Blog Post #5

Exercise number six!

This one is about finding your writing voice using this blog post by Jeff Goins. It asks you to complete ten steps to find your writing voice.

I found the blog post itself to be helpful. It gave a lot of good advice about writing voices, particularly about making sure you're comfortable with your writing voice and that you practice and develop it. I found out the hard way that if you aren't comfortable with the way you write, you'll probably never enjoy writing. I spent a lot of time trying to imitate the voices of popular writers, and I never finished anything.

It's actually one way in which I find NaNoWriMo to be really helpful - I'm writing so much that I don't think about crafting my voice to sound the way I think it should, I just write. And although anything from Nano is very much a first draft, I've come up with some great ideas and phrases this way.

It's something I've had to realise about any art: there are hundreds of different ways to be good at something, but your way has to be true to you. And it won't be exactly how you want it to be at the beginning, but that's where practicing comes in - the more you write (draw, sing etc.), the better you will get. Eventually you might even become just as well-liked as the people you admired in the first place (who, spoiler alert, probably got where they are by practicing and being comfortable with their voices).

The exercise included in the blog post was also helpful. It required you to think about how your voice will work, and why it works that way. This, like a lot of the other exercises, follows a pattern of learning I heard about a while ago.

The idea is that you are at first unconsciously bad at something, then consciously bad, then consciously good, then unconsciously good. These exercises work well for that conscious stage - you learn what you might be doing wrong, and then you have to think about how to fix it. Applying these exercises will hopefully improve your writing. Eventually, you'll become unconsciously good, and you'll apply the techniques you've learned without thinking. Although that doesn't mean you shouldn't keep trying to improve - otherwise, you'll risk getting complacent, bored, or both.

I'm not sure how I'll go at applying these during Nano. I think you'd do really well at applying this if you were unconsciously good, but I'm definitely not anywhere near that stage yet. I'll do my best, but I think a lot of this will be implemented in the editing stage.

I'm also thinking about going back and doing these exercises again post-Nano. I think it'll be really interesting to review them once I've written 50, 000 words.

But right now, on to the next exercise: setting.