Andrew Wille’s workshop was initially called ‘Finding Your Voice’ but within moments he replaced ‘finding’ with ‘trusting’ – a change that struck a chord with me. I spend huge amounts of writing time deleting and re-phrasing, second guessing myself and doubting my voice. The central message was to follow your instinct to tap into something easy and natural then your writing will come to life. If your writing feels forced it is probably because you are using a voice that is not true to you – we need to learn to trust the voice we’ve got.
Andrew Wille (@andrewwille) has a great blog post about this and many other incredibly useful and insightful posts about improving your writing here.
Thank you for the kind words, Claire!
Can I just add a quick mention for using I Remembers as an easy way to grow this trust in our voices:
http://wille.org/blog/2012/09/28/friday-writing-experiment-no-3-variations-on-the-form-of-i-remember/
Thank you for the great workshops and writing exercises! I’m currently brooding about a plot problem so I’m going to do the I remembers – much more useful than getting frustrated.