How to Find/Lose/Re-find Your Voice
as a writer/person/witch (plus new classes)
“Not connecting with your voice,” an agent told me in an early rejection of my book (now available to buy).
Never do what I did, which is abandon your voice because one person doesn’t “connect with” it. For years afterward I didn’t think my own voice was good enough, and I tried to write like someone/anyone else, like a good (i.e. published) writer with a connectable voice.
“It took me a while to get to you as a person,” another agent wrote in a later rejection. No shit. I’d dumped myself based on one subjective preference.
I didn’t know the first rejection was really a compliment; my voice was so strong that this person couldn’t even connect to it. I didn’t know that a rejection could be a compliment. I didn’t know that I didn’t want to have some universally likable voice; I wanted to have my voice. I didn’t know it was worse to lose my voice than an agent.
If you write, then you will hate/lose/find/re-lose your voice. Here are ways to keep finding it:
Don’t try to adopt a “publishable,” “pleasing,” “universal” voice. Don’t “try.” If that makes sense.
How do you most easily get out your voice in general? Use that venue or stage or medium, whatever it is, where your voice “flows” and most sounds like you. Maybe it’s a phone or a journal or a napkin—no judgment. There is no “real” way to write.
Begin a piece in an email or text to someone specific. A best friend or a crush work well.
My best work is in email, texts, and dating profiles. I used to get many messages on OKCupid — not asking me out but complimenting my well-written profile.
I’m my “best self” — or at least I “perform my best self” — in text boxes because I have an audience in mind and the stakes are both low and high and I use every tool I know to make a specific someone like/love/reply to me. In email I write for my life; in text I audition for love; in Microsoft Word I freeze.
Bonus: if you do this enough, then it may become easier to carry over your voice from Gmail to Word.
Warning: boys will not like or want or read these emails or texts.
Inspirational quotation from
: “I want as many people as possible to get the option of feeling that same kind of fluidity in writing, to feel that writing is theirs, that they can do whatever they want with the alphabet, that they are not at all deficient in the raw material that makes for good, engaging, lively, soulful sentences.”—Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto
Your problem is social media. The noise is drowning out your own voice and presenting you with too many realities to choose from (and you’re choosing the worst).
Change the audience in your head, from a critic to a fan. Preach to the converted. (If you believe you have no fans, then write to/for your dog/pet.)
Hot tip: You’ll never talk your haters out of their hatred or change their unchangeable minds, so refocus. Just trust me.
Do you have a phone? Many writers dictate their thoughts, then transcribe them, and then edit the transcriptions into writing.
Start a piece as a journal entry or a letter.
“Phoebe Ephron once told her daughter to write as if she were mailing a letter, “then, tear off the salutation”; this advice, combined with Ephron’s observational prowess, forged her signature voice.” —The New Yorker, “The Nora Ephron We Forget”
David Sedaris writes in a diary every day to warm up; he records details and observations, interactions, and conversations he has and overhears, and these become the basis for his books of essays. Other diarists include Oscar Wilde, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, and maybe, just maybe, you.
Hot tip: Start with events, facts, crap you notice. It should not be “good.”
Inspirational quotation from cis-male writer Aaron Sorkin: “. . . I still will, from time to time, sit down and try to write like someone else because I feel like that’s what’s required of me. You have to remember that you can only write like yourself.”
Research what you’re writing about to write about it with confidence.
Be obsessed with and invested in whatever you write. Feel at least 10,000 feelings about it. Immerse yourself in it. Want to do the bath scene in Saltburn with it. Want to do the grave scene in Saltburn with it.
Read your writing aloud . . .
. . . to yourself, a friend, a writing group, an audience of strangers. Go to storytelling shows and tell your story — not for the applause but to improve your writing on the page. Listen to yourself ad-lib or trip up, and add to or subtract from the page accordingly.
Hot tip: Find other funny, supportive people and share your writing. Again, this isn’t about the writing itself — it’s about how you talk about it and what others react to and how you riff and think of more to say (and how to say it) when you share vs. write alone in a room (where writing may have no pulse).
- defined “writing like a motherfucker” on a podcast, and it’s the perfect answer to the finding-your-voice problem:
“‘Writing like a motherfucker’ means ultimately, really, deeply trusting yourself and saying, ‘I am not going to sit around and worry about whether what I have to say is important or that people are going to like what I’ve written or anyone’s going to be interested in it or if it matters or if it’s good enough or any of that stuff.’
