9 Steps to Take Your Writing from Mechanical to ALIVE

so why does some agents reject a book after reading say the first paragraph or two and why do some readers dnf a book after only reading the first page or two well there's can be a lot of reasons but I'll tell you one strong reason right now it might be because you don't sound like anybody if your writing comes off as robotic or mechanical or just like you're fulfilling a duty to the page rather than really enjoying being there that's a clear sign to the reader that they're not interacting with a human it feels like

they're just reading AI the goal of this video is to help you write a single paragraph Just say 3 to five sentences where you sound fully fully fully like yourself or like the character that you're writing so let me take you through these nine steps and by the end I guarantee you're going to be able to write a couple sentences that feel very alive now the first step in trying to find your voice as an author is to erase all expectations I find that a lot of authors come to the table bringing a lot of

baggage that they've been saddled with by Elementary School teach teachers and high school English teachers and just all these voices in their head telling them you can't do this you can't do that you have to get rid of those if you're going to capture a true and authentic voice on the page I'm talking about things like am I allowed to have fragments yes yes of course you can I would say most best-selling authors use fragments questions like can I start with a conjunction that I mean the rule against conjunctions came from some fiddly fly idiot

300 years ago that decided oh you can't start with a conjunction that's a rubbish rule or questions like can you misspell words or can you make up words and the answer is yes and yes you can get away with anything as long as you can pull it off on the page or a question like do I have to use respectable language no no you most certainly do not all you are required to do is to be true to yourself or to the character whose voice you're trying to emulate there is one and only one rule

when trying to find your voice on the page it's to trust your quirkiness let yourself speak and flow out and just transfer that energy onto the page now the second step in finding your voice is a very important one and it is know what voice is so let's look at two examples one's going to be a little bit more robotic and mechanical just going through the motions and the other one's going to be filled with voice a first line could be Sarah was tired as she drove to work on a Monday contrast that with a

line like another Monday another caffeine emergency you see how the second one has a lot more Verve a lot more energy A lot more person ality it just feels fresher now the second line could be on her way she stopped at the coffee shop and it was a mess compare that to something like Sarah shuffled into being there done that whoever named this place deserved both a raay and a Stern talking to and nearly turned right back around so we have a much more active verb we have shuffled we have specificity in what the coffee

shop was called and what's more it's sort of a clever pun so you might get a smile out of a reader from that and then we also have a parenthetical like whoever named this place Place deserve both a raise and a Stern talking to so like both at the same time she hates it and she loves it and the third line could be something like the line was so long she worried that she might not have the time as opposed to something like the line snaked through the shop like a line to get into a

funeral slow moving and full of people who'd rather be anywhere else I think that second example is a lot more clever uh it also includes a simile which I think elevates the sentence and we also get a little bit of sentence variety it feels different than the two previous sentences so work on continually improving your ability to recognize voice on the page and a great way to do that is read a lot of books with very strong voice to them and allow that sort of seep into your unconscious you're going to get better just through

Reading those voices and making your voice come out on the page now the third step in finding your voice is the absolute unskippable one the one that if you take out the whole process will fall apart it's number three discover your natural voice what I want you to do is to take out your phone and simply record yourself speaking and take one of these prompts and just talk about it for a minute or two use this prompt I'll tell you what doesn't make any sense and choose a hobby horse and go on a little rant

or use this prompt I remember when you could and talk about whatever now after you make that recording of yourself play it back and I want you to focus on how do you sound do you just have a whole Rush of sentences smashed into each other kind of like the way I talk if you can't tell people remind me constantly in the comments I talk too fast I'm sorry or do you have a more deliberate thoughtful measured Pace with your sentences and how you speak how you sound when speaking is the best clue for how

you should sound on the page when you're writing how you speak is very much your natural way of communicating your natural way of using language and you want to capture that energy and replicate it on the page and honestly a really good technique would be not just to listen back to it but to actually transcribe it so you can see this is the way that your verbal speech this is how it actually appear on a page and just so you know I'm not making this up I actually did this with students I taught college for

