Habit 8 find your voice activities4/29/2024 Learn to tolerate seeing the mess so your voice has room to grow and permission to show itself. What happens if you erase your first inkling? You interrupt the flow that will soon lead you to what you really want to say. Leave a string of your not-quite-right words and ideas. Try generating new material without deleting as you go. The hard work for me is to write through the bad.” My creative process consisted of a flash of inspiration and then the editing of that flash of inspiration repeatedly and compulsively until I was bored and it was boring. I wanted to say things perfectly, compulsively. One of my writing retreat participants, Erin, said: Your voice won’t fully mature if you edit as you write. Boredom and silence are your voice’s ally as you recognize and heed what captures your mind and heart. Make space to these clues by taking a sabbatical from social media and Netflix (just an evening works wonders). Cultivate noticing what you notice, noting it, and valuing it even though it makes no sense (yet). What lights you up? What drives you batty? What problem do you have a solution for? What images compel you? What sentence structures make your heart zing? What words do you love-or hate?Īll of these can be sources of your voice, but you must pay exquisite attention to them or they poof! disappear. Be Devoted to Paying AttentionĬartoonist, podcaster, and teacher Jessica Abel advises her students to “Pay attention to what you pay attention to,” while Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gassett said, “Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.” So how do you get your voice development cooking? Here are five time-tested ideas you may find useful. Turn toward developing your voice and you may find big dividends: more flow and energy, more readers, more publishing and other opportunities, and most of all, more sincere and satisfying work. You must step away from other people’s opinions and stories, from what you may think you should sound like, and get curious about your opinions, your stories, your experiences.Īvoid doing this work and you may well find your writing stalls out and begins to feel flat, even pointless. To develop your voice you must investigate and own your singular way of noticing your world, and then practice and hone your singular way of capturing that noticing. Today’s guest post is from author Jennifer Loudon ( your writer’s voice requires you to know yourself and reveal that self in your writing: this is who I am and this is what I care most about.
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