’ll find that a different kind of writing actually suits you more or you’ll pick up some skills that will help you to clarify your voice in the genre of your choice. 

And speaking of skills, here’s job number two: learn technique. 

This is a tough one to talk about because you don’t have to walk very far to hear somebody complain that technique talk is exclusive: as soon as you start thinking about technique, you’re excluding people from the craft of writing. Before I get into it and to prevent me from going too far down that distracting tangent, I’ll just say, “Hello, my name is Writing with Andrew, and I’m a teacher. I’m not saying you have to have high-level technique before you start writing. I’m just saying that good technique will take you further than no technique, and I’m here, along with a lot of other people on this planet, to help you learn it.”

I love reading cookbooks, especially the ones focused on baking. And, while I, of course, enjoy the recipes and the pretty photographs, what I often like most are the pages that a lot of people skip past—the ones about kitchen tools and ingredients. If there’s a baking book that bothers to go into the specifics of grain anatomy and milling processes and gluten percentages, that’s a cookbook that I admire from a baker who really knows the material they’re working with. 

So why wouldn’t you, dear writer, do everything you could to learn about the language you’re writing in? Of course the language you have now is perfectly serviceable—you can write anything you set your heart to right now if you really wanted to. I can follow a recipe for chocolate cherry pinwheel cookies and end up with something great without knowing the ins and outs of flours and cocoa powders and all the rest. But I couldn’t make up a recipe for chocolate cherry pinwheel cookies—definitely not as well as a baker who does know their ingredients backwards and forwards. 

You’ll always be able to express your voice better if you know more words. You’ll always translate your identity to the page more effectively if you can tell a subject noun phrase from a relative clause and can do it well enough to detect ambiguities that could mislead a reader. Just in the same way that you’ll paint better portraits if you understand the properties of different kinds of paint or build better bookcases if you know the advantages and weaknesses of different kinds of wood. Knowing how language works, how your artistic medium works, can be the difference between hoping your voice shows up in your writing and knowing that it will. 

But then, don’t just stop at learning how language works—practice developing your style. If your voice is the essence of you, style is the most reliable way of expressing that essence. As the scholar Edwin Black put it, “certain features of a linguistic act entail certain characteristics of the language user” If you want your voice to be observable to a reader, your style will be the best tool for the job. 

I had to learn about clauses and modifiers before I could understand cumulative sentences. I had to learn the rules of punctuation before I could understand dashes. Now, both are stylistic features that are characteristic of my voice—I have the stylistic tool in cumulative sentences to express the way my thoughts build layer by layer, to craft ideas in sentences that roll along smoothly—and to interrupt it all and turn on a dime with a dash when I need to. 

Learning how English works enabled me to develop a style, which enables me to express my voice. 

But, for some reason, it’s unpopular to ask writers to learn about grammar and usage and style. Drawing on overly authoritative statements from old studies and a lot of political earnestness, writing teachers for decades have pushed grammar and style out of the classroom. Paul Butler has observed that scholars of composition have neglected “style as a topic of serious scholarly inquiry” to the discipline’s own detriment. Rather than teach grammar as a flexible tool of expression, generations of well-meaning writing teachers have withheld the tools of grammar from their students in order to avoid stifling their free expression with notions of correctness and error. As a result, they train writers who can, at best, only offer vague, impressionistic descriptions of writing—it flows or it’s jarring or it doesn’t quite make sense—without being able to identify at the level of the language why it flows or how to remedy that unclear sentence. How can you understand your own writing with any kind of depth if you don’t have the vocabulary for it?

Sure, for most people doing most kinds of writing, your intrinsic understanding of grammar—the intuitive grammar that you use to talk to a friend or order a pizza—is plenty enough. But, if you really want to unlock your voice, you’ll want to work toward a deep understanding of the medium you’re working in so that you can be in complete control of it. 

And again, as always, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try writing until you have a PhD in theoretical syntax—it means that you should keep writing with a focus on growing your linguistic skill set. Experiment with different kinds of sentences, try out some repetition and variation, give yourself a week to really figure out semicolons—you don’t have to know those things to get started, but you probably ought to know them if you’re really serious about expressing your voice as effectively as possible. 

Plus, if it’s grammar and style you want—I happen to know a playlist or two full of videos that will get you started. I did the PhD in rhetorical style so you don’t have to. 

Kaput: As if anyone else would want to…

But there’s one last thing, at least for today: beyond writing a lot and writing widely and beyond deepening your technical knowledge and skill, it’s worth taking some time to be reflective. And I don’t mean the kind of reflection we all do where we get lost in our heads and worry about whether we’re good enough or daydream about plots or turn interesting phrases over and over in our minds like they were jingles from advertisements. I mean the kind of serious, deliberate reflection that will help you to clarify what matters to you most in your writing. 

When you read, take note of what you admire and what you don’t in the work of various other writers. What resonates and what doesn’t? If you really like a writer’s surprising turns of phrase, you might realize that catching readers off guard with delight is part of your voice too. If you really dislike a writer’s name dropping and self-aggrandizement, it could be a sign that your voice is humbler. If you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with, taking a thoughtful average of the reading you most enjoy could be a way to pin down your own voice. 

