As an author, developing a unique voice makes your writing outstanding, fun, and easily identifiable. Your voice includes your distinct style, use of sentence structure, choice of vocabulary, tone, and area of interest. Irrespective of your literary genre, finding your unique voice is crucial and requires some effort. Today, we will explore tips on how to find your unique writing voice.
Always Read Other Author’s Works
To find your unique voice easily, you must learn to read other writers’ works. Learning from others enables you to build and grow easily. Read works from different authors across a variety of niches and genres regularly. Consequently, you become conversant with different author’s writing styles and patterns. Thus, you could develop interest in any of the styles and might decide to adopt it or incorporate such style into yours.
Discover your Niche
Discovering your niche is another way to find your voice as an author. When you read widely and write consistently, you tend to develop an interest in a particular field such as fiction, non-fiction, romance, thrillers, comedy, horror, etc. More so, an eagerness to pass a specific message to an audience can help you build a niche. Focusing on a particular writing niche makes it easy to maintain a distinct voice while writing.
Write Consistently
Consistency in writing is one of the most natural ways of discovering your voice. Make it a daily routine to write down your thoughts, and views on any aspect of life, daily experiences, short stories, or poems. You could also rewrite other writers’ stories or content that you’ve read in your own words. This enables you to convert your inner voice into words; thus, you can easily grasp what writing voice you have.
Try out Different Things
It is necessary to try out different writing techniques while trying to figure out your unique voice. Authors use various means to convey their stories, which could be narrative or descriptive techniques. You may also choose to write using the first person or third person pronoun, colloquial or official tone, or even introduce slangs in your work. When you try out different styles in different stories, you may now decide which is more suitable for you and that becomes your voice.
Maintain a Specific Preferred Style
If you have discovered a particular writing style that appeals to you and your readers, it is necessary that you build on it. Consistency in a specific writing style helps for improvement and adaptability to the voice. For instance, if you write using formal language, words, or tones, endeavor to maintain such voice. However, it is important to differentiate your voice when writing novels for either adults or children.
Be Open to Feedback
Feedbacks help greatly in finding your unique voice and improving ability. Ensure you give out your works to individuals or fellow writers to read and always ask them for feedbacks. This helps to ascertain your level of consistency in tone, language, grammar, etc. Nevertheless, you must learn to accept criticism in a good way to improve.
Read your Stories Aloud
Learn to always read out your stories after writing them. This enables you to dictate the disparity or unity in your various works. Thus, you can easily make an overall appraisal of your writing ability. Reading your works aloud helps to create a self-awareness of the uniqueness of your voice.
Conclusion
Your voice as a writer is your distinctive writing tone. It makes you stand out as readers do not have to read your entire work before they can identify the writing as yours. However, writing a great story is hard work, and having a unique voice requires much more work. Notwithstanding, this piece will go a long way to guide you in helping you find your unique writing voice.