The Importance of Your Authentic Voice
By Annis Cassells, Writers of Kern
An authentic voice is what makes a personal connection between an author and her readers. It lets her personality shine through. It signals that writer’s work even when unsigned.
We recognize the sound of a letter or other written piece as our mother’s or that of a good friend. We know the style and language of a favorite author whom we’ve read extensively.
Readers react to the person they perceive behind the words – their character, personality, individuality, and sense of humor – as much as to the words themselves.
In Roy Peter Clark’s Writing Tools he quotes his colleague Don Fry’s definition of voice: “Voice is the sum of all the strategies used by the author to create the illusion that the writer is speaking directly to the reader from the page.”
Clark cites some of the indicators of a writer’s voice as level of language, whether the writer normally writes in first or third person, use of metaphors and other figures of speech, and typical sentence length and structure.
A great test for one’s writing voice is oral reading. Once I wrote a sonnet based on a model I’d received in my inbox via a prompt subscription. My poem fulfilled all the requirements of a sonnet, and I was quite pleased. But when I read it aloud to my writing group, they said, “That just doesn’t sound like you.”
And it didn’t feel like me. So I rewrote the poem in free verse, my usual form. Not only did it sound much better, it felt like home – much more satisfying to my readers and me!
A writer’s voice is like her signature, or a stamp on her work. Readers react to the person they perceive behind the words – the writer’s character, personality, individuality, and sense of humor – as much as to the words themselves.
Life coach and speaker, Annis Cassells has written
You Can’t Have It All: Poems and contributed to
Enough: Say Their Names… Messages from Ground Zero to the World.