Being Comfortable With Your Voice

I’m talking about your “writing voice,” by the way.

As frightening–and somewhat depressing–as it may be for me to think this now, I’ve been writing professionally in one capacity or another for the last 10 damn years. In that time I’ve broached just about every form of written communication possible, from advertising (Running the gamut from prints ads to radio commercials) to freelancing for magazines (And doing reviews, opinion pieces and not too serious exposes) to writing for television (And corporate videos and even a film script or two here and there) and of course, writing fiction in the form of short stories and novels.

And more recently, there’s this here Blog thing.

I’ve found as the time passed that while I can do all these things reasonably enough to get paid for them (With the exception of getting a novel in print, which still escapes me for the moment) these things are accomplished with varying levels of length and difficulty. Though for the most part, they fall into two categories which are, unsurprisingly enough, work and play. It’s the actual qualities and definitions comprising these two categories that surprised me.

Work

Is, by the far, the shorter of the two categories and at the same the harder. While it’s true that writing ad copy, or a script for a half hour television series is nowhere near the marathon of nursing a novel for a year or two, I find it much harder for a few reasons. Of course one is the educational aspect, but that’s also a positive. Usually (As is the case with the script I’m writing now) I come in with only the vaguest familiarity with the topic, and have to do a lot of homework to get up to speed, learning a lot in the process. The tricky part comes in weaving all that information and doing it in something that is NOT my “voice.” I’m usually (In real life as well as in writing) snide, cynical and ready to make fun of anything at a moment’s notice. While that sounds good coming from a cynic, or a character in a story, it doesn’t play out so well coming from the mouth of an attractive presenter who’s supposed to be endorsing whatever the subject is, and so, an enormous amount of restraint is involved.

It’s good practice in one way, because you don’t want all your characters to sound the same, but it isn’t easy.

And I often find myself surprised by the fact that even though the demand for volume isn’t there, sometimes I will sit there scratching my head wondering how to say something and fill up just a few sentences here and there, or what amounts to just several seconds of dialogue. It’s a good challenge, but a train twisting one on occasion.

Play

Which sometimes crosses over from “Work”.

Some of my work actually makes into “Play.” Like pretty much anything I do for GameAxis constitutes play since they encourage me to be snarky and the topic is something near and dear to my heart anyway, namely games, DVDs, comics and movies. Writing this sort of thing is a snap, since it’s not unlike writing for the blog in that I just say what I think. Out of all my play writing, this one is the second easiet.

The Blog is of course the easiest, period. No restrictions, and the ability to rant to my heart’s content makes this thing a breeze to fill out since I have so many rants to at my beck and call. Whether anyone reads it or enjoys it is another matter entirely, but some things you gotta’ do for yourself, and this blog is for me as much as anyone reading it since I want a record of the last few years to look at in the vain hope that I’ll be able to wax nostalgic about my “struggling days” at some point in the future when I can call myself a novelist.

Stories like novels and shorts are weird, because while they definitely constitute play and let me stretch my imagination in ways I had not previously imagined were possible, they are also the hardest of my play writing and there are moments where they are No Fun At All, and I wonder why I even bother, but just lower my head and keep pushing on anyway. Sometimes there are those “Magic Hours” where the muse is riding piggy back and everything comes out so fast I’m convinced this material isn’t mine and I’m merely taking dictation. Other times, I just sit there staring and even a few pieces of dialogue here and there are exhausting. But in the end, the most satisfaction I get from any of my play writing comes from this.

There was a point to this somewhere, but it’s time for sushi. Real sushi, not Mega Sushi.