by Mike Klaassen

Created on: March 05, 2007   Last Updated: May 14, 2007

REVIEW OF
FINDING YOUR VOICE: How to Put Personality in Your Writing
By Les Edgerton
Writer's Digest Books, 2003

I picked up a copy of Finding Your Voice out of curiosity. Over the years, I'd come to suspect that the term voice was being misused as a concept of understanding writing. I wondered if this book would enlighten me, or if it would confirm my suspicions. It did both.

In Finding Your Voice, Les Edgerton does a great job of coaching writers on how to bring out their own personality in their writing. He explains why writers often fall short in this effort. He recommends exercises to bring out the writer's personality. He suggests techniques to make fiction-writing more reader friendly. Overall, the book covers a lot of the art and craft of writing style. I suspect Les Edgerton is a very good writing teacher.

But my suspicions regarding voice, as it is often used to describe fiction, were confirmed. One of the problems is that voice refers to different subjects. In a story, each character can have a distinctive voice in dialogue and during introspection. Also, if the writer chooses to utilize an on-stage narrator, that narrator can have a distinctive voice. The problem with voice is when the term is used to describe the writer's style.

Unfortunately, the subject of the writer's voice has morphed into confusing and misleading babble. The next-to-last chapter of Finding Your Voice provides examples of the conflicting views of top writers, editors, and agents regarding this subject.

Today's novel-writer would be better served if Les Edgerton would: 1) re-name the book Developing Your Own Writing Style, 2) delete all reference to writer's voice, and 3) expand the text to more fully cover other aspects of style.

Although Finding Your Voice confirmed my suspicions regarding voice, I found plenty of ideas and insight to make the book worth its purchase price, and more.

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