Am I in tune?
Find your own voice! A frequent command in ‘how-to-write-fiction’ books. As if it was hiding under the bed, or lost, like the TV remote.
I never lost mine anywhere, but it took me a while to find it.
I began by impersonating my favourite crime writers then I took a wrong turn and started to sound like I’d swallowed a slang dictionary and a thesaurus for breakfast.
Eventually I realised my voice wasn’t something I could choose. It sneaked up on me.
If I allowed my own personality into the narrative, my voice shaped how I told the story, it pitched the tone and dictated the way my characters thought and spoke.
I’m a member of an amateur choir and I started writing this blog after an afternoon’s singing practice. I’d never sung in a choir before this one, and it dawned on me that, purely by chance, I’d been finding my singing voice at the same time as I’d been searching for my writing voice. They may seem worlds apart, but in both cases, my voice is my unique way of expressing myself, but it must balance self-expression with conformity.
As the only bass in the choir, my voice should be in tune but not lost among all the other voices, confident to sing out when needed. My writing voice should fit in with the genre, without disappearing inside it, and remain unique.
If this happens, I stop worrying and start enjoying myself.
And if I crack a note or write a sentence that doesn’t fit, I’ll shake my head, grin and try again.
It’s not about perfection but about embracing my idiosyncrasies and having a laugh at the cacophony I bring to the world.
