Five steps to delve into your creative consciousness and discern your identity — and how to write it authentically.

Introduction

A challenge that every writer faces at some point usually early on his or her career — and indeed throughout a writer’s career — is nailing down one’s voice. The advice “find your voice” is a typical refrain in writing communities. What does “voice” actually mean? Voice means your unique point of you as a person combined with your writing style.

Point of view refers to your experiences, your worldview, and a host of other personal preferences and biases. Style refers to the words you commonly use, the sentence structure you prefer, your go-to cadence, emotional tone, or even your favorite genre. These concepts apply whether you are a journalist, blogger, screenwriter, or novelist. 

You need solitude to uncover your voice. However, a writer’s voice does not live or thrive in a vacuum. Your voice is a reflection of your identity through your art. That’s why discovering your voice is important not just to help you grow as a writer, but also to help you understand more about yourself as a person. Here is a step-by-step process to enable you to discover your voice so you can grow as a writer and storyteller.

Step 1: Examine Yourself

Shakespeare said, “to thine own self be true.” That doesn’t work with ethics or objective truth, but it does apply when referring to subjective areas like art. That’s why being in touch with who you are and what you feel enables you to realize what your voice is. These exercises will help you do that. Or, if you already have a sense of identity as an author and creator, these techniques can help you further develop your tone and style.

Your personality vastly impacts the way you write. There’s much that can be gleaned from examining one’s personality type and determining how that affects your writing voice. While the Myers-Briggs personality test (also called the MBTI) is not very scientific, it is a free technique to broadly categorize how you interpret the world and use information. Thus, knowing your Myers-Briggs type is the first step in examining yourself as a relates to your voice as a writer.

You’re iteratively creating a style all your own.

Secondly, you could also take an even more nuanced approach by determining which categories your writing fall into according to this chart inspired by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Unfortunately, the chart (below) also sets up these creative aspects as false dichotomies when they should be value spectrums. Still, like the MBTI itself, it’s an interesting thought experiment. What’s your Writing Personality? I think I’m an ECBK. 

This should be an iterative jumping-off point, not a prescriptive cubbyhole. You might even find that depending on the type of story you’re writing, the work could require different writing styles. For example, when I’m writing an article for work, I use a more direct, business-like tone when compared to my in-depth screenwriting blog.

When I’m working on a screenplay, the style is way different — and not just because of the formatting, either. Cinematic storytelling needs to be pithy, visceral, and visual. My “voice” has “range” which is influenced (but not controlled by) my personality.

Writing coach Amber Helt explains the concept of the Writing Personality further:

The writer’s personality test operates similarly [to the MBTI], matching genres and writing styles based on how you use dialogue, descriptions, prose, and pacing. 

If you don’t like [your writing persona], change it! This isn’t your DNA and personal psyche, it’s how you approach your craft. You can train yourself to write in any style.

By analyzing and categorizing your personality, you’ll be able to discern how your point of view works its way into different types of prose. Improvise, adapt, and overcome. 

Step 2: Analyze How You Write

Now that you’ve examined yourself, it’s time to examine what you’ve already written. Be as objective as possible when viewing your work. You’re not looking not for how “good” or “bad” you think the writing is, but instead searching for what stands out about the writing itself. If you need a jumping-off point, check out How to Evaluate Your Own Writing.

Analyze your prose as if conducting hermeneutics on a verse of scripture. Grab a notepad to write what you notice as you ask yourself these probing questions:

• Do you use a plethora of large words when they are not necessary?

• Do you write in terse patterns when something more poetic would work for that scenario?

• What audience were you writing to when you wrote this piece? 

• In retrospect, does what you wrote accurately target that audience?

• If you were tasked with rewriting this piece, what would you do differently?

Those are the type of questions that you should have in mind while you’re reviewing multiple recent pieces (Reese's Pieces?) of your work. Once you’ve thoroughly analyzed your work, distill your somewhat objective view of your voice into three words.

Yes, three words. Not sentences or paragraphs — three words. We’ll come back to this handful of utterances.

Step 3: Analyze The Works of Others

For the next step in these voice exercises, take a break from your work and cleanse your prose palate with the handiwork of other wordsmiths. Use the same type of questions that you ask about your writing and apply it to authors that you admire or stories that you love. 

This is not so much to compare yourself with literary greats but to see what you can learn from the different voices that you connect with. The artists that you resonate most with are bound to influence you to some degree. By contrast, the worldviews and perspectives that feel foreign will also help you get a better sense of your voice’s timbre. Being conscious of these moments of both stylistic harmony and dissonance assists you in identifying your singular voice and avoiding mere imitation.

You need solitude to uncover your voice.

List writers you admire and then ask these types of queries as you read. Again, take notes while you do this:

• How does he or she construct sentences? Scenes? Ideas?

• Is the writer pithy or verbose?

• Does the writer use the same style and voice across her work?

• Why do you enjoy his writing?

• What part do you not enjoy, and why?

• If you had to write your version of this, what would you change? Why?

Step 4: Try Writing in Other Voices

Now, take your cognitive conditioning to the next level by imitating those writers. Once again, this is not to forge you into some celebrity wannabe. By putting yourself in that person’s shoes, you’re able to experiment with other voices that differ in varying degrees from your own. Through this creative workout, you’ll be able to determine what your authentic voice is — or could be — like.

Pretend you’re a well-known (read: distinct) author or screenwriter, and write a scene or article from his or her perspective:

• J.K. Rowling

• Stephen King

• James Mangold

• Tom Clancy

Or, to be even more thorough, you could select an author and one of that author’s characters for this exercise! So, pretend you’re a character in a film or TV show and write a few internal monologue paragraphs:

• Sherlock Holmes

• Jean Luc Picard

• Count Dracula

• Oscar Schindler

Discovering your voice is important not just to help you grow as a writer but also to help you understand more about yourself as a person.

If you’d rather focus on specific dialogue patterns or stream-of-consciousness prose, then consider the fictional character approach. Whether you do one or both, the point of this is not to create fan-fiction or shallow mimicry, but to experiment with potentially alien points of view and writing rhythms to find one that suits you best.

Step 5: Ask Others to Describe Your Voice

Remember when you analyzed your own voice? Now, ask at least three friends (who are skilled wordsmiths or well-read) to describe your voice in their own words as succinctly as possible. Do any of the words or emotions fit the words you came up with in Step 2? Which words strike a chord within you?Even if the words your colleagues list are disparate, these words form a qualitative data set you can use to further investigate your identity as a writer.

In fact, by completing these exercises, you’re seeing what does and does not fit your voice. In essence, you’re iteratively creating a style all your own. Now, when you return at last to your writing, your creative horizons will be enlarged and your artistic well deepened.

Summary

Every author needs to find her voice, but that’s easier said than done. Since one’s art is not created in a vacuum, one’s voice likewise needs to be developed by the hard work of practice and study.

Here are the steps we went over:

1. Examine Yourself

2. Investigate Your Writing

3. Analyze the Greats

4. Write as the Greats

5. Crowdsource Your Voice

Your voice as a writer is composed of your unique point of view and style. For a bonus step, describe your style in the comments using three words or less. Remember, your voice is not so much discovered as it is created. So, get creating!

—

Ready to get your screenwriting career off the ground? Check out my free training: How to Launch Your Screenwriting Career!