A product manager I coached this week came in stuck on a problem I've been hearing all month:
how do I find my voice?
He'd done the work.
- Completed Sam Parr's 14-day copywriting course, where he emails you a sales letter a day and you copy it out by hand.
- Designer friends had told him voice develops the way design does—you imitate other people's styles until your own surfaces.
- He'd spent 230 days journaling, 800 to 900 words a day.
He still couldn't find it.
I've had about twenty of these coaching conversations this month, and "how do I find my voice" comes up in almost every one.
So I went looking for what writing teachers actually mean by it. Nobody has operationalized this. Style, voice, register—these words get thrown around as if everyone agrees what they refer to.
But if you ask for a definition, you get vapor.
Here is a catalogue of some popular definitions of writing voice (I have removed the attribution from them. This is not throwing shade at other writing teachers; I'm just saying what's out there.)
- "Literary style is the power to move freely in the length and breadth of linguistic thinking without slipping into banality."
- "There's no substitute for volume when looking for your unique writing style."
- "A key ingredient in the sense of style is to write as if you have something to show."
- "[Writing style] is like basketball. Master the basics first. Stephen Curry can make behind-the-back passes whenever he wants, but my 4th grade basketball coach was right to immediately take anybody who tried such a superfluous maneuver out of the game."
- "Style is organic to the person doing the writing, as much a part of him as his hair, or, if he is bald, his lack of it. Trying to add style is like adding a toupee."
- "When you take a values-first writing style, you build engagement around your beliefs."
- "Style is an expression of the interest you take in the making of every sentence. It emerges, almost without intent, from your engagement with each sentence. It’s the discoveries you make in the making of the prose itself."
- "Your unique writing style is simply a set of variables."
- "Good writing style is unchained from a single register."
- "Style is properly speaking a germinative phenomenon."
- "Style is an increment in writing... All writers, by the way they use the language, reveal something of their spirits, their habits, their capacities, and their biases."
- "Style is the physiognomy of the mind."
None of which tells you what to do tomorrow morning when you sit down to write.
Here's what I told him, and I think it's right: