Finding your voice when writing

Whether it’s a shopping list or a horror story, the purpose of writing is to share information. But it’s how you share that information that makes the difference, it’s the tone you use that will keep people coming back to read more. That’s why big companies will spend thousands ensuring their messaging is on brand. The unique tone used by different companies is their personality, it is what makes them stand out from the crowd. And if the psychologist, Mehrabian is to be believed, the tone in which we are told something is much more important than the words being communicated.

I’ve worked as a copywriter for a lot of different brands, and in that time I’ve learned to quickly adapt to different voices and write in different tones when needed. It’s like playing the part of a different character. You put on the mask of that brand and speak in a different way.

So how can you change the way you write for different companies?

Look who’s talking

I once worked for an airline which writes in a particularly audacious voice; it is also noted for its sassy cabin crew and their sharp red uniforms (you’ve guessed who they are by now, I hope). Whenever I was writing something, whether it was customer communications at the airport or email marketing, I would imagine the words being spoken by one of the cabin crew.

Could I imagine someone in those chic red uniforms saying what I was writing? Maybe it needed 15% more cheek — perfect. Then I had the tone in my head and I could write anything. The right words would then strut out of my head, down to the keyboard in the perfect tone of voice.

Find the trigger

Another time, I was writing for a brand and I found that a certain phrase was enough to set the tone off in my head. The line was something along the lines of “as long as we can have cake as well”. This slightly decadent and playfully indulgent attitude pervaded the culture and tone of voice so thoroughly that once I’d written it the rest of the piece was easy to adapt to that particular tone. It was so indicative of the brand and encapsulated the whole tone of voice so succinctly that simply by placing it in the copy, it tainted the whole piece perfectly and triggered the tone of voice in my head.

Another company I worked for used the expression “grab yourself a cup of tea and we’ll have a chat about it”, (I can take credit for this one). The purpose here was to establish an informal conversational style. That expression resonated with me enough to let me sculpt the rest of the copy in the same tone.

These techniques are all fine for copywriting and creating content for company websites, but as a writer, I have aspirations of something more than just the blog post of the week. That novel is still rumbling around in my head, just waiting for me to find its voice and let it pour out all over the page.

Finding your own tone of voice in fiction writing

In fiction writing, there is the debate as to whether the narrator should be simply a window on the world and the story, or whether he is more of a character telling the reader what is happening through his own eyes, colouring and inflecting what the reader sees. In “How to Write Damn Good Fiction”, James N Frey talks about the “author invisible”, where the narrator, with godlike omniscience, remains neutral in tone, merely recounting the events as they happen.

Writing as a narrator with no personality is impossible and not good advice to give an author (as Frey notes himself).

Good books, good story, good novels, need strong narrators. When handled well, the narrator can be just as much a character in the story as any of the actual protagonists. A strong narrator ensures the reader sees the setting and the story as you intend it to be seen.

Some novels/stories go further and the narrator is actually part of the story, in these cases the tone and inflexion the narrator brings to the story are almost palpable. One of my favourite examples of this is in the graphic novel “Slaine: The Horned God” by Pat Mills. In these stories, we meet the narrator, Ukko, before anyone else, it is he who sets the tone for us. Ukko tells us of his tales with his master, the titular hero of the stories, Slain, and we learn throughout the tale that Ukko is a greedy, lascivious creature. Right from the outset, we know that we are taking this journey with Ukko, we are seeing the world through his eyes. Every word, and in this case image, that we see is dripping with Ukko’s personality, his tone inflects every scenario. He is our eyes.

Such as Ukko provides us with a third-person narrative on a story, Patrick Rothfuss’ Kvothe gives us a first-person perspective and imbues his story with his own tone. The Kingkiller trilogy is a bildungsroman, and in it, we follow the life of Kvothe who is recounting his story to an in-story scribe. This gives him total freedom to colour our perception of the world. We see the events exactly as Kvothe saw them, albeit with hindsight and a good helping of grief and regret. While Kvothe does come across as an honest narrator, accurately and honestly telling his story, he is nevertheless one with a vested interest in telling his story and preserving his own reputation. At the end of the Kingkiller books (number three, Pat?), we know Kvothe not just from his actions but also through his tone of voice, the story he has told us.

Finding your unique tone of voice when writing

Finding a unique tone of voice for writing your own fiction can be more difficult than finding it for a brand. But one way to find it is through imitation. Years ago, I had singing lessons, and while I may never have progressed to being much of a singer, I did learn an important lesson from my teacher about developing my own unique voice.

Every week, we practised singing in the styles of different singers and I would try to imitate them as best as I could. This involved trying to sing like David Bowie, croon like Jim Morrison, fa-fa-fa like Otis Redding, or wail like Axl Rose. This notion of regular imitation would eventually lead to me developing my own unique style and finding my voice, as the teacher put it.

Copying styles can be used to discover your own tone of voice. By imitating authors, you can learn how they construct their writing and get under the skin of their tone of voice. I started doing this by simply copying exactly what my favourite authors had written. Later on, I would use what I had learned to try and create original pieces in their style, matching my tone as closely as I could to theirs.

One day, this will allow me to create my own unique voice to write in.