Channeling the Unique Voice That Lives inside of You!

Lesson #4 Is A BIGGIE!

I’ve been talking a lot about “voice.”

We all have it. You hear it right now, the one talking to you in your head. It’s special. And yet we tend to ignore it because we value the voice and opinion of others — the outside — more than we value our own voice on the inside.

Voice is the only thing a writer has that separates him or her from the pack.

Voice is the only thing we have as humans that makes us unique.

And yet we work so hard to mute it.

So stop for a second in this hectic world where social media tells us how to look and act, where people tell us who we should be, where bosses are giving us deadlines, and your kids are yelling in the backseat: Listen to that unique voice that you have – right now — running in your head, the one that only you can hear, the one that calls to you, tells you who you really are when the rest of the world refuses to listen or to see it.

When emerging authors begin a book, they are driven by that unique voice that runs in their heads. But before we fully channel it, it begins to be drowned out by the call of fear and that voice becomes diluted, a faint echo of the one that originally sang to us.

I know because it's happened to me. I began my first book, America's Boy – a memoir about the difficulty of growing up in the Missouri Ozarks but surviving due to the love of family – as a novel. I actually started it as a memoir but grew fearful of pretty much everything, including what my family and hometown would think. I spent a year writing it as fiction, until Gary read it (a nightmare for writers) before I was ready for anyone to see it.

When I asked what he thought, he said, "If you had dropped this on the street, and I had picked it up, I would never have known you had written it. It sounds nothing like you."

I was stunned. But, in my heart, I knew he was right.

So I started over. Fearless. I channeled my voice, the funny-sad-sentimental one that could make me ugly laugh and ugly cry in the course of one paragraph. I finished the book, I reached out to literary agents – who are the ones that sell your book to a publisher like HarperCollins or Penguin Random House -- and I received three offers of representation in less than two weeks. That was 17 books ago.

"Your voice is one-of-a-kind," my literary agent said to me when I signed with her. "It's what sets you apart, and it's what will make you successful. It's all any of us have, and we all try to water it down, make it like everyone else's, just so we'll fit into this world. But it's those who don't who will be the most successful in this world."

And she's right.

Voice — our uniqueness — is all we have as writers AND as people.