Voice has always been something of a cape that writers wear. Or maybe a shield. Or superpower.
Whatever.
The fact is that my voice is mine, and it didn’t come from anyone else. That’s beautiful. It’s also scary as hell.
But where does my writer’s voice actually come from?
Journalism
Yeah, yeah, I know. I just turned a lot of people off with that admission.
But my degree and the career it created are vital to why my voice is the way it is. Journalism is all about getting the point across quickly. You write on a limited space, so you have to be economical about what you’re telling people.
Not only that, but you have to get the important stuff into that first line. And every sentence needs to be important enough to spend money on ink.
Writing stories is very much the same.
Which leads me to…
Screenwriting
You want to talk about pacing and structure? Go look at your favorite screenplays. You’ll notice very quickly that they are so well thought-out that it’ll blow your mind how much goes into a production looking effortless.
I stumbled into screenwriting in 2017 because a friend from high school needed help with a project. I said yes without realizing it would eventually bring me back to creative writing after nearly a decade away.
I was rusty. Really rusty.
But screenplays have a way of exposing every weakness. They don’t let you hide behind beautiful prose. Every scene has to move the story. Every line of dialogue has to reveal character. Every beat has to earn the audience’s attention.
I learned that what you leave out can be just as powerful as what you put on the page.
That’s still how I approach novels.
Communications
You want to know something about perspectives? Talk to a communications professional.
On any given day, I’m writing for faculty, students, administrators, researchers, legislators, alumni, and the public. The same event has six different stories depending on who’s reading it.
My job isn’t to decide which perspective is right.
It’s to understand all of them.
I’m asking questions, getting answers, and filtering it through a public lens so that the world will know the story and understand why it’s important. That’s much harder to do than a lot of people realize.
And then one day, you start to realize that everyone thinks they’re the main character in their own story. No one wakes up believing they’re the villain. Everyone has a reason for what they do. Even when they’re wrong.
Honestly? I’ve caught myself doing this at times. Turns out, it’s human nature.
And it’s a lesson I’ve put into my stories as well.
Medicine
Living beside medicine means that I’m exposed to more humanity than people probably realize.
One of the earliest lessons my husband brought home was from an older doctor who told his cohort: “One day, each of you will carry a graveyard.”
He wasn’t trying to scare them (that came later). He was reminding them that medicine isn’t practiced by perfect people. It’s practiced by human beings making impossible decisions with incomplete information.
The point wasn’t to forget those patients.
It was to learn from them.
That idea has never really left me.
Stories work the same way. Every mistake changes someone. Every success changes someone. Every conversation leaves a mark.
That’s probably why I’m drawn to ordinary moments more than dramatic ones.
In Summary
Journalism taught me to look for the facts. Screenwriting taught me to get rid of the excess. Communications is where I learned to understand perspective. And living with medicine continues to teach me to have compassion for imperfect people.
That’s how I got my writing voice. Or maybe the better way to look at it is that this is how life built it. Because voice isn’t just sentence structure and cadence. It’s also me showing you how I see the world.