Finding Your Voice The Craft of Writing

Dianne Jacob dj@diannej.com Twitter: diannej

Instagram: diannemjacob

Is it hard to find your voice?

Good news: It’s been there inside you all along. It’s waiting to be discovered.

In this session today, you will:

!   Discover your writing voice

!   Learn how to write about common topics with distinction

!   Develop a unique writing style.

Which will lead you to:

!   Connect more with your readers

!   Build your readership

!   Create more opportunities to write elsewhere

!   Stand out in a crowded field.

What is a unique voice?

Voice is your delivery system for your experience, a kind of narrator.

It’s your natural state – you already have a personality.

It lets people imagine you.

Why hone your voice?

Readers want to understand you. They want to: !   Experience your way of viewing the world

!   Relate to you

!   Identify the writing as consistently yours, so they feel like they know you.

Voice distinguishes you from others writing on similar subjects.

It’s about HOW you approach the same content everyone else writes.

It’s about the content and angle you choose, sentence length, references, and other identifiers.

Most of all, it’s how you stand out.

Voice unites your content.

Readers want consistency.

They want to recognize you everywhere – when they go to your blog or social media, or read your articles or books.

Three examples of strong voice:

!   Ruth Reichl

!   Mayukh Sen

!   Michael Twitty

How are they different?

What about your voice? Are you...

Articulate Authoritative Believable Breezy Clear Candid Clever Confessional Dramatic Effusive

Elegant Eloquent Encouraging Enthusiastic Friendly Funny Gentle Goofy Honest Ironic

Joyful Knowledgeable Light-hearted Passionate Opinionated Outrageous Playful Practical Profound Quirky

Reassuring Relaxed Riveting Sarcastic Self-deprecating Sensible Smart-ass Trusted Whimsical

Define your personality.

Voice is about who you already are, and whom you aspire to be.

Let’s figure it out.

We’re going to explore:

!   Who you are

!   What you want

!   Who you want to be

Be a natural extension of yourself.

That way, readers will believe your writing is authentically you.

You should sound like you talk.

Whatever people enjoy about you will come out on the page.

Be who your target reader expects.

Readers make assumptions about you based on your name, bio, race, age, photos – you name it.

If you’re cookbook author, they want an expert, someone they can trust, someone who will guide them and entertain them.

If your job is to entertain (and it is!), they will expect to read all the way through, maybe laugh.

What if you’ve copied someone else’s voice?

That’s fine at first, as long as it’s not verbatim.

But if you write the same content in the same way as others, that won’t work. People will ignore you. They’ve seen it before.

Whoever you are is just fine.

Let’s say you want to teach people how to cook.

What if you were self-deprecating and silly?

You can still be believable and authoritative.

As long as you’re still genuinely you, and how you want to come across.

What about your beliefs?

Lasting values or ideals help you establish your voice, such as:

!   Cooking for others is how I show love.

!   I won’t censor my writing because it’s who I am.

!   I believe anyone can learn a new skill.

5 tips to make your writing unique.

1. Include your life and interests.

Readers want to know what you believe. They want a relationship with you that is bigger than the subject matter.

Maybe you love comic books or Las Vegas, or your father just died. Can you work a little of this info into your article, essay, or blog?

2. Cultivate intimacy.

Not your deepest fears or sources of shame.

Not telling secrets.

In the best scenarios, you will have the same fears or cares as your reader, but mostly harmless stuff, such as running out of food at a dinner party.

3. Be human.

Perfection is never interesting. What people like are fails, disappointments, struggles, and success.

Include the less-than-perfect moments. Readers want to know you are imperfect, just like them.

4. Tell a story.

Opening with an anecdote makes your writing more compelling.

Help readers see more than a recipe: how hot it was when you baked pies in August, or the first time you had to buy groceries at a discount market.

Stories create interest and keep readers moving through the piece.

5. Reference popular culture.

We each have a life outside food. People are curious about yours.

Try working in references to a current TV show, favorite song, television show, celebrity, or movie.

Doing so makes you more real to your readers.

3 tips to strengthen voice through writing technique.

1. Mix it up.

Vary your sentence lengths. Keep them short if they will appear online.

Vary paragraph lengths. Even a 1-line paragraph works, sometimes.

Sometimes sentence fragments work too.

2. Find the right vocabulary level.

You probably wouldn’t write that radicchio has “plump Episcopal splendor.” But Nigella Lawson did in a cookbook headnote.

Bill Addison of Eater.com wrote that Zahav restaurant “evokes the Levantine landscape.” You might not use the word “Levantine.”

Don’t try to impress, though.

You decide the right level. It’s the level that sounds like you talk.

There’s no point in trying to impress people by NOT sounding like you. That’s the opposite of how to find your voice.

3. Use a little jargon.

If it’s how you really talk. Do you say things like “Hey, girl” or “Dang?”

Try slang or jargon in your writing. Just a bit goes a long way.

Last word: Have a good time.

Experiment with new kinds of writing, for fun.

Try: You on too much caffeine.

Try: You at a cocktail party.

See what you get.

Thank you!

Keep in touch:

Website: diannej.com

Email: dj@diannej.com

Twitter: diannej

Instagram: diannemjacob