Finding your ‘voice’: It comes with experience, confidence

Maria Montoya

By Maria Montoya
Reporter
The Times-Picayune, New Orleans

Posted: Sept. 19, 2003

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As news people, we don't often get a chance to write in the first person. But that doesn’t mean our stories can't have voice.

That was the message at The Poynter Institute’s “Finding Your Voice” seminar, in which Roy Peter Clark talked about voice as an “illusion of speech.”

Think about it: When someone reads our words aloud from the newspaper, we are essentially speaking to them and, more importantly, bringing them details of someone's story.

To fully explain this idea, Clark, vice president and senior scholar at the institute, asked each of the 21 attendees to bring an item to share with the class. The show-and-tell items included an old letter from a long-since-deceased grandfather. Within the body of that letter, we could hear and capture the voice of the reporter's grandfather.

“For each of the stories that you write,” Clark explained, “you have to find that letter. It’s the most important job that you have as reporters."

But what about voice, we wondered throughout the week. How do you know if it’s there? And where does a confident voice come from?

The three seminar faculty -- Clark; Ceci Connolly of The Washington Post and Kelley Benham of the St. Petersburg Times – agreed that voice develops over time and comes with increasing confidence.

“Every story isn’t going to be this fantastic narrative,” said Benham, who recently became a newsfeatures reporter at the Times. “Try to see if you can sprinkle a pretty line or telling detail into every story, even if they might cut it out in the end.”

Other tips for developing voice:

• Don't overlook the good stuff in your notebooks that often gets chopped out in the grind of daily beat reporting. Said Benham, “Hold some of your best stuff out of the daily stories and use the material to write a more detailed instant weekender piece.”

• No matter what you're working on, talk to your editors and colleagues early on. By doing so, Connolly said, you can avoid misconceptions about what a story might or might not be about and you can get coaching on how to approach difficult topics.

• Trust your instincts. “This confidence gives you the ability to focus the story, selecting what to put in and what to leave out,” Connolly said.

Toward the end of the week-long session, Clark urged us to consider music as an inspiration to voice in our writing.

Music, he said, “can teach us about beginnings, endings and transitions.”

Even more, each of our stories can be set to a different score. We just have to be willing, as artists, to find what theme we want to explore.

Maria Montoya was a 1999 Scholar at The Greenville (S.C.) News. Read her essay on “How I wrote the story.” Reach her at mmontoya@timespicayune.com.

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