Signposts to Your Writer’s Voice
By Barbara O'Neal | January 25, 2017 |
How do you learn to know your voice? How can you find the connection points in your life and yourself, and know when you’re really connecting to the stories you’re meant to tell?
I teach voice a lot, and I love that moment when a light comes on for a writer, when their eyes show that slight shock, sometimes a distinct discomfort. I love it when I feel it myself, too, that sharp, intense feeling of connection.
Often, I’ve said to you here that I believe you were meant to be a writer. You wouldn’t be pursuing this difficult and challenging work if there were some way you could get out of it. I strongly believe you were meant to tell your own, particular, unique, individual, only-you-can-tell-them stories.
How do you know what those are? How can you see your own voice? One way is to look back at the journey you’ve taken in your writing so far. What are your favorite bits of writing? What are your best? Don’t just look at published or polished work. Take a wander backward and see what you see in your whole body of work.
The best way I can illuminate that path is to share some points in mine.
Even as a small child, I made up story-songs, and spun stories to myself, but the first thing I remember writing that really connected was in the fifth grade. A very short story about an old man dying on his birthday, and his regret over his relationship with his son. It contains a detail about flies, buzzing too lazily in the heat to even move off a ledge, which I took out of my own life, a very uncomfortable sad moment when my dad’s dad came to see us and I was alone in the house. I had no idea what to say to him so I sort of skulked around, peeking at him on the patio. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, tall and white haired, staring out at something in the distance. We were strangers to each other, even though we lived in the same town. Eventually, he left, and I felt both relieved and embarrassed. The story emerged from my discomfort.
That was the first time I really connected to the page. As a mature writer, I can see that sorrow and regret, missed chances and wrong turns are all over my work. I write about pretty ordinary people trying to find their places in the world, find their work, falling in love and falling out of love and trying to find their way. I love a little magic and lots of music. I tend to write about mixed cultures because that has been my life.
But as a young writer, trying to figure out what to do with my work, with this passion, it wasn’t as easy to see where I was going. When I decided to try to really write fiction, really try to make a go of it, I was 24 or maybe 25. I’d written about five novels, countless short stories, and had accumulated a fair number of rejections from magazines on my short stories. Then I’d gone to college to study journalism, where I found professors and peers who were very supportive. I wrote features and columns for the school paper, and I got a lot of reinforcement for the work.
I loved the attention! I wanted it on me all the time! I loved making people cry. I loved wading into big controversies and knowing the right people and having enough background to write the story well.
But at 24, or maybe it was 25, I wanted to try to make my fiction work. I was flailing around a lot, writing all kinds of things, not sure what I was supposed to write. I couldn’t hear my own voice yet.
Everything I read said you should write about what you know, and I looked at all of it. I was married to an African-American man, and we joked that we were both first-generation Southerners. I had a couple of little boys, and we lived in a Latino-Italian town. My own background was as ordinary a white working class world as you could imagine, and I was really kind of embarrassed about that. My dad ate baloney sandwiches with mustard. Who wanted to read about those kinds of roots? Why would I want to spend my time there?
I thrashed around with various stabs at stories. I had some great rejections, personal letters from editors, even from a few glossies, but…
No sales.
One night, my kids had been a pain all day and I was exhausted and it was too hot to sleep and I just sat down at my kitchen table and wrote a story that had been rolling around in my brain. It was a story that came out of nowhere, about a woman I’d once seen in a kind of seedy club years before.
It was a very dark piece, about an aging prostitute in love with a broken gangster on a downward slide. He’s her boyfriend’s best friend (forbidden love, my old friend!) and she finds him in a bad situation and rescues him. They have sex and it’s sad and piercing, and she really does love him, but he’s just way too far gone. I wrote it in a white hot heat, all of a piece.
I knew when I finished that it was really, really good. I just felt the difference. I could really hear my voice in it. Like the story about the old man, it was full of regret and lost chances and redemption. It was about all the terrible fears we feel about not being lovable and how love can make things feel better, even for a little while, and I got it. It was electrifying.
I had more great feedback on that story than I’d had on anything to that point, and came within a hair of selling it to a very prestigious literary journal. It never sold–and honestly, I needed to make money, so that literary route wasn’t going to work for me anyway. But I took that kernel of what I’d learned, that I liked writing about love between unlikely people, and regret, and hope, I wrote a straight romance, trying to figure out how to fit those pieces together.
