Cutting through the Noise

Like many other writers, I spent my early years trying to sound like someone else. Preferably, someone famous as successful, because I didn't understand that I could never be as good a Lavyrle Spencer or Stephen King or Larry McMurtry or Frank Herbert as the original article.

Over time, I forgot about emulating others and quit hiding Colleen Thompson. I let that voice develop, for better or for worse. Though not every attempt was a hit, of course, those successes I did find gave me confidence that I could run with the authentic me, allowing it to color everything I wrote.

Give yourself a million words or so, and you can cut through fear and noise and finally hear the authentic way your thoughts sound. And if your voice proves sufficiently unique and appeals to enough people, perhaps you, like Mr. Vader here, will get the chance to milk it for a lot of years to come.

After a Million Words of Crap... the Right One

The other day, I received a lovely compliment from a reader and aspiring author, who told me how much she wants to write like me.

Flattered as I was (and I can tell you no one laps up praise more happily than I do) I quickly thanked her and hastened to add that that's the wrong idea. Because no matter which author you admire, you'll never be more her than she is. But you're the very best at writing like yourself.

The trick is, writing enough words (Raymond Chandler is said to have insisted that every writer has a million words of crap to produce before getting to the good stuff) to break through to your authentic voice. More than likely, you're imitating other voices, other styles, and/or those you perceive as big successes for about half a million of these. You spend a few hundred grand more floundering, and the last ones grinding out some pretty decent prose that's not quite ripe yet. (When I go back to my old short stories, I see the raw material for what I'm still becoming. And believe it or not, I'm grateful for the rejections that gave me more time to develop.)

At some point -- and this point comes at a different time or number of words for every one of us -- you'll start to realize where you're different from whatever else is out there. You'll recognize the things you're good at, and how you sound in your own head.

Only then, can you capitalize on the uniqueness you bring to the table. You'll wrestle that individual voice into a marketable form.

Will you sell it? There are no guarantees on that one. But there's an intrinsic reward with finding that after your proverbial million words of... let's be kind and call it compost, you've finally grown the perfect crop. Even if no one else ever reads them, you've still written them, and that's worth something.

Because how many people find their own voice in the chaos of this world?

A Master's Voice

One of the most difficult and frustrating facets of the writing game may be voice. It's tough to explain, harder to grok, and impossible to boil down to a simple set of how-to instructions. Yet voice, the unique way in which an author strings words, sentences, and paragraphs to build a story, is the factor that separates the good writer from the great author -- and the single quality that most excites agents, editors, and readers.

I belong to a critique group that includes five talented women. If each of us brought one page of a brand-new product to a meeting, and they were all mixed up, with no names, I'm dead sure that every single group member could match each page with the correct writer, in the same way that readers could correctly identify something written by, say, Janet Evanovich or Michael Connelly or Diana Gabaldon or (insert your favorite author). Voice is as good as a fingerprint in that way.

You can't go to a workshop to develop your voice. You can't find a shortcut how-to article or book that will help all that much. What you can do is write. And write and write and write until your voice finds you (which, according to the famous adage, happens after you've gotten every writer's million words of...um... crap out of your system.) And then hope its appeal is broad enough that you will find success.