A Writing Voice Exercise
Whenever we write for other people (rather than simply for ourselves), that writing becomes a vehicle for our intentions. What do we want the reader to do or feel? Those intentions definitely color the writing voice.
Yet you may not give them much thought. This month’s exercise will jar you out of any writing ruts by asking you to turn those intentions on their head.
The three intentions
Most writing intentions can be sorted into three buckets:
- Entertainment
- Information
- Persuasion or motivation
These buckets are big; entertainment may include beautiful poetry, mind-bending sci fi, or engrossing fiction, for example. And many pieces succeed on multiple fronts. A story might entertain while also changing the reader’s mind. An essay might inform and persuade.
But you can usually identify out the least important intention for anything you write. That’s the one we want to lean into.
The exercise: Flip it around
Find a relatively short piece of prose you’ve already written, like a flash fiction piece, a quick essay or blog post. For email-based fun, choose a substantive email you might send to a friend or colleague.
Choose the least important intention for that piece, and rewrite the piece making that the primary objective.
For example, if you wrote an email to your mother telling her when your flight was coming in, your primary intention was informing her. Perhaps, if you cracked a joke, you hoped to entertain. Now return to that email and pick a persuasive motivation — maybe you’ll convince her to bake a cake before you arrive!
Please note, you don’t have to send the email.
Does the result sound absurd? Probably! Perhaps it was fun. And it probably made you flex part of your voice you don’t usually use.
Go ahead and try this with different types of writing. This exercise may help you discover elements of your voice that make your writing richer. For example, if you always write deeply fact-based prose, you may gain the courage to offer an opinion. If you’re always persuading, you might benefit from developing humor in your work.
Let me know if this yields any interesting insights for you.
Enjoy this?
Check out all of the voice exercises in The Writer’s Voice.
Check out this post: Using Humor in Nonfiction Writing
