Finding your Voice

One of the biggest influences I had as a writer early on was a particular English teacher in High School; his name was Stephen Moyer, or Mr. Moyer as I knew him at the time. In total I was a student of his 3 times including the advanced Writer's Craft course that he alone taught.

Mr. Moyer was known to be...a bit eccentric. Well, he would've been eccentric had he been rich but as any teachers reading this can attest to, teacher and rich don't often go together. So to be polite I can just say that he was different; as most great writers are. Mr. Moyer was the antithesis of that old nugget about those who can't teach, because he could write.

One of the sayings he could often be heard repeating to those of us lucky enough to be his students was a variation on "Have you found your voice yet?" I can't say how many times he looked sternly at me and asked "What is your voice?"

So what is my voice? What is any of our voices? What did the esteemed Mr. Moyer mean?

He believed, and I know him to be right, that every writer has a unique voice; a way of expressing their words that is truly their own. If you look at the greats as he often did (Faulkner, Steinbeck, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dickens, etc.) each of them wrote in a style that they owned. It was through the act of defining this personal style that they wrote such amazing stories. By crafting a distinctive voice they were able to imbue their words with personal experience and elevate them beyond just words.

As writers we should all aspire to first find, then hone our own voices. It is through this personalization of the craft that we can set ourselves apart from the multitudes of similar sounding voices out there. It is through perfecting our voices that we can become known as scribes of "honest" or "authentic" writing. And isn't that what the very best stories are?

What worries me today though is that there are too few teachers like Mr. Moyer active in the world to impart this wisdom. I think this is why I read around Goodreads how authors are striving to emulate this author or that author rather than trying to find their own style. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but it is also how bookstores become crammed full of one original novel and a hundred knockoffs.

Many here are fans of On Writing by Stephen King. I too have read it but, have stopped short of exalting it as the only road to success. For example, just because King deplores the use of adverbs, doesn't mean that the only good writing is devoid of them. This is what works for him; this is the voice that he has found and honed to much success.

It is his style, his voice; it works for him. But rather than copy it, I say it is incumbent upon us to find our own way of writing...our own characteristic and personal voice.

Personally speaking, I'd rather see a world where the shelves are full of the breadth of human experience described by unique and exciting voices. Rather that than where we seem to be headed; the shelves full of the same voice echoing across the page, becoming fainter with each repetition.

Somehow...I think Mr. Moyer would prefer that too.