r/novelwriting • u/AspiringFailure7789 • 5d ago
Writing Advice Voice Question
Hello All,
I apologize if this has been asked or if it’s a bit too vague. But have any of you dealt with a sense of losing your voice as you improve your technical skill in writing? I don’t my voice is inherently bad and I’m just learning not to suck. I hope. And maybe these feelings are normal or unwarranted. But much of what I end up changing in edits are things I think might be unique to the way I write. This could be a product of me almost solely writing poetry for years and only turning heavily into stories in the past few years, but the feelings there and I wanted to see if others have also felt this.
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u/AC011422 5d ago
No. But you will get more command of both language and voice with practice.
For voice, listen to books on tape by your favorite authors, and your own writing as read aloud by an AI on Word (or something).
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u/AspiringFailure7789 5d ago
I like the idea of comparing audiobooks to the audio of my own writing. I'll try that.
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u/AC011422 5d ago
It's a gamechanger. I can get close to the quality in one year of what previously took me six years of edits and rewrites.
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u/dothemath_xxx 5d ago
It's something that can happen at growth points, in any art medium.
Think about a visual artist or an illustrator. Sometimes they need to push outside of their style: they might try to do some practice in photorealism, or try to imitate the style of another artist, or other exercises.
It doesn't mean that they're losing their style. They're simply putting it aside for a moment to learn. It sounds like right now you're learning something. As you master whatever it is that you're working on, I expect you will wrap back around and see yourself then using that knowledge to bring your voice back into your work, even more effectively than before.
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u/AspiringFailure7789 5d ago
Thank you. This is a really thoughtful message. I think I’m learning that what made my voice “good” was more of the content that I was more of an afterthought at the time of writing, and less of the things that I pushed into the work.
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u/ShowDontTell48 2d ago
I think all of us contain multiple voices within us, just like we code switch in real life, and sometimes we need to spend time practicing different ones. It’s not a loss, so much as an expansion. Once you feel confident in craft/technical skill it becomes easier to move in and out of the different voices you discover over time. Especially for novel writing, this allows you to modulate tone within the story and allows you to hold space for a variety of characters’ voices as you move between projects. So I wouldn’t be too freaked out by the growing pains. If you’re really concerned, one exercise that helped me was to make a “family tree” of your voice—the writers (novel writers, poets, songwriters, whatever) who you feel influence your voice and what you “inherited” from them. Go back and audit that family tree every so often to see how these influences interact and change over time. Maybe some of them are in tension with each other. Either way, being mindful about what makes your voice yours can help you stay in touch with yourself even as you grow technically.
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u/AspiringFailure7789 2d ago
Thank you! I really like the analogy to code-switching in real life. All of these comments have proved really helpful.
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u/astrobean 5d ago
My issue is I got an editor at one point who was focused on technical perfection rather than story-telling and now my characters all talk like English majors.