It was rejected, but at a very high level. High enough that I felt sure I could figure this out….but, wow. Things were getting pretty hard.
No one cares if you want to be an artist. We were a young family, struggling to make ends meet in a city that was economically crashing in the wake of the steel mill crashes. We didn’t even have a phone. I took a job with a friend of my father’s, who ran a 12-lane-bowling alley in the shadow of the steel mill.
It was a god-awful job, the worst I ever had, but I could work around my kids, and even bring them to work if I needed to. And I fell in love with everyone there. The humans. Pueblo, really. I was enchanted by the legends they told me, and by the old Italian men who smelled so good and still flirted so elegantly at age seventy. I fell in love with working class people who accepted me completely into their world, and let me be a part of them (all of which shows up later in my book No Place Like Home.)
They loved me. They were good to me. They saved up jokes totell the little bartender who got the grilled onions just right on their burgers. (I still have a large, dark scar on my right hand from the fryolater.)
So I wrote a romance novel about a woman who was writing a sonata to the rise and fall of the steel mill. The hero was a Vietnam vet (yes, it was a long time ago) who limped (and smoked!). She had lost her husband to suicide. He was a writer who took refuge in history. It was a romance, but it was about Pueblo and working class people and finding home.
I would go in early to work to write it, to have that little extra hour to write. And the people worried about me having such big dreams. They worried and worried. They didn’t want me to get my heart broken. They thought I was such a good person and they liked me and they wanted me to be happy, and to be a writer was so big a thing to want. Too big.
That was a turbulent period in our lives. One of our college friends was murdered. I remember stumbling into work after the funeral feeling like I’d gone to another world. My younger son had the chicken pox so badly that he nearly died. (I didn’t even know people could die of chicken pox.) And through all of this, I kept telling my husband to believe in me a little bit longer. Just a little longer. I kept writing anyway.
That little book about the sonata to the steel mill sold, and honestly, I knew that it would from the moment it started hitting the page. It was real and true and honest. It was filled with love for my subject. It was about a romance between two people who needed–desperately–to love each other. It was about music, and about art saving you, and about redemption and triumph and even a little thread of mysticism and magic.
All writers travel a similar path to their own work. Maybe your path has been harder than mine, or easier, but we’re all looking for that work we can call our own, those threads of power that electrify us, make us race back to the work, day after day, no matter what else is going on.
Look back over your journey. When did you connect with something in a riveting, powerful way? When did you feel in your guts, “this is good”? When did you get particularly good responses from editors or critique partners or reviewers? Write down all of those moments, and then see if you can find some similar thread in them, themes or ideas or connection points of any kind. That is the raw material of your voice, and there is the work you’re meant to do.
Over time, some of the layers will shift and change, of course. That’s life—our voices change with our journey. I’ve fallen in love with England, and I wrote about second chances so much because I had a pretty traumatic divorce (aren’t they all?). If you find the work you’ve been doing doesn’t fit anymore, that might be why. Figure out where your deepest loves are now, and see what happens.
Now, get to it. We need those stories.
Do you know the threads of your voice? Can you point to certain moments in your writing when you knew you were on the right track? How has that played out in your journey? If your voice has shifted, can you point to the events and shifts in thinking that changed it?
[coffee]
Barbara O’Neal is the author of more than a dozen award-winning, bestselling novels, including the runaway bestseller, When We Believed in Mermaids, which has been published in more than 20 countries and spent many months on the Amazon Charts, as well as the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Washington Post bestseller lists. Barbara lives on the beach in rugged Oregon with her husband, a British endurance athlete who vows he’ll never lose his accent and their zoo of cats and dogs. You can find more information on her newsletter and where to find her on social media at barbaraoneal.com.
“It was real and true and honest. It was filled with love for my subject.”
That is it exactly. The moment when you know your heart is full of love. At the beginning of a project, I find myself resisting that. It takes a while to give your heart away.
But it does happen. It’s what you feel in a marriage, in battle with comrades, on a protest march, soothing your hurt child, forgiving someone, or serving French fries in a bowling alley to old Italian gentlemen who accept you and love you just because you are there and with them.
