Finding my Writing Voice

Photo via: Joseph Hart

It's Day 21 of the blog challenge, so I've been writing for three weeks straight.  Go me!  But early on in the challenge, I wrote that I was sick of myself.  I was tired of hearing my own voice in my head, and reading what I'd written.  I think partly this was because my blogging "voice" seems put-on.  In school I always prided myself on not sounding pretentious in my academic writing; I felt like I could "keep it real" but still convey an appropriate sense of diction.  Now it seems like I'm having the opposite problem--after years of schooling I'm having trouble dialing it down a notch.

I love reading about writing.  Two of my favorite writing books are Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott, and 50 Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark.  I love reading about writing so much that sometimes I avoid it because it gets me too excited, too worked up and wanting to take over the world or something with my writing.  That's when the procrastination usually hits.  It takes me forever to craft something, then I lose steam for it...fellow procrastinators out there, you'll understand.  

But sometimes, it's not the procrastination that gets me.  Sometimes, I'll be so excited and ready to implement every writing trick I've heard of, and then I'll read something great.  Like anything by Amy Tan.  Or I'll come across something unexpected, like my current book, The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson.  And it will be so simple but so well put and poignant, that I wonder why I even try.  All my gimmicks and scholarly writing...it's all a sham.  

So I need to find my voice.  One that doesn't irritate me or alienate readers.  "They" say that for a blog, you should write how you speak, so I'm going to try that.  Hopefully that voice isn't also annoying.  One way I'm going to work on this is by starting each blogging session with a three minute flow exercise.  Just writing without stopping, like we used to do in high school.  Without worrying about punctuation and grammar, and I'll do it by hand because I think it's harder to ignore mistakes when you're typing.  

Here's the last sentence I wrote today during the exercise (with the errors and everything): "On the other hand, you read some writing that just makes you go, damn! and it seems authentic though so maybe I'm just trying to hard."