Developing your voice as a writer

Moving through fear to find your own unique tone

It is the year 2000. But despite what Jarvis Cocker promised, I don’t feel fully grown. I try to still the sheet of A4 paper in my hands. To focus, while remembering to breathe. And to listen. It’s a lot.

Finding your voice as a writer is messy work. Like trying to sing a song without accidentally imitating the rock star whose vocals you adore (I’m looking at you Stevie Nicks), writing in your own voice means wading through all the swampy layers you’ve subconsciously drowned your words in over the years.

Perhaps, like me, you were encouraged - and I say that euphemistically - to drop your working class vernacular. To adopt a different tone or language from the one used in your home. Chastened by a teacher with a distinctive drawl, who believed that Edinburgh should be pronounced Edin-bra*.

*It shouldn’t. It’s also not Edin-burg either, just saying.

Or maybe all those Point Horror and Christoper Pike books you devoured as a teen got lodged in your vocabulary. Along with visions of locker-lined high school corridors. And fantasies of being the vampire-slaying cheerleader perched on top of the pyramid. When, let’s be honest, you were way more likely to have been in the D&D Club or Emo Appreciation Society anyway.

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I majored in Arts Journalism at university. Each week we’d be given multiple writing assignments that would result in us dutifully spending the last of our baked beans budget, trekking across Edinburgh in search of reduced price theatre tickets.

Our course leader was a sweary academic-turned-arts-editor, with a penchant for holy jumpers and highly improbable excuses for his everyday lateness. Never before had I, fresh from the Scottish country air, met someone with such unfortunate luck. We listened in slack-jawed horror as he regaled us with his latest tale of slipping in sick or waking up, trapped underneath a naked stranger.

Despite what these initial impressions may convey, being a theatre critic was a serious business. The rules, and there were many, were ingrained in us.

We must never ever…

Leave early (even if we desperately needed to pee and yes, I did clarify this thanks to a bout of eye-wateringly sharp cystitis that saw me chugging down cranberry juice - without the vodka for a change - like someone who shopped at Waitrose).

Call an actor boring. We could get sued for that. But it was okay to describe a certain A-lister, who was prone to giving particularly wooden performances, as a “trusty oak”.

Talk about the play. Just like the members of Fight Club, we stepped boldly yet silently into the night after shit (or in this case the curtain) went down, keeping our thoughts and opinions to ourselves.

Have our words come back to haunt us on a promotional poster. This would be a sign that we had used too many adjectives (and would then be immediately kicked off the course, our editor joked. Or did he?), and been too vociferous in our praise.

Take part in audience participation. Aloof was our middle name.

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Each week we would have to read our work out loud in class. Peeking to see if people laughed when we hoped they would. Wondering why they looked confused or if our words had resonated.

One of my classmates had the most amazing, acerbic wit which came through completely authentically in his writing style. From. Day. One.

His was the voice I coveted. The one I wished I had inside me. But instead I had to cultivate my own.

This meant getting honest. Stripping back all the shoulds and affectations. And breaking the grammar rules, after years of being schooled in the opposite direction.

It meant writing like nobody was reading. Even though they clearly were. And doing it over and over again.

In this way we collectively practised finding our voices. For two whole years. The constructive feedback that followed each round helping us to refine our way of weaving words. Until after a few months, we were swapping our typed articles at the beginning of class and able to guess who had written them from the very first line.

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I was commissioned to write first for an arts magazine (low on pay but big on fun) then a national newspaper (scary as all hell), thanks to our tutor’s contacts. Having grown up in a farming community and gone to the local high school in small town Scotland, I often had absolutely no idea what the directors and actors I interviewed were referencing when they talked about the classics or certain art movements. My introduction to the magic of theatre was via musicals. My favourite opera, the one with the phantom. Like Joey in Friends, I did a lot of smiling and nodding along.

But, weirdly, being myself seemed to work. Mostly. Did I have to regularly dash to an internet cafe to Google the shit out of life? Absolutely. Were there times when I didn’t strike the tone the editor was looking for and felt crushed after having my article completely re-written? Definitely. Were they perhaps looking for a voice of authority and not an undiagnosed autistic/ADHDer bumbling her way through university? Probably.

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Twenty-three years on, I sit at my kitchen table typing this. Surrounded by stacks of books for the academic assignment I’m currently, slowly and painstakingly, piecing together. Trying on a new, more formal tone as I critique positive psychology interventions and design an eco-coaching programme to take an exhausted leader from borderline burnout to creatively re-energised.

Last summer, I read my poetry out loud for the very first time. In front of complete strangers. We were encouraged to steal a few words from each other along the way, while always coming back to our own style. Our own voice. And in this way, the process begins again. And again.

Soon I will shut this scuffed up laptop. Pick up the sci-fi-meets-Scottish-road-trip novel that is nudging from the corner of my periphery vision. Curl up in my hammock chair and gently rock to the rhythm of another writer’s words.

But first, I’m taking a moment to feel grateful for Substack. And the creative outlet it’s given me. Here we can travel wherever we want to. We can use our voice to connect with people from all over the world. Whether we believe we have something important to say, or not.

This space is our own. We get to practise finding, developing or evolving our writer’s voice here. To make - or break - our own rules. And write ourselves home again.

It is the year 2023. And I still don’t feel fully grown. I take a deep breath as I hit publish.

Putting your words out into the world, then gently detaching from wherever they may land is a bold act. In my experience, the nerves never go away. But it gets a little easier each time.

Something I learned while writing this post. Pulp’s Disco 2000 was inspired by Deborah Bone, a childhood friend of Jarvis Cocker, who received an MBE for services to children’s mental health shortly before her death in 2015. The year before, at her 50th birthday party, Cocker reportedly sang the song to her. Feeling all the feels just thinking about it.