How To Find Your Blog Voice

Be­com­ing a bet­ter writer means be­com­ing a bet­ter person. 

This is my 31^st post and it marks the com­ple­tion of my first month of blogging.

I’ve writ­ten about prim­ing your cre­ativ­ity in ‚How To Write A New Blog Post Every Day.‘ To­day we’ll ex­plore the pe­cu­liar metaphor of find­ing your blog­ging voice.

„Find­ing your voice“ is one of those metaphors that sound so nice but are hard to un­der­stand. Hard to turn into ac­tion­able steps.

It’s in one cat­e­gory with “be your­self” or “be au­then­tic.” Prac­ti­cally useless!

In “find­ing” there’s the pre­sup­po­si­tion that your voice is hid­den and needs to be dis­cov­ered first.

How do you do it? Where do you look?

• Is it hid­den in the depths of your clut­tered desk?
• Se­cretly en­crypted on your hard drive?
• Is it an es­o­teric en­tity in your mind that makes words flow into your keyboard?

You see, nice metaphors lead to all kinds of confusion.

First, let’s be clear we’re talk­ing about your voice in writ­ing. Not about speak­ing or singing.

Here’s the secret …

Here’s The Se­cret To Find­ing Your Unique Voice In 30 Sec­onds Or Less

1. Open any blog post you’ve written.
2. Take a look at what you’ve written.
3. There you’ll see your voice.

Took you just sec­onds to find it.

Sorry to be blunt!

Once you’ve found your voice, how can you be­come a bet­ter writer and a bet­ter person?

Here’s a won­der­ful in­sight from Ed­mund Blair Bolles:

“Like stage pres­ence in ac­tors, voice emerges from a writer’s be­ing. The writer is of­ten un­con­scious of it and does not al­ways try to cre­ate it.”

Now we’re get­ting somewhere.

The way you write is af­fected by your personality.

De­pend­ing on your char­ac­ter you will show a spe­cific way of word­ing the things you write. If you had dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter you would say the same thing in dif­fer­ent words.

That’s what I mean when I say you’ll find you your voice sim­ply by look­ing at what you’ve written.

• It’s not some­thing that needs to be searched for.
• It’s not some­thing that’s not here yet, not some­thing that’s sup­posed to bub­ble up from hid­den depths in the future.

Are you up for an experiment?

Ok, let’s try to find my blog­ging voice. :-)

Take a 30 sec­ond look at what I’ve writ­ten above. 

• Can you feel the know-it-all be­hind the writing?
• The con­de­scend­ing teacher?
• The au­thor who feels a se­ri­ous need to set things straight?
• To heal hu­man­ity from its mud­dled thinking?

Ah, yes, you got me there!

Or look at these 3 quotes from my other blog posts.

“To build the lifestyle you de­sire you must con­quer the free­­dom-com­mit­­ment paradox! “

Link to post

“The back links you hoped to gen­er­ate with dis­trib­ut­ing con­tent are un­der in­tense scrutiny by Google. “

Link to post

“To­day, In­ter­net mar­ket­ing re­quires time, money, and knowl­edge far be­yond what was needed ten years ago. If you’re not will­ing to up­grade your in­ter­net mar­ket­ing to a pro­fes­sional level, you might as well just STOP.”

Link to post

Wow! Isn’t that de­press­ing? Sounds like there’s a tough world out there, and lots of hard work with lit­tle rewards.

What kind of guy would write stuff like that?

Do you see how look­ing at your writ­ing can re­veal not only your voice, but also the ‘writer’s being?’

</END OF EXPERIMENT>

Re­fin­ing Your Voice

Once you’re pay­ing at­ten­tion to your voice, you may want to re­fine it. For the sake of your read­ers. Or for the sake of your own per­sonal growth.

What I find, look­ing back at one month of daily blog­ging, is that you can’t up­grade your writ­ing with­out up­grad­ing your think­ing first. That’s pretty cool.

It’s too early to proof, but I firmly be­lieve that do­ing so con­sis­tently will not only change your writ­ing but also your personality.

Fi­nally, see three ex­am­ples from this very post.

1) “The way you write is tainted by your personality.”

Huh? My per­son­al­ity is taint­ing my writ­ing? You got to be kid­ding me! But that was ac­tu­ally the first sen­tence that popped into my keyboard.

Re­word­ing this was more than re­word­ing. It re­quired a change in thinking.

2) “Huh?” The in­no­cent “Huh?” a few lines above read “WTF?” in ver­sion one.

It’s a con­scious choice to not use this type of vo­cab­u­lary in my posts.

I fully ex­pect to lose this vo­cab­u­lary in my real-life con­ver­sa­tions au­to­mat­i­cally within a few weeks. Sim­ply be­cause re­fin­ing my writ­ing voice will trans­fer into every­day life.

3) “Ed­mund Blair Bolles said:”

Doesn’t that sparkle from excitement?

If you’re cu­ri­ous, scroll up and see what I wrote instead.

Re­word­ing this was more than re­word­ing. It re­quired a change in feeling.

The reader isn’t the only one who feels bet­ter with the up­graded version.

The Voice You’re Find­ing Isn’t The One You Were Look­ing For

When we talk about “Find­ing our voice” we’re think­ing about the great one, the in­spir­ing one. The one that read­ers will love us for.

But this one isn’t found.

It’s de­vel­oped, by look­ing at your cur­rent voice, and chang­ing it sen­tence by sen­tence to re­flect a bet­ter, more in­spir­ing you.