more than a decade at schools like USC and Chapman University and I would take them through a process where I had them listen to themselves and then match that with what's happening on the page and make sure that those two things matched cuz if they didn't there was a problem like they were Faking It on the page they weren't being themselves on the page now some of you might have the question do I have to sound like my myself and I mean the answer is no like if you have a Russian character you're going to

try to channel sort of a Russian accent when that character speaks so yes it's perfectly fine to adapt a Persona because you have multiple characters in your book but I think it's absolutely essential that you know what you naturally sound like and listen if you want a little bit more help on your voice and specifically sentences you should take my course how to write a splendid sentence other than my novel course it is actually my most popular course people absolutely love I give little quizzes at the end of each video there's little PDFs so you

can read along with the sentences that I'm talking about and I even give writing challenges at the end of every single video and I cover stuff like the four pillars of sentence writing which is order Focus pace and vary and the most fun part of the course is the breaking the rules section because I mean we don't want to be rule followers as writers so I teach you both the rules and then also how to break them well the fourth step in really developing a good authorial voice on the page is to describe your voice

I think it's really helpful to sort of pin down what exactly you sound like on the Page by just coming up with say three descriptores like three adjectives that describe how you sound when you're writing and if you sound vastly different between books then just choose descriptors for the book that you're working on right now and to give us a sense of how this would work let's look at two examples the first one's going to be Forest Gump by Winston groom now when you read this little paragraph you can hear the way that Tom Hanks

would say it in the movie can't you but it's coming through the page the misspelling the syntax the sentence structure it's all there so if we were to use some words to describe this we'd probably choose words like colloquial or folky or down to earth and what it certainly is is unique right this is a voice that doesn't sound like anybody else's voice he's immediately captured a Persona on the page for a second example let's look at the Devil Wears product by Laura weissberger now take a second and read this par paragraph and then try

to come up with three words that you would use to describe the tone in this paragraph you can pause the video if you need a little bit more time how I would describe it I would describe it as energy right it's very very energetic I describe it as stream of Consciousness like it's really flowing and then I'd also describe it there are certain sections that appear kind of Stato which I think is a fun little addition to the voice here that clutch gas shift part is very staccato so now that you've come up with three

words to describe how specifically you sound on the page please leave them in the comments I'd love to hear what you think your voice sounds like now once you know your three descriptor words is now time to number five check them against the character now you're going to be creating a large variety of characters right and for this particular book you have to determine all right to what extent does my particular voice match the voice of the character I'm trying to create some of the time those will be very very close to one another especially

if the character maybe is based on autobiographic iCal details of yourself other times it's going to be Worlds Apart the other thing you have to pay attention to is point of view if you're writing in first person then yes you're going to really have to channel that character's voice in this particular book however if you're writing omniscient then you can really let your voice flow through the omnis narrator's voice and then change to the character's voice when you're writing something in their dialogue and lastly I just want to talk about the process of how to

create a character a lot of authors think oh oh I need to come up with their hair color and eye color and height first like basic information about that character and instead I would encourage you to go in a different direction start with voice come up with a single line that that character would say that somehow encapsulates their personality perfectly once you get that line and you can hear how they speak in your head then you're ready to move on to all the stuff about their background and what they look like and all that other

Jazz but hearing them might be the first step in character creation Now The Next Step when trying to create a voice on the page is number six choose a tone what sort of attitude do you want to be on the page what sort of attitude is the reader going to get from reading your words now it could be something like very calm or very serious right it doesn't have to be anything wild but I think you have a lot of other options as well you could be sarcastic you could be depressed you could be nonchalant

I think having an attitude in mind when you're writing a particular passage allows to do so much naturally subconsciously stuff like word choice stuff like sentence pacing so much will just come through if you're thinking all right I'm going to try to sound like this right now and just for a couple of examples think about Kurt vagan and slaughterhouse 5 what a cynical World weary voice that is on the page so it goes and there's also a lot of dark humor in that book as well or think of the hilarious side poking humor of Douglas

