SEO title: How to Find Your Writing Voice in Fiction
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How to Find Your Writing Voice So Your Fiction Sounds Like You and Nobody Else

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Print out one page of your fiction, stand up in an empty room, and read it out loud at the speed you'd normally talk.

Somewhere on that page your tongue will trip.

A sentence will come out stiff, or you'll hear yourself say a word you'd never use in real life.

Mark those spots with a pen, because they point straight at the thing writers call voice.

Your voice is the way you'd tell the story to a friend

Voice is the feel of your writing.

It lives in the words you pick, the details you notice, the jokes you make and the things you leave out.

Give two writers the same story about a woman leaving her husband, and you'd know within a paragraph which one wrote which page.

You already have a voice. You use it every time you tell a friend about your day.

The work is getting that same voice onto the page.

Most of us stiffen up the moment we sit down to write fiction, and we start writing the way we imagine a real author would.

The lines you trip over are usually borrowed

Go back to the spots you marked. Nearly every time, the stiff lines are the ones where you were writing like somebody else.

It might be a habit from school essays, an author you admire, or a fancy word you reached for because it sounded more literary.

Your reader hears that shift as well, even if she has no word for it. The page suddenly sounds like a different person is talking.

Rewrite each marked line the way you'd say it out loud. Keep the meaning and use your own words, then read the whole page again.

It will sound more like you, and it will almost always read faster too.

Write down the details only you would notice

A big part of voice is what you choose to look at.

When your heroine walks into her mother's kitchen, one writer mentions the smell of fresh bread.

Another notices the calendar still turned to March and the dead plant on the windowsill that nobody has had the heart to throw out.

Both work, but the second one tells us something about this family, and it sounds like one particular person is telling the story.

Carry a notebook for these.

Write down the odd things you see and hear, like the phrases people use in the queue at the shop or the way your neighbour waves with two fingers.

Those little scraps turn into the details that make a page sound like yours.

Copy a writer you love by hand, then put the book away

Reading is still how most writers learn rhythm. Pick a page from an author you love and copy it out by hand, slowly.

You'll feel how long their sentences run and where they put the punch.

Then close the book and write a scene of your own on a completely different subject.

Some of that rhythm will rub off on you, and the subject stays all yours.

Do this with several authors over a few weeks.

Your voice ends up as a blend of everything you've loved, shaped by your own way of seeing the world, and that's how the writers you admire found theirs.

Stop sanding your voice off when you edit

Editing can flatten a voice faster than anything else.

Writers smooth out every odd phrase and cut any line that feels a little too personal.

When you edit, fix anything a reader could misunderstand, and be slow to touch the lines that simply sound like you.

If a sentence breaks a school grammar rule but sounds exactly like your narrator, keep it.

Readers fall for a narrator's quirks, and those quirks are usually the first thing a heavy edit removes.

Some of your best lines will turn up on a walk

Voice grows with practice, and a surprising amount of that practice happens away from the desk.

A walk has a way of shaking loose the line you couldn't find sitting down.

Take a small notebook with you.

When a phrase pops into your head, write it down in the exact words it arrived in, before you tidy it up.

Walks are also a good time to listen.

Hearing a story read aloud trains your ear, and after a while you start to notice what sounds natural and what sounds forced in your own pages.

Lindsay Lake's Spider Method for finding your voice

Lindsay Lake, the romance novelist behind Private Seduction, puts a lot of weight on voice.

In her words, "when you write, you can create your OWN world... your OWN story... in your OWN voice".

Her novel-writing program, The Hurricane Method, includes something she calls the Spider Method.

She describes it as a method that "spins a web of authenticity to your writing and helps you find your unique voice".

Lindsay Lake's Hurricane Method page (https://hop.clickbank.net/?affiliate=YOURIDHERE&vendor=hurricanem&tid=YOURTRACKINGHERE&type=written) lists the Spider Method alongside the other techniques in the program.

The program also comes with the Hurricane Method Complete Audio Edition, in 15 parts.

Lindsay says you can save the audio files to your phone, an mp3 player or even your car stereo, and go through the program wherever and whenever you like.

That turns your walks into study time, with the notebook in your pocket for whatever lines turn up along the way.

The whole package is $47, one payment, and you're covered by a 60-day money-back guarantee.

Pick up that marked page and read it out loud one more time, and when you're ready to go further, see what's inside the Hurricane Method (https://hop.clickbank.net/?affiliate=YOURIDHERE&vendor=hurricanem&tid=YOURTRACKINGHERE&type=written).
