CREATIVE WRITING

ADVANCED CREATIVE WRITING TECHNIQUES

Voice is the elusive, indefinable quality that makes your writing unique. James McCreet looks at what voice is, and isn’t, and offers advice for developing your own

One of the signs that your writing is becoming more advanced, more proficient, is that you have a voice. This semi-mythical, near-ineffable quality is often seen as an important part of a writer’s development. It is impatiently sought. It is ardently yearned for. But what is it? How do you get it? And do you need it?

Voice is not to be confused with style. A writer may adopt any number of styles according to the type of story they want to tell while their voice remains the same. Very occasionally, the voice is also the style (see Kurt Vonnegut). A voice, rather, is the individual writer’s prose DNA. It is all of their learning and reading and experience and practice and feedback distilled into a distinctive manner. In this sense, it’s quite like a real voice.

Everybody’s voice is different. Each has a different timbre, intonation, volume, modulation and phrasal pace. Importantly, we often don’t like the sound of our own voice if we hear it played back as a recording. It is truest and most real when heard from the inside. A writing voice is the same.

Defining voice is very difficult. I’ve been writing for almost 40 years and people have told me I have a distinctive voice but I couldn’t tell you what its hallmarks are. It’s better, frankly, that I don’t know. A voice isn’t supposed to be defined or understood. It is a tuning fork for prose. When we have a voice, we can read our work and hear the slightest dissonance, the most minimal incongruity. The point when technique meets the demanding standards of the voice is when we’re writing at an advanced level.