How To Find Your Writing Voice
[Monthly Columnist – Rebekah Snyder] – Starting this January, I am introducing a few new monthly columnists who will be guest blogging on a monthly basis.
I asked Rebekah because we share a common writing friend-Sarah Martin. Like me, Rebekah was home schooled and also wrote a book on dating. Even though we have never met, when I think of her I envision the next “Devotional Diva.” She just has this amazing spirit and doesn’t mind (might I say enjoys) being challenged–my kind of girl. Please welcome her!
I didn’t always think my voice was beautiful.
Not my singing voice.
There was never any question that I had my mother’s gift of song. Not even my speaking voice. I never really gave that one much thought. It was my third voice that I had the hardest time coming to terms with. My inner voice—the one you’re hearing in your head right now.
The one that comes out when I put my pen to the page.
For years, I did what all writers do at first. I imitated.
I mimicked style and passion and prose so that I could be the next Shannon Kubiak, the next Steven James, the next author who caught my attention with their moving message or stirring syllables.
I found myself wanting to be the kind of author who could make you fall in love with words for the beauty of them.
And in some ways, mimicking that style I envied stretched and shaped my writing for the better. But it also made me lose sight of one important fact…
Rebekah Snyder had a voice, too.
And Rebekah Snyder’s voice mattered.
And buried somewhere beneath the borrowed fragments of everyone else’s masterpieces, Rebekah Snyder remained, silent and alone.
It was a long time before I realized that my voice was beautiful because it was a long time before I let myself be heard.
My voice remained hidden behind facts and principles and little nuggets of truth I thought you should hear, because never in all my years of scribbling in journals did I intend to swing the door of my heart wide open for strangers to trample in.
But do you know what’s really amazing?
Want to know how to find your writing voice?
It’s always the blogs that are downright painful to write that receive the most attention from my readers.
The articles they most comment on and thank me for are the ones I never wanted to post—the ones that made me hover over the “publish” button as I considered backspacing over the exposed fragments of my heart.
Maybe you’re wondering how, in a world that is flooded with information—a world that has billions of voices screaming for attention at the same time—your voice matters.
It doesn’t.
Not if you’re bent on hiding it like I was.
You want to know how to build a blog following? Be real. Speak from your heart.
Because the world isn’t looking for more information; we’re looking for connection. We’re looking to see how the broken, vulnerable pieces of our hearts are mirrored by another. We’re looking to find that we’re not alone in the cold, cruel spaces of being.
You see, we don’t need another phony copycat painting syllables on the surface of this world.
If you’re going to be a voice that mimics all the other voices, you’re only adding to the noise. But if you’re willing to lay yourself out there and be seen in all your flawed and wounded glory, your voice matters a whole awful lot. Like that last, little Who in Whoville shouting,
“We are here! We are here!” your voice will save the world.
That’s all we ever expected from you. Your voice.
That earth-shaking, world-changing, original voice. Your voice and no one else’s…
That’s what the world is longing to hear.
So find it, and cherish it, and share it with us.
Rebekah Snyder is a writer who has fallen in love with her voice. She shares it (quite loudly at times) at www.beyondwaiting.com. She’s not ashamed, so hop on over and check out the exposed pieces of her heart. Her voice can also be heard on Amazon, in the form of a book entitled Beyond Waiting.
[Photo: ruifernandes, Creative Commons]