Adams or a Terry pratchet you can tell in almost every single paragraph of their book they are thinking as an author what would make this section funny and that overriding desire to make jokes and to crack jokes ends up influencing every single word that they write the next step is one that a lot of authors forget and it honestly handicaps their Pros it is number seven focus on rhythms let's go back to that text that we were looking at before from the devil wees product I want to point out that the first sentence of that

book contains 35 words and zero commas while the next sentence contains four commas in five words The rhythms of those two sentences could not be more different one is Flowing uninterruptedly the other one is very staccato and jerky so when you're creating rhythms in your Pros you want to vary it up between sentences have the rhythms of one sentence contrast with the sentence before it and with the sentence after it and another great way to create a voice on the page is making sure you're varying your sentence lengths that very first sentence of the devil

Wares PR is 35 words the very last sentence is just six words now you might think that the Forest Gump example breaks my rule cuz you eyeball it and you're like you know all four of those sentences are roughly the same length John how does that make a pleasing Rhythm on the page okay okay I'll tell you how it's not just about sentence lengths it's also how you break up each sentence internally the first sentence of the four for scump example is two parts the next one is three parts but all three parts are really

really short the next sentence is also three parts but all three parts are much longer and then the last sentence is broken up into four separate parts yes the way you break up your sentences and the length of your sentences goes a long way to how your voice sounds on the page so you absolutely have to pay attention to that but I will say don't try to pay attention to that as you're in the process of flowing and writing it's more of an unconscious thing if you allow your natural speaking self to go onto the

page that's going to happen without you even thinking about it yes you'll make some tweaks later on but you can do most of the tweaks in revision rather than in the drafting process for the eighth step of this voice finding process I'm taking you through we're going to look at deliberate word choice word choice is so essential in voice you can sound very pretentious if you're using very high futin words but say the exact same thing in second grader language and suddenly you seem very accessible now it's time for a quiz I'm going to show

you an example from Barber King solvers demon Copperhead and you're going to tell me what word you think she picked so the sentence is the company put the kabash on any choice other than going into the mines now the word in question is kabash did she use that the company put the choke hold or the company put the shut hole or the company put the clamp down each of these options are viable but each one of them is a very distinctly different choice for how the text sounds on the page and I should also say

that the word that bber King solver chose might not be the right word for you if you were trying to write the same sentence this is just her voice on the page okay do you have your guesses in A B C or D well I can tell you that she doesn't choose the first option kabash maybe because it's too Yiddish for a story set in the Appalachian Mountains she also does not choose number two um I think there's nothing wrong with that word perhaps that word choice maybe was a little bit too expected though and

she wanted to do something a little bit different and lastly she doesn't choose number four that was probably the most awkward sounding of them all uh I didn't jive with it now there's she no she chose number three which I think is a very interesting choice because one it's a madeup word like shut hole is not actually a word and I chose that because I want to make sure that you know you have the freedom to make up words like you're a writer you have the whole writer card that gives you the permission to make

up words if it is the right word for your sentence I also think it's kind of an appropriate word because it's literally talking about something that's going on in the sentence I mean a m is basically a hole that people go into and so shut hole is very symbolic for what's happening to their other options the only hole that is open is going into the mind but at the same time I find this word very accessible it's very Anglo-Saxon it's not difficult to understand anybody whose first language is English will be able to figure out

the meaning of this word now don't misunderstand me I'm not saying like you need to make up a whole bunch of words I'm just pointing out the process by which you go through maybe more in revision than in drafting of how you choose the exact right word for your sentence to capture the voice that you're trying to create on the page and for our very last step in this entire process it is number nine read it out loud you need to take a paragraph that you've written maybe yesterday or a year ago and read it

out loud to yourself now the reason that this is the last step in the process is that your ear is smarter than your eye your eye seeing something on the page often struggles to detect whether there's a lot of voice in Earth or how it would actually sound if spoken out loud your ear on the other hand is an absolute genius it can really tell what you were trying to do and whether you've accomplished your goal of actually creating a voice on the page now how do you know if a passage doesn't have any voice

to it well in this case I would refer you to Elmore Leonard's famous rule of if it sounds like writing rewrite it often things that sound like writing are just a little bit too stiff and maybe a little bit too proper to have a strong voice on the pap page okay I hope that helps you come up with a strong voice for yourself on the page or come up with a strong voice for your character on the page and good luck with your writing