My new project is about lost love–oh, so potent –and finding the grace to let that person go. It took a while to gain traction and it’s not yet fully up to speed. That’s not because the story is hard to write but because I am protecting myself. It’s fearful to be open to hurt.
But that is what storytellers do and I can’t recall a more powerful storyteller’s story than yours today. We are all one. More so today because of you. Thanks, Barbara.
I love the metaphor of the marriage and the sound of your new project. It is hard to step out of the way when you know becoming vulnerable to the story and all it is going to say will be painful, but it is the thing that makes it live, as you know so clearly.
And it’s that moment of love, pure, soaring love. Yes, like a protest march.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I’ve known I would write since I was 12 (and how it was always going to be epic fantasy), and yet was able to ignore that seemingly unignorable truth for 35 years. The roots of my voice are definitely planted in the fertile soils of Middle Earth—of not wanting Tolkien’s stories to end. I remember how sad I was when my dad told me Tolkien had passed away, and how he gave me a Time magazine folded back to the page with the obituary. I remember reading all of the appendices of Return of the King over and over, and how I mentioned something about them to another Tolkien-loving friend, who said, “You actually read that stuff at the end?” And how incredulous I was that he hadn’t read it.
I remember the morning, shortly after we left our business (summer of ’04), when a visiting friend came into my office to find me researching the Goths online over coffee, and how he asked me why I was bothering with such an odd historical footnote. I remember telling him, “Because I’m going to write a book about them.” And how I startled myself with that information. It was like consciously realizing, and admitting, something my soul had known all along.
I’m currently reading Anam Cara, A Book of Celtic Wisdom, by John O’Donohue. My bro-in-law stumbled across the book and bought it for me because I’ve long referred to my wife as my Anam Cara (Gaelic for “soul-mate”). It’s even engraved on my wedding ring. Yesterday I came across this passage:
“To be born is to be chosen. No one is here by accident. Each of us was sent here for a special destiny…. It is in the depths of your life that you will discover the invisible necessity that has brought you here. When you begin to decipher this necessity, and surrender to it, your gift and your giftedness come alive. Your heart quickens and the urgency of living rekindles your creativity.
“If you can awaken this sense of destiny and purpose, you come into the rhythm of your life. You fall out of rhythm when you renege on your potential and talent, when you settle for the mediocre as a refuge from the call. Rhythm is the key to balance and belonging. It is ancient. When you embrace your rhythm, providence is at one with you; it minds you and brings you to your destined horizons.”
After contemplating this, and my own acceptance of my journey, and now in reading your wonderful post, I can see how finding our true voice as storytellers is much like finding O’Donohue’s rhythm of life. Thanks, Barbara, for being such a tangible aid to my finding my rhythm, not just today but for years now. Coffee’s on me. Or maybe a libation for later? Cheers to the rhythm!
Vaughn, you made me cry this morning with O’Donohue’s beautiful words, and also do a happy dance that you read the LOTR appendices. I tried to learn Quenya in High School!
The moment of your father giving you the Time magazine with Tolkein’s obituary touched me deeply.
And I’m going to write this down and post it where I can see it:
“It is in the depths of your life that you will discover the invisible necessity that has brought you here.”
Thank you, Vaughn.
I love this post. I especially love the bit about the fly on windowsill. I can relate. It’s those little moments that are actually the doors opening to the vastness of the universal… the eternal.
A while back I went through my writings. I’m working on my second novel. I didn’t think it was too much like my first until I realized an overarching theme. My stories are always about displaced persons, outsiders, trying to feel comfortable in their own skins. Trying to find people and places they can call home.
I came from England as a child to America.
You are right, Barbara. No matter what we write, when we write from the heart, we are telling the story we are meant, and need to tell.
Thank you.
Funny how those recognitions can be connected to something so clearly.
Lovely, strong, Barbara, your quest for the written word, your journey to publishing. Sometimes it does take LIFE to make the writer write, to find the words. Thanks for this piece. I’ve also written forever, never could sell my stories to Redbook or McCalls, bless them, but my novel is improving and I have the time to write, so I’ll take my “living” and put it on the page.
McCalls! I’d forgotten them. How many short story markets there used to be.
Putting your living on the page is the work of a wise woman.
I know that I was writing the second book in a mystery series while trying to find a publisher for the first one, when a story was vouchsafed (I love that word) to me, and I could see being the only person who could write it, and that I didn’t have the skills.
