On Finding Your Writer's Voice

I've been thinking about voice lately, and what it means to know your own writing voice, partly because I've been talking with a few younger writers who are still trying to figure out who they are. 

And it struck me. I may not always be able to DESCRIBE my writing voice, but I know it, I am comfortable with it, and I trust it, and this confidence in my writer's voice is part of why I am able to write with the facility and ease that I do. It's NOT easy. I'm not saying that at all. It's a journey, a process, and It's taken me a long time to get to the point where I am able to be as comfortable as I am with my own writing, and myself.

As I tried to explain to my young writer friends what a writing voice was, I realized that a lot of what I have done, as a person, a writer, and a teacher, is to explore voice and identity. 

This is actually the purpose of a lot of my work. To empower people to find their own voice, to be able to tell their own stories. Between writing stories, working on self esteem, teaching English and Humanities and art, and working on my own creative process, I've dealt with a lot of these exact issues. And they are all tied together. And it's not at all just about writing stories or comparing yourself to other writers or taking classes or tricks with technical facility. I'm not looking to teach people how to write. I'm looking to help people discover who they are, what they have to say and how to say it in the most authentic way possible. 

So I've decided to do a series of posts talking about the writing voice, what it is, how you find it, how you learn to trust it, and how you can use your own voice to become a better and more confident writer.
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This is not about writing techniques. This is about writing process and understanding your own identity. 

The full series will be posted on my patreon account at the 1$ level. I'll keep you up to date here on what I'm up to and will crosspost a few to share. Eventually I'd like to turn this into an ebook, but for now, it will be regular short posts about voice with some exercises and insight into how identity works with our writing process.