Deciphering The Writer’s Voice in Blog Content

The bane and joy of life for anyone who writes is the necessary quest for that discoverable but indescribable essence called “voice”. Voice is the subject of endless conversation for editors, agents, and writers. It often gets labeled with subjective adjectives like authentic or original. What makes voice such an enigmatic topic is that it means different things to different people, and more often than not they are wrong.

A writer’s voice has nothing to do with style or skill, and it is not just a zany buzzword or marketing device for the Internet age. It is all together plainer and yet vastly more complex than any of those things. The voice is the pure essence of the writer, open and unfiltered, lying bare on the page. Finding and using a voice is a scary and exhilarating dive into the writer’s innermost thoughts.

Voice though isn’t just having ideas; it is also daring to share them with the world. All 7 billion humans on earth have a unique background and distinct swirl of thoughts and dreams floating around their minds. Finding a voice is about translating that singular amalgamation into words. Most of our lives are spent preparing the package of ourselves we want to share with the world. How we dress, what we say, what we do; these are all filtered through a gauntlet of inner judgment we may not even be conscious of.

What makes this all trickier is that to find an authentic voice, a writer must shed all the notions and ideas about stories and characters that our media-filled lives constantly bombard us with. It is all but impossible not to be influenced by the stories we consume, and in the process, we soak up other’s voices and mistake them for our own.

Unfortunately, there’s no class on finding a voice. It is an inner process, an internal journey, through doubt and fear, and a battle to defeat inauthenticity in a world dominated by article copywriting services like here and the voices of other storytellers creeping into our heads. It is about finding that version of yourself that you’ve created for the world and destroying it. That means losing control of what others think, or society thinks, and discovering what it is that you think.

It is a bit like seeing a therapist, except on this journey there is no one else to guide you. To find a voice, a writer almost needs to get rid of the idea of voice all together. Instead, and ignoring the cheesier implications of this phrase, the writer’s voice will only appear when writer truly comes to know their own self. So put down your guard and start digging deep; look for your passions and your truths, locate the things that make you smile and piss you off. Inside of that raging storm of truth, if you listen closely, you’ll hear the voice you are looking for.