This Week We're Working on Finding Your Voice

Zen Buddhists say the primary goal of meditation is to find enlightenment, but if you have a goal to find enlightenment, it will never happen. If you achieve enlightenment, merely thinking you have pushes you out of enlightenment. That’s Zen in three lines. It’s a pleasure.

Finding your writing voice is a lot like achieving enlightenment. You must chase an ephemeral thing without chasing it. When you achieve it, thinking you have is enough to eliminate it, so you must have a voice without knowing you have a voice. Simples. 😁

In case you haven’t noticed, this week we’re talking about finding your voice.

You can never fully enter the writing sphere until you’ve found it. This idea is as ephemeral as mist, and yet we must make it a part of our everyday writing experience without having the goal of making it a part of our everyday writing experience. The moment you see it, it disappears, so how do you achieve it?

I have one answer for you (and there are many): By eliminating pretentiousness from your work and learning how to be authentic when you write. You must find yourself. You must be willing to show yourself. You must find the happy place wherein you are free. The more confidence you build, the easier this will become, so the early years of writing are the time for building self-belief. This is why I nagged you to attend writing events—the capacity to see yourself as a writer will help you find your voice.

You must know who you are and how you think. You must be satisfied with the authenticity you bring to the page. You must become uninhibited. You must let your true self out when you write.

Young writers are often ostentatious. They show off their skills in a grand, cerebral display of pretentiousness. That’s why their work is often fat on fancy words and blunt stylistic elements. Auden said it well when he wrote, “I am very glad I shall never be twenty and have to go through the business again, the hours of fuss and fury, the conceit and the expense.”

Even the least evolved readers can spot ostentatiousness in writing. They might not be able to tell you what makes it so, but by god, they know it’s there, so you will always fail if you’re inauthentic.

To find your voice, you must get rid of your bullshit. You must try other people’s tricks for size. You must find out which tools work for you. In a sentence, you must experiment until you find yourself.  

You’ve been without a prompt for a while, but today I’m giving you a different exercise: Go into your files and post the one piece of work you believe demonstrates your writing voice the most. Let’s see how your feedback goes.