Finding Your Voice

Some writers have a distinctive voice. Someone can hand you a paragraph, and you might not know the book, but you might be able to pin down the author. For instance:

1. “Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.”

2. "What's the use of learning to do right when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?"

3. "A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!"

Can you match the author with the above quotation? And I've added an extra choice just to make it interesting! Here are your choices, and the answers are below: A. Ernest Hemingway B. Mark Twain C. Charles Dickens D. Jane Austen

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I've noticed something about more modern works, however. Perhaps contemporaries of Dickens, Twain, Hemingway, and Austen could have said the same in their own time. I've noticed that in certain genres, they all sound the same.

This is not to say that the books are not well-written. I'm not saying the plots are identical, although there is nothing new under the sun, and so we do tend to recycle a plot and make it our own.

What I've noticed is that mystery writers use the same words -- not the jargon of a police procedural. That would be expected. Jargon is jargon. But they use words we don't use in everyday language, and they all seem to do it.

I've noticed with my own writing, that what I'm reading impacts what I write. If I read mysteries for three months straight, my writing will reflect those linguistic choices. If I read nothing but historical fiction, my writing reflects it.

So how, then, do I prevent that? How do I create a work, a novel, a world, that is unique to me? How do I write in such a way that a reader will instinctively know it's my work?

That's what we all want, right? We want our writing to gather an audience that will stalk the bookstore waiting for the newest book. We want to stand out from the crowd.

There are a few modern authors that do this well, and again, a writer not on this list is not necessarily a bad writer. My short list of writers with a distinctive voice are Nevada Barr and Patricia Cornwell. Cornwell's work has actually changed over her prolific career, and you can distinguish between an early Scarpetta and a more recent Scarpetta.

Who would you include on this list?

Answers: 1. Austen 2. Twain 3. Dickens