Finding your voice

Finding your voice

    

If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and living thing, then of course style is really everything. -Mary McCarthy

It is only through style finally -- through language -- that any writer can be original. All the themes are old. -Lee Smith

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words.

-Virgina Woolf

* Know the rules of grammar, of writing, and break them: Subject-verb-object. Complete sentences. Split infinitives. But break with a purpose, with intent. The goal is clarity. Not rule-following.

* Forget how "stories" or "articles" should sound, are expected to sound. Throw out contrived formality. Academic is death.

* Read aloud.

Established styles/voice:

*Straight news lede

  1. AP blunt, direct, informational.

  2. NY Times full of clauses, "suitcase lede", mild flourish.

*Celebrity profile

   1. Present tense, scene, famous person doing something. You're there, along for the ride.

*New Yorker

   1. Intent/point of long article typically obscured. Authoritative. Date is clear, even if 1676.   First-person, if displayed, is low down, like a sudden surprise.

*Recipes

*Music reviews (esp. capsules)

*Medical journals      

*Blogs

1.  Gawker: intellectual snark.

2.  Tech: wonky insider, excited, the future is bright

3.  Personal (mommy blogs, ie): Familarity, topical slang (dh, ds, dd), "you know the backstory," sweetly funny depictions of insiders and their shared interests, sarcastic/cutting on views of outsiders.

*TV news magazines (48 Hours, Dateline): Overtly dramatic, over-wrought language, continued strained 

suspense, constant recapping of story/characters.

*TV sports coverage: "NBA star Shaquille O'Neal told me ...." Questionable, almost laughable quoting that seems direct, implies intimacy, but strains credulity. Clipped, telegraphed language.

Simplicity is key.

Cheats at Voice (but can be helpful to discovering yours)

* Stream of conscious writing. Writing as it comes to  you, no thinking, unfiltered. Perhaps your voice is there?

* Vary sentence length.

* Kill your adverbs

* Subject-verb-object.

* Pay attention to use of clauses.

From Ben Yagoda, “The Sound on the Page”

1. Train the ear.

“Pick up the strains of other writers’ styles … by what could be called active reading: reading widely and slowly, and aloud if possible. Choose some writers whose styles appeal to you.”

2. Copy other writers - literally

“Because it forces you to slow down, simply copying a passage is a great way — much better than mere reading — of internalizing an author’s sensibility and cadences. Up until the late nineteenth century, when cheap textbooks became widely available, schoolchildren were routinely required to memorize passages of poetry and prose, and in so doing they tasted, chewed, swallowed and digested style. Give this a try with authors to whom you’re drawn. It will attune you to the literary-speech ratio in their style; it will help you feel their rhythms; it might clue you in to their characteristic clinkers.”

3. Turn on your cliche-watcher.

“Cliches are prominent features of everyone’s first draft, whether we write it down or keep it to ourselves. How could they not be? We hear and read them all the time and our brains are filled with them. The key to avoiding them in the second and succeeding drafts is recognizing them and casting them out.”

4. Read aloud.

“Revision is all about reading, and you need to be a good reader to hear your own cliches and the other ill-advised compositional decisions you’ve made.”

5. cc yourself.

“Send yourself a copy of all your e-mails that go out to others: as with listening to your own voice on tape, opening and reading your messages can help you ‘overhear’ yourself, the false notes and the true ones.”

6. Visit familiar territory.

“Take an hour (could be a little more, could be a little less) and write a page or so about your father or your mother. Or you could tackle any other subject, as long as you know a lot about it and it means a lot to you. Don’t worry about making it an essay with a beginning, middle and end; just concentrate on imparting some true things. Once you’ve got your page down, transform it, over the course of a week or so. Specifically, take it to extremes, in multiple versions. Try it with no contractions and with contractions at every possible opportunity; with short sentences and complex ones; with one-sentence paragraphs and all in one paragraph; with short Anglo-Saxon words and with long Latinate ones; with literal, straightforward language and with as many metaphors, similes and rhetorical questions, as much irony and hyperbole and alliteration, as you can pack in. Then experiment a little with compression and slackness. Do one version that’s as long as you can reasonably make it and another that’s as short as possible, each time trying to impart the same sense.

When you’re done, you’ll have a lot of really bad stuff. But you’ll also have some useful lessons, the first being that no good style, whether relatively anonymous or relatively distinctive, is uniform. It’s always going to be a mix of elements, and the key to the style is in the proportion. You’ll also have a better feel for the proportions that work best and feel best for you: your style.”