: Re: Developing your writer's voice I'm a relatively new writer and sometimes I feel like my writing is too bland and that I'm struggling to develop my writer's voice. Does anyone have any good

@Murray831

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Maybe you already have a voice. It is difficult for writers to judge their own voices. You live with your voice all day long, in your head, so it seems normal to you, and boring. Other people (most of whom exist outside your head to some extent) don't live with your voice all day long.

What do other people say about your voice?

That said, I think there are things you can do to explore and refine your own voice. I like playing with writing exercises. Two kinds:

Goldilocks exercises. Pick something that you can vary about your writing. Sentence length, say. Take something you've written and rewrite it using sentences no longer than 10 words (or 7 if 10 is too easy). Notice the effects. Then rewrite it again using sentences no shorter than 25 words (or 35). Notice the effects. Given everything you learned from those two rewrites, rewrite one more time, focusing on how you can use sentence length to get the effects you want.

You can use goldilocks exercises for anything that you can use more of or less of. Like description. Describe a setting using no more than seven words. Describe the same setting using no more than 100 words. Notice the effects.

Tie one habit behind your back exercises. Pick any feature of writing. Rewrite a scene with no uses of that feature. None. Zero. No form of the verb "to be." No adjectives. No dialogue. No exposition. Notice what challenges that poses for you. Notice what you have to do to overcome those challenges. Now you know more ways to do whatever you normally do with "to be" or adjectives or exposition. Given what you've learned, rewrite your scene focusing on the effects of thing you just experimented with.

One more that doesn't fit into either of those categories: The Horrible Awful Brutal Word Count Massacre. Take a scene you've written. Remove ten percent of the paragraphs. Then remove ten percent of the remaining sentences. Then remove ten percent of the remaining words. Try to cut the least important paragraphs, sentences, and words, but you will have to cut things that matter. Count the words. That's your word count limit. Rewrite the scene to say everything the original scene said, but without exceeding your word count limit.

Choices. None of these exercises is about what it seems to be about on the surface. Eliminating "to be" is not (really) about eliminating "to be." It's about discovering the effects of "to be," and alternative ways to achieve those effects. That gives you choices. Same for sentence length. Same for word count. When you play with one variable, you learn unexpected things about other variables.

Each is about noticing the choices at your disposal, and the effects of those choices. Once you are aware of the possibilities, you can make the choices consciously for a while. Then they will fade into the background and become incorporated into the voice you are developing.

Your choices are your voice.

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