Finding my voice.

My name would be familiar to you by now, but if it isn’t, it’s Cris.

Cris Danai, author of the book that’s showcased across this entire website.

 

And speaking of familiarity, I know one thing that I struggled with a bit, and a lot of others do, too. Their voice.

Not my speaking voice. No, that I mastered early on in my life.

I mean, the voice. The style. The Cris Danai classic story. I want to talk about how I managed to make it happen. You can stay a while and listen. I won’t take too much of your time, I promise. I know you have a lot of stories to read!

 

Imagine what your first words were. And yes, this time, I do mean your speaking voice. Babies start speaking somewhere around a year or two, right? Well, just around a year, I think. Two would be…problematic.

But do that, would you please? Imagine your first words. Not the goo goo gaa gaa ones. The ones that, if spoken in conjunction with more words, form complete, legible sentences.

I bet you said mama or papa, right? There are billions more with the same answer. Billions. With a capital B.

So, how come we all speak so differently from one another? How is it that our voices, their sounds, the way we talk, and what we talk about are so…unique? I know you already have answered it, but let me do it.

Because we practice it. Because we speak and talk and talk and talk and talk. We talk all our lives and keep practicing it without knowing. It would be kind of obvious that we’d get pretty good at it.

 

So, if you’re an aspiring author, you have to be the same. Maybe you don’t have to start with goo goo gaa gaa, or even mama or papa, but you have to start somewhere, and when you do, keep on practicing. If you don’t know what to write, imitate. You don’t have to publish everything you put to paper. I know I didn’t.

As a child, you learn to talk according to your environment, and your voice—the entirety of it—is formed based on your experiences. You don’t start off with some original philosophical statement. That would be absurd! You imitate. First your parents, then those around you, then the books you read in school, the teachers that listen to you, and then your friends and siblings.

Imitation brings practice. It lets you know what you can do when you talk, and it lets you find your voice.

So, in writing, you imitate. You copy the writings and works of the authors that interest you. Maybe you then read the works of those that don’t, just to build your portfolio. You copy and copy and copy and copy till what is formed is so removed from any one author’s signature and style that it ends up forming something completely new.

It ends up forming your voice.

 

I did something similar. As I alluded to before, I wrote a whole lot of stories that I never completed. Left them halfway through. Half the time, I didn’t like what I wrote because I had already read that story before. It felt too similar. I read a lot more books the next time I wrote and gave up, and now it was completely different from the last time. It was still something similar, but if you compared the two, you’d imagine it was written by someone else who wasn’t me.

And I’ll guarantee that if you read those before you read The Lady Wind next, it’ll seem even more different and unique this time. It’s an evolution of your style, of your voice. I didn’t find it because I looked for it. I found it because it came to me, and of course, I practiced it for such a huge part of my life that when it did come to me, it flowed naturally.