Writer's voice

I'm going to go a little meta here, and write about writing.

Something I've always struggled with is finding my voice. I have scores of ideas for stories, some based on vivid dreams which even on waking, I found utterly fascinating. Yet when I put pen to paper, the epic tale becomes childish drivel, or pretentious prose.

No matter how many novels and writing guides I read, I couldn't seem to remedy this. The maddening part, was that not all my writing suffered this, and it took me a long time to figure out the difference. Knowledge.

If I had knowledge and/or experience on a topic, I could comfortably write about it in my natural voice. Just look at previous posts here: Ghost Train was written while on a late train, Insomnia was written while I was tired but unable to sleep. I wasn't thinking about sounding clever while writing them, I just combined my personal experiences with a little imagination.

Of course, this doesn't mean that you can't write about anything you don't experience personally. But we do need to research those topics heavily. Even for fantasy, we need to know about the world we're writing, though it's one we create.

So if you have trouble finding your voice, if your writing lacks confidence, or exudes pretentiousness, get back to basics. Write about what you know to find your voice, and research what you don't to expand it.