But that what you concern yourself with is what is inside of you, and you concern yourself with getting all of that out. That you don’t write to please people. That you don’t write to publish. That you write with wild abandon: what’s in your mind, what’s in your heart. That you trust your intuition. That you follow where the writing leads you. That you say on the page or on the screen what you’re absolutely terrified to say out loud in your own life. That you trust that it’s going to be okay if you tell the truest truth that could possibly bear.
And I found that when I write in that way…is that all of the fears that I have…about being rejected, about people saying, ‘Why would I read this?’ or ‘You’re too much’ or ‘I’m going to judge you’ or ‘You’re a bad person’…all of those fears disappear….And it’s because I genuinely give all of myself to that. I’m incredibly rigorous with that emotional abandon.”
My best advice to you is my therapist’s advice to me about voice and fear and risk.
Risk “not being good enough.” Risk looking like an idiot. Risk being uninteresting and unoriginal. Risk being an emotional daredevil! Risk total vulnerability. Risk uncomfortable honesty. Risk a sexual relationship with a fresh grave.
Lean into your every fear about writing—Maybe no one will read this. Maybe no one will think it’s important. Maybe people will think I’m too emotional or too stupid. Maybe I said too much or asked too much. Maybe people will judge me. Maybe I’ll offend someone. Maybe people will think I’m a bad woman, or worse, a bad writer—and write anyway.
Writing is risk-taking, but I’ve lost more from risking nothing.
If we don’t risk, then fear owns us. With every “maybe” and “write anyway” I can almost feel well-worn, cavernous neural pathways rerouting and overwriting fear and self-hatred.
Your “you-ness”—your experiences, expertise, education, day jobs, hobbies, opinions, feelings, passions, obsessions, embarrassments, outrages—comprises your voice and superpower. This is what you have to offer and what sets you apart and what you must water regularly.
Also? You’re the best writer and happiest person when you’re you.
So, rather than “look for” your voice, or waste time doubting it and crapping on it, spend time honing it and making it more of what it already is.
As Glinda the Good Witch tells Dorothy, “You’ve always had the power, my dear. You just had to learn it for yourself.”
How do you find your voice? Tracking device or ?
Find your lost voice in my upcoming seminars and workshops:
NEW: Humor and Satire Writing Workshop
Feb. 22nd-March 14th (Thursdays)
6:30-9pm EST
Online, via Roundtable
Do you want to make friends as an adult and also write humor and satire? In this four-week writing workshop/dance experience, we’ll do both. Specifically, we’ll break down the short comedy piece to better understand how to write, publish, and self-promote your own.
*
NEW: How to Write a Tragicomic Memoir
March 30th (Saturday)
2-5pm EST
Online, via Writing Workshops
Learn to make readers laugh while RIPPING OUT THEIR HEARTS in a sad, funny book about you, your exes/parents, and society. There will be a life-changing* lecture, foolproof writing prompts, infinity handouts, an AMA, and more, a lot more. *If your life isn’t changed, then it’s not my fault.
*
NEW: The Art of Rejection
May 19th (Sunday)
3-5pm EST
Online, via Writing Workshops
Getting good at rejection is the secret to success, both professionally and romantically. Look forward to a lecture/sermon, handouts, writing exercises, answered questions, and a lot of crying. By the end of class you'll realize that, in the words of comedian-turned-Dancing With the Stars contestant Kel Mitchell, “A setback gets you ready for your comeback.”
*
NEW: Tragedy Plus Time
June 2nd (Sunday)
2-5pm EST
Online, via Writing Workshops
Tragedy plus time equals comedy, and in this three-hour seminar on “traumedy” we’ll do that: turn your tragedies into comedies (or at least more entertaining tragedies) using time and many more devices. This class is perfect for writers who work across genres (fiction, nonfiction, humor, serious) or want to learn how. Happy endings will not be accepted. Prerequisite: being in therapy.
ICYMI: I’m Elissa Bassist, and I teach short conceptual humor/satire writing, funny personal essays, tragicomic memoir, emotional emails, and that’s it. I edit the “Funny Women” column on The Rumpus, and I wrote the award-deserving book Hysterical.
Consider smashing “paid” because I’m building something here and could use your support.
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This is great advice. On the topic of one's voice, I kinda feel like there are two sorts of people, those who have a voice (that's easily recognizable) and those who have voices (not one defined way of expressing themselves and more of an "expression chameleon").
Loved this piece. Will come back to it. I'm a fan of your work Elissa.