When my advisor described my writing as homely, it was a description that resonated with what I admire most in the poetry of Ted Kooser. When she pointed out rich but delicate play with language, she may as well have been pointing to what I admired most in the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins. When she said that some of my lines read like “pithy gnomic verse on their own,” she could have said that I was reaching toward the razor sharp insight of Kay Ryan. Maybe in the way that infants learn to speak by listening to the adults around them, we find our voice by hearing it in others. 

So make note of what you find yourself drawn to in the things that you read because it might just lead you back to what you really want to accomplish in your own writing. 

Kaput: And the things you dislike in other people’s writing may just be what you dislike in your own—isn’t that right, Mr. I Hate Pretentious, Self-Serious Drivel?

Don’t you mean Dr. I Hate Pretentious, Self-Serious…oh, point taken…

Kaput: It’s the little things like that that make it all worth it…

Well, anyway, you can also turn that same reflective eye on your own work. Once you’ve accumulated enough work, what do you notice that feels distinctive, what do you see that does a good job of representing you on the page? 

Your style is not your voice, but your style can be reflective of your voice. Do you have reliable patterns in your sentence structure that do a good job of representing the way your thoughts unfold? 

Your word choice is not your voice, but your very own variety of the language, your idiolect, reveals your voice to the reader. Are there words that you use more than others? Are there things you do with words that feel unique and true to you—do you make up new words easily or do you smash existing words together? Are you more likely to use casual diction or hundred-dollar words? 

Of course, it’s important to mention that there may be aspects of your linguistic habits that don’t reflect the best you’re capable of. You may notice that you rely too much on a particular word or that you have a thoughtless habit of starting every paragraph in the same way. Just as you might modify the quality of your physical voice in different situations, it’s normal and beneficial to to adapt your writing to your goals for each piece. You might, for example, love rare words but hate the idea of alienating readers—so you might opt to express your voice in a more plainspoken way, not as a betrayal of yourself but in an effort to embrace the higher ideal of having an audience. 

But anyway, your subject matter is not your voice, either—but the things you choose to write about are reflective of who you are and what you care about. Do you ground your work in the natural world or urban environments? Do you write about your time in the military or your childhood in the suburbs? Is your writing interested in understanding family relationships or in probing the complexities of faith and belief? Writers are often known as much for what they write about as they are for how they write— so your recurring themes are a guide to your essential voice. 

And your tone is not your voice—but your tendency to write pieces that are full of exuberance or yearning or contentment or bitterness resonates with and reveals your voice. And we could keep going, but you get the idea. Look at your own work—not individual pieces but the body of your work—and look for patterns, identifiable traits that might help you to characterize your voice. And then put it in words.

One of the trickier parts of working on a poetry thesis was finding ways to explain my project and my work to other people. At a few points in the process, I even had to write out explanations of my project and my artistic goals and vision. It was all an exercise in finding and defining my voice—or, more accurately, finding it by defining it. You automatically have a voice, but you might not know what it is—so reflecting on your work and trying to define it may just be the trick to finding it. 

But it is tricky, sometimes, to apply that kind of critical eye to your own work, especially early on. In those cases, it can be helpful to get other people’s eyes on your writing to help you to pick out and describe the most distinctive elements of your voice. When I had to write out or talk about my vision for poetry, you can bet I relied a lot on the kinds of comments my workshop groups had made about my work. They were thoughtful readers, and I trusted their perceptions of my work, so as they started to identify patterns in my writing, that made it easier for me to do the same. 

So it’s easier said than done, I realize, but do what you can to find a supportive community of readers and/or fellow writers. Thoughtful readers can be invaluable in helping you to identify things in your writing that you would otherwise overlook. In fact, we’ve got the resources to help you on your way right here: there’s a growing and supportive bunch of writers giving each other thoughtful feedback on the Writing with Andrew Discord, and I’m also available for one-on-one work. Links to both are in the description. 

In the end, it’s important to remember that you are your voice—you have one, and you will always have one. Expressing your voice in writing, though is a different issue, and, frankly, it’s a skill issue. And that might sound like a put-down, but it’s actually the best news there could be. 

Why? Because it means that finding your voice is not some journey through the platonic realm to find your irreducible essence, something writers either have or don’t have. Instead, because it is a skill issue, finding your voice just means getting better at expressing yourself in writing—something that happens as you continue to write, as you focus on practicing technical skills, and as you look back on your work and the work of writers you admire to define the qualities of your voice that make the biggest difference on the page. 

So don’t worry about your voice—don’t even give it a second thought—because you already have it. Instead, focus on doing the practical, achievable things that will help your voice to shine through and dazzle your readers. 

You absolutely have a voice, and you absolutely have the ability to express it more effectively. So check out the videos here on the end screen to keep learning the skills that will help you to do it, and check out the links in the description to join us on Discord or to find some time to work with me individually. In any event, go have some fun defining and expressing your voice, and we’ll see you again soon.