Your Voice is Like a Recipe

Your Voice is Like a Recipe The hardest thing for me to describe to a new writer is voice.   At a recent conference, during an informal gathering, a new writer asked how to identify voice. I gave her authors’ names and showed her how they had distinct voices. She recognized theirs, but she was still confused how to identify her own. Then I read a blog post about developing your own recipes, and how good cooks start off reading other recipes, then altering them as they deem necessary. Soon they have original dishes, after trial and error, insertions and deletions, embellishing and withdrawing. The same goes for writing. Recently, I heard a new writer say she didn’t have time to read very much. I hate that, because reading other work is the best teaching tool out there. Not conferences, not degrees, not how-to books, not that those don’t help. However, since the beginning of time, it’s been proven that the best way to learn anything is I’ve heard some writers say they are afraid they will copy who they read. Nah. Ain’t gonna happen. You are not as good as they are, and trust me, you will not pull it off like they do. They have their voice. They know what they’re doing. You may still be searching. I believe that reading the masters (i.e., successful authors who write in the genre you write) teaches you what works. You may even try writing like them. One author, then another author, then yet another. They are in your head as you fight a chapter – the action, the character development, the plot formulation. You study one   author for one aspect, then grab another for yet a different facet. Go ahead and copy them. You’re going to edit the book anyway.   Because a funny thing happens between Chapter One and Chapter Thirty. Your writing grows. You start winging it several chapters into the story. You aren’t so quick to copy, and get quicker at making up your own stuff. You reach Chapter Thirty and then†¦you go back and read the first few chapters. Wow. You write better than what you put in the opening chapters, and you learned it as you fought your way to the final chapters. That’s when you start with Chapter One and edit away, using the new voice that seems to ooze out here and there. You edit all the way through the book. Then you go back and look at Chapters One through Ten or so again. Dang it! You discover your voice grew again! You write better in the end than you did in the beginning of the story. So†¦you edit the book again. You do this over and over and over. Twenty times or more, if necessary. As long as you feel your ending sounds better than the beginning, you rewrite, until your voice is uniform  throughout. A handful of you will think your book is good after the second draft, and you would be wrong. All those edits are necessary to build that elusive voice. Aren’t sure you have your voice defined yet?   Keep reading the masters, copying the masters, writing beginning to end, and rewriting over and over. So, what does this have to do with a recipe? When you first make a dish, you use a recipe perfected