Find Your Unique Voice

Having a unique voice is a journey of discovery that can be engineered if you know how, but I fell into it naturally. There are many factors that go into your signature writing style known as your unique voice. Our writing voice comprises of your style and your tone, but more importantly, it's how you see the world. What makes the most successful authors so compelling to read is how they process the world around them. It's that thrilling surprise of not just experiencing a fully realized world filled with characters mundane or magical but how they interact with the world around them in such appealing ways. I found out from experience that only asking questions can lure the elusive voice out.

• Where are you from?

Where you grew up in your formative years will have a significant effect on how you express yourself. Being born in England but growing up in Jamaica, has allowed me to incorporate the English aspect of me with my Caribbean point of view and produce a combination that is distinctly Anton Marks.

• Experience.

Live. Be a participant in life and not a spectator. Just be involved and form an opinion. Humans tend to want to explain the world they inhabit. Don't be afraid to do that, create meaning from the path you have trodden and use it in your work. I grew up Roman Catholic but was compelled to experience other Christian, and non-Christian faiths, and my experiences have all gone into making my unique writing voice, unique.

• Who are your favorite authors?

I think for most writers the authors who excited you in your early days, the ones you read voraciously allowed you to have a pattern you could emulate and then create your style from all the influences. If you look at your early work now, you will detect the many influences contained in it but over time as you discard and incorporate elements that feel natural to who you are what you will see now is the final creation of your unique voice.

• How do you process the world about you?

What is your philosophy of life? What do you believe in? Are you interested in conspiracy theories? Which ones? What are your views on life after death? Believer, agnostic, or atheist. Can Science lead us to a world of advantage through the technological singularity, or are we on a road of self-destruction? What are your politics? Research new points of view?

• What's happening around you?

It's a given that effective authors are observant. Watch the people around you. Really see them. What are the things you see that are not obvious? Is your observation of a handsome man the same as another observer? Are there metaphors that reveal so much about what you are observing succinctly that when they are read, it is distinctive to only you? What about using your other senses? How do you shape words to express these sensory inputs not in a hackneyed way but fresh and memorable? Most importantly, in a way that has your personality stamped all over it. Develop your sight.

We know there is no one like you. You already have a unique voice. In actual fact, you are not one in a million but one in six billion. Greatness comes by coaxing that voice out through the sweat and blood of writing. Only then will you create a compelling expression of yourself, which is your Writing Voice. Don't stop, don't hesitate, keep going, and that unique voice you seek will come.

Anton Marks is a Jamaican born UK lover of the street life, fantastical fiction, film, comics and an appreciation for the written word.
Tweet him @AntonMarks