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Where My Writing Voice Comes From
And how to find yours.
Most of the rules of Internet writing are total bullshit. Not the basics: grammar, spelling, syntax. You need those to convey ideas clearly and not sound like a moron, or an eight year-old, or our sitting president. I’m talking about the rules the “content creators” want you to abide by. The rules for becoming a successful writer. The rules for building a massive online audience. If you want those rules, there’s about 79,000 other columns on Medium that’ll give you the rundown. Here’s a smattering of what they’ll say:
- Write shorter paragraphs
- Write headlines that create a “curiosity gap” (clickbait)
- Use the “content” (the body copy) to fill in the “curiosity gap”
- Write with your intended audience in mind
- Eliminate adverbs
- Capitalize on trending topics
- Have something valuable to say
Sure thing, Brad. Way to give the world a blueprint for how to sound like an earnest, terse and mildly helpful chat-bot.
Listen, future content creators of the world: strike the word “content” from your vocabulary. Write it on a post-it note, douse it in kerosene and set that bitch ablaze. You’re not here because you dream of one day stuffing the “Top Posts” section of the Medium newsletter. You’re here because you dream of creating pretty things that serve a purpose. Those bro-flakes are teaching you how to speak. I’m going to teach you how to fucking sing.
You’ve been to karaoke. You’ve heard Becky go in on “Drunk in Love.” It sounds like a auto-tuned dolphin fucking a champagne bottle. But why? Can she not sing? Nah. But she could … if she found her singing voice, and it’s not the same voice you use to talk.
How do I know? Because I sing! The voice I sing with sounds nothing like how I talk. And let me be 120% Swarovski-clear: I hate the sound of my speaking voice. Hate it. Although I’ve largely sung my way out of how I used to talk, in my head I still sound like a 23rd-Century robot-parrot hybrid shot out of a cannon and filtered through a vocoder after 12 cartons of Winston and 3 gallons of cough syrup. You want your prose to crackle? You gotta find that singing voice…