It took a long time from the turn of this century, when that happened, to teaching myself what I needed to learn and publishing late in 2015, because the same reasons that made me the person to write it are implicated in making me very slow.
I found a way to do it, to create a story in tiny mosaic pieces with a designated space in the final picture, and stayed with each piece as long as it took to get it right. I have standards for my work developed from years of reading the classics – and everything else – and had no intention of lowering them for myself!
And it jelled when I realized I had developed style and voice, and could rightly say I knew what I was doing and how. And I could give different characters the same. The actual moment came when I submitted the WIP to an organization claiming to supply a ‘seal of approval’ to indie work – and realized that, for the kind of writing I am doing, they hadn’t a clue. Maybe their suggestions were necessary for writers whose command of English was shaky, and who did things to break the ‘rules’ by not knowing them in the first place.
But I knew precisely why I made every deliberate choice.
(https://liebjabberings.wordpress.com/2016/04/22/you-like-a-writers-style-and-voice-or-you-dont/)
Very freeing.
There’s so much still to learn and develop, new writing problems that come up as I write forward, and those pesky standards, but I have no hesitation at all in saying I am a writer – and I know what I’m doing – something I couldn’t do five years ago.
It sounds as if you’ve been true to your path, Alicia, even to rejecting the “seal of approval” you recognized you didn’t need. Excellent!
Beautiful. Thank you for this.
Thank you, Barbara. You hit me in the heart with your phrase, your theme–regret and lost chances.
As a child, my parents lived on the edge of town, no children nearby to play with except my younger brother. During the times we played alone, I had an imaginary playmate to talk with and create an imaginary world.
Then when I read Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, I started writing my imaginary characters on paper, creating stories and completing two short stories. I thought I’d be a romance author (after Alcott, Harlequin and Regency romances were my go-to reading). Ha! My first published book is non-fiction.
But as I reflect upon what you wrote, I realize that my recurring theme, in my stories and in my non-fiction, is to have courage, to stop running away from the regrets, the lost moments. Have courage, face those times (with compassion for a younger self) and learn the lessons needed.
It’s striking to me how many of us began by simply extending the “real” world onto the page. So natural!
Courage to face regrets is a powerful theme indeed.
I was riveted reading this, Barbara, you talking about that passion you felt as a young writer, looking for a way to connect to it. I relate to that struggle, and also, being from a certain background, to eating baloney with mustard. But mostly to that feeling of finally connecting the passion to the voice. For me, it was an essay that I wrote in a fit of inspiration while on a landscaping job. I literally plopped down after shoveling piles of mulch onto a hillside of rhododendron and fired off two pages, then and there. It felt to me like I’d g finally spoken my truth, and so I sent the essay off to a small publication that dealt with spirituality and the environment. Then I promptly forgot about it. A while later, I got a phone call from a friend who informed me that he’d just read my article in a magazine (this is pre-cellphone and computer). Thank you for this beautiful reminder that the compulsion to write, while often so hard to live with, is the very thing that keeps us going, and that if we do, magic can happen.
Funny how those true things can come up in the middle of something else entirely, isn’t it? It’s a way of letting down the guard.
Barbara, thank you for this important post. I loved all the details of your younger self, how you knew when a piece was good. Some of my best writing has not sold and I think because it needs to be developed more. But the stuff that I can sell I have to write too, not because we are a struggling family but because of the things we want for our children, a good Catholic education. I could homeschool but I don’t have the temperament. But you have reminded me, again, not to put aside the works of my heart too long on hold for the more commercially viable projects. Thank you.
Both the commercial and the ethereal have their place. We are artists, but we have to live in the world….and the world requires money. It is soothing for the artist’s soul to immerse in the purely creative projects, too.
Hi, Barbara:
I’m impressed by your efforts to teach voice. It is the most difficult, mercurial, personal aspect of writing — and I think one of the most difficult to teach.
I’m teaching a class this weekend to a group of writers trying to do the “final polish” before sending their work out to agents. In my discussions with agents at conferences, I’m always struck by how frequently voice is the prime determinant on whether they connect with a manuscript or not. I’m going to send my students the link to this post — and I would love other from you (not in this comment thread, but maybe another post down the road) how exactly you help students who are still struggling to find their voice.
Wonderful as always to see you here and read your touchingly personal stories. Happy New Year. Take care.
