Find Your (Authorial) Voice

Obtaining that white whale: unique authorial voice

How to Find Your (Authorial) Voice.

I’ll skip to the TLDR: this is a trick question.

Many a baby author has sat at a computer for hours writing and rewriting the same passage to try and get it to sound “right.” It happens in every genre from encyclopedias to pulp romance to high fantasy to thriller to restraining orders. These beautiful baby authors will try different points of view, different tenses, different adjectives, different amounts of adverbs, they’ll toggle cussing on or off— all in the pursuit of an authorial voice that feels their own.

And, eventually, they’ll land on something that sounds about what they’re looking for, and they’ll cling to that style of voice with their fingernails through the whole of the series, and when it’s time to write a new series they’ll repeat the exhilarating, agonizing process.

What big kid authors don’t tell them (out of older-sisterly good intentions) is that when you are doing this, it isn’t your voice you’re looking for. It’s your narrator’s.

You are a human being, as complex and ever-changing as the sea and the sun and the blades of grass in your lawn. Your narrative voice can (and should!) change all the time. It’s part of allowing yourself to be a whole human instead of a cardboard cutout kept for consumption. If you don’t allow ‘your’ narrative voice (which is to say, the sum of all your narrator’s voices) to change over time, then you’re not allowing yourself to grow as an author.

Did you just exhale a sigh of relief that you don’t need to have your whole authorial brand selected before you start writing your first book? Good. That was the point of that.

But now that we understand what a narrative voice is (reminder: your narrator’s voice), and its mercurial nature, we can get into how to pick one you like.

Your narrator, unlike you, is a cardboard cutout kept for consumption. Don’t worry, she’s not here, so saying this won’t hurt her feelings. Your narrator, whether that’s a character within the story or if it’s an omniscient-third type of energy (I’ll get into definitions in a bit), has one job, and that’s to tell the story in the most interesting way possible.

Not the cleanest. Not the most factual. The most interesting.