To Improve Your Writing Skills, Find Your Voice
By: Drew Magary
Tags: Creativity, Writing, Social Media, Inspiration, Create

A decade ago I was given my first major magazine assignment. The twist is that it wasn’t actually MY assignment. I had been hired to rewrite an article that had been done by someone else. Poorly, it appears. I don’t know who this inadequate writer was. Possibly William Faulkner. Regardless, the copy filed by the writer was dull and lifeless, and my editor told me that my job was to make it “voicier.”

My assignment was to breathe life into the words by imbuing them with my own ESSENCE, which tends to be clear and direct and gleefully profane. The irony is that my own revision of the story ALSO never saw the light of day. But I must have made it voicier somehow, because I kept getting work from that editor, even assignments for articles I was allowed to write from scratch!

You can make your own writing voicier, too — the voice you use for your first novel, for the next email you write today, for your 8 millionth tweet, anything. Given that many of you are stuck inside right now, with nowhere else to go, you might even have the time to do it. But before I hand you your bluebook exam, I need to explain to you what voice is.

Your voice is you on the page. It’s the sum total of your influences and your life experiences — all built into words. It’s the expression of your identity, or perhaps the identity of the person you would LIKE to be. This is a blank page, after all. Lemme break down the formula for you.

Take in all the influences

A voice can come in an infinite number of guises. Let’s listen to a few of them right now.

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

That’s from Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. But let’s say you’d never read those words before and someone asked you to identify their source. I bet you could guess. That passage above is so distinctly King that it may as well be a fingerprint. It possesses all of the man’s public qualities: it’s honest, ambitious, thoughtful, and decidedly righteous. You can hear King saying these words in his actual voice, which was itself a magnificent instrument.

Now let’s listen to another critical voice from history. I speak, naturally, of @dril:

A friend of mine once told me that @dril is written as the inner monologue of the internet. I think he’s a funny guy who’s stoned out of his brain ALL THE TIME, but our two opinions need not be mutually exclusive. The average person online is both arrogant and defensive as a matter of natural reflex. It makes sense that someone took those qualities and deliberately ratcheted them up to absurd levels, complete with garbled syntax and all. You gotta hand it to him. Is the real @dril like this? I’m gonna say no. But he looked at the deeply insecure lunacy of everyone else online and shrewdly created a voice that reflected it.

There are more voices like these all around you. They come in the form of writers, musicians, filmmakers, family members, even advertisers. Listen to them. Listen to Candice Millard. Listen to Alexandra Petri. Listen to Fountains of Wayne, who nailed Jersey better than all the more famous Jersey musicians ever did. Listen to your favorite English teacher. These are your influences. They supply you with information, opinions, and STYLE. For example, I spent the bulk of my adolescence listening to Sam Kinison comedy albums.

Explains why I write in all caps so often. I also listened to Metallica, watched The Hard Way 700 times, re-read every Great Brain book over and over, and took in a zillion other influences. Those voices made a boisterous jumble inside my brain, each of them informing the other. This is legal, by the way. You’re allowed to be influenced by Jesus AND by Slayer at the same time. They can’t arrest you for that. Except in Georgia.

Try to absorb as many influences as you can, and seek out influences that other people aren’t necessarily into. You’re living through a generation of movies all made by people who were REALLY into Star Wars, myself included. It shows, and not necessarily for the better. You got the time now to go deeper down the rabbit hole. The more diverse your influences are, the more diverse your own voice will be.

Live your experiences and use them creatively

The old writing edict is to write what you know. I remember being told that in Creative Writing class in college. The end result was 20 students all turning in the same short story about a kid who goes to a house party and has a shitty time. We were not the most imaginative lot. Not terribly popular, either.

The goal shouldn’t be to write what you know, but to USE what you know. So you know what it’s like to be somewhere where you’re SUPPOSED to be enjoying yourself, and you know the odd shame you feel when you are not: when the night isn’t living up to the perhaps unreasonable standards you had for it. Okay, now set that party in Nazi Germany. See now? You used what you knew, but you gave it FLAIR. You gave the reader a reason to give a crap.

In order to write well, you gotta live. You gotta be out there seeing and doing and learning new things. That’s not easy to do at the present moment, but let’s imagine a world where everything gets un-fucked (a stretch, I know) and you’re finally able to venture out your door once again. Take advantage. When Philipp Meyer was writing his epic novel The Son, he learned how to tan hides AND he drank buffalo blood. Why? Because that’s what his characters did. He had to personally experience what they experienced so that he KNEW what living through those experiences were like. That way, he could then put them into proper words.

You know what it’s like to be in love. You know what it’s like to feel lonely. You know what it’s like to have a friend let you down. You know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of violence. These are universal experiences, but in your context they are PAINFULLY specific. You can use all that. And then you can use more. You can live more, whether it’s for the sake of research or for the sake of living itself. You will absorb everything around you in a way that literally no other person will, because you will absorb it at a particular time in your life that only you are living in. Think deeply about how those moments make you feel. Even if you’re uncomfortable with how they make you feel. ESPECIALLY so.

Allow those influences and experiences to guide you

Now the challenge is to get those thoughts down into words. They don’t have to be pretty. They don’t have to be perfect. What matters is that they are CLEAR, that you are able to get the person reading your copy to understand how you feel and — this is where the magic happens — FEEL what you felt. Scroll back up and read King again:

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Tell me you can’t feel those words right now. They are both profound and direct. They require no obscure vocabulary to get the idea across. King lived and learned enough to have ideas, to know how to get those ideas across, AND to separate which ideas of his were worthwhile from those that were useless. Think hard about your ideas. Save a good one, and then think about what that idea would look and sound like if it were something you wanted to see and hear, whether it’s in the form of a short story, or a take, or a TV show script, or a song, or even a tweet. Be your own audience for a moment. Laugh at your own jokes when they land the right way in your cortex. It’s okay. You’re finding your voice and you’re gaining a strange, wonderful awareness of how that voice will sound to distant ears.

Once you’ve given your voice shape, it has remarkable power. I’m gonna let Carl Sagan explain how:

One glance at (a book) and you hear the voice of another person — perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.

You can work that magic, too. All you gotta do is listen: first to others, then to yourself.

Drew’s third novel, Point B, is available starting today. Right now. Go buy it.