Thanks, David. It’s always great to see your phosphors here.
I find the most valuable way to teach voice is via writing exercises. I have a lot of them piled up, but it’s hard to teach them without interaction and readings. I’ve thought a lot about how to translate the methods into something more readily usable, but haven’t yet figured out how to do it.
Barbara, what was the title of the first book that “broke through” for you – the beginning of your confidence in your own voice?
Dana, it was a book called Strangers on a Train, by Ruth Wind. I loved the cover madly and still think it’s beautiful, if dated.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92297.Strangers_on_a_Train
Yes yes yes! It truly happens that way. I wrote 6 or 7 stories til I found my writers voice and I remember the lightbulb blinking in my head when I knew it was working–everything was finally falling into place. I was writing about things I knew and loved: music and dedication and passion.
I love that you worked in a bowling alley. Now that’s food for character thought if ever there was one!
Even more of a story to that bowling alley–about a decade later, the entire back wall of the building fell down. No one was hurt because it happened in the middle of the night, but Corsi’s Bowl was no more.
As you know, I’m a fan of your work, so I am quite glad you found your voice.
Barbara, speaking of voice, I thought this was you from just the first two paragraphs, though the pull of its delight doesn’t get its full momentum till a bit further in. This is a lovely piece, so evocative of the odd minings, talismans and emotional shivers of our lives that make their way into our writing.
I lived in San Francisco in the late 80s and early 90s and loved the eccentric grab-bag of essays, literary bits and hokum that was in a section of the San Francisco Chronicle called the “Sunday Punch.”
To then, I’d had pieces published in a number of second-tier magazines, but I really wanted to be in Punch. Then it came to me that the odd 15-year correspondence I’d had with the Jack Daniel’s Distillery (I’d initiated it by telling them I brushed my teeth with Jack Daniels) would make a great essay. This is how it began:
“It seems that truth is more than one breed of animal. For instance, there’s your factual truths and your spiritual truths. If my grandmother said that Smucker’s jam kept her kids from getting the mumps and would keep my kids from getting the mumps, that’s a spiritual truth of my grandmother’s that no Xeroxes from the New England Journal of Medicine are going to dissuade. I have received such a body of spiritual truth from the Jack Daniel’s Distillery.”
That piece, which did get in Punch, was the first time I’d sensed my actual voice—sort of a wounded-animal wise guy, something that’s never left—on the page.
Thank you, as always, for some expressive, poignant writing.
Love that description, Tom, a wounded-animal wise guy. Perfect.
And what could be more perfect for that voice than letters to Jack Daniel’s Distillery? What a great story.
Voice is confusing to me. I wrote a scene once for a writing exercise about a lonely woman who meets a secret friend in the park every morning. At the end, it’s revealed this friend is a dog. My roommate still asks me about that and wants me to tell her more about what happened with the dog. Write a short story! Well, I didn’t keep it so I would have to start from scratch. She says that she loves my voice. What voice? I ask her. She said that I have a distinct voice that came out in that scene. How can I reproduce that when I don’t know what my voice is? Is this the author voice or the narrator’s voice, or both? Yes, I know my novice voice is strong here! How is it developed? Thanks for your help. :)
Really, you have to just keep writing, and keep writing, and keep writing. And listen to your intuition when something feels really good, better than what you’ve done before, more true. You’ll begin to hear it.
This was such a gorgeous piece — thank you for sharing it. I felt as if you were reading it to me, sitting right here on the couch. Your voice is amazing.
Namaste hands. Thank you.
I really appreciated this. The feeling you mention — writing something and knowing “this is good”? I chase that and I’m so happy when I find it. Collecting those “this is good” moments and seeing what they have in common is solid advice… I will give it a try.
Thank you for your story! This was a beautifully written post and very inspirational.
Thank you for the encouragement you’ve given here!
Where can I find your story about Pueblo & the steel mill?
It’s called Strangers on a Train, Leanna. Under my pseudonym Ruth Wind. It may be hard to find.
However, I’ve written a couple of other books set in Pueblo. No Place Like Home by Barbara O’Neal is *really* about Pueblo, and remains one of my most popular books.
The other is The Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue, Barbara O’Neal.
You can find both of those on any of the main retailers online.
Beautiful piece, Barbara. I really connected with it. Thank you.