Lindsey Roth ~Finding your voice

[Sondra Perl]

#420

Chapter 5 gives numerous techniques to seek out our writing voice. Keeping those references up front when we write, having index cards fixed over your monitor when you are writing hopefully will trigger those techniques.

Finding ones voice as a writer is an unending journey. However, I believe that the writer persona, because it is a private internalized act, with no external input, sometimes a natural voice is more accessible. Our quiet voice tends to be a truthful one, an authentic one that feels aligned with your being. If I’ve been reading one particularly writer and I write during that period, I tend to emulate that voice. Eventually, the real or true voice emerges and magnifies. The practice of writing means that with practice comes your voice and style.

I know that finding my voice as a person has been a challenge. At times I feel like a chameleon, slipping in and out of personalities that suit the situation. For the past 15 years employed as a legal assistant, it is imperative that I write in the manner of that of the attorneys. Legal writing is a different style all together, for the most part attorneys are required to write terse, perceptive and informative briefs, white papers and articles. Judges created these rules, courts won’t accept papers written outside of those guidelines. This technique has rooted itself in me. It’s not that legal writing isn’t creative, there is a resourcefulness to writing succinctly within a limited time frame. It’s the antithesis of an authentic voice. I’m fearful that this legal culture has crept too far into my writing style.

[Anonymous]

#431

I like your point about “the writer persona” as “a private internalized act,” because it prompted me to stop and think about what is “the writer persona.” I agree, as I think all would, that our natural voice feels like our most true voice. Yet, I also find that some people can become fixated on or intimidated by the false notion that writing means developing and inhabiting a separate, authorized “Writer Persona,” one with a lot of bravado instead of self-authority, imitated affectations of one’s favorite writers instead of personal idiosyncrasies, or even the exhibitionist need to identify as/be seen as a Writer, who Writes seriously about Writing and who ends up writing for one’s audience rather than for oneself — which becomes, paradoxically, severed from one’s natural voice as an individual.

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