How I Coach “Voice”
I use this heavily in pitching, writing, meetings, interviews, life, and work. If you're struggling to find your voice, this might help.
Who Are You?
Here’s everything you need to know about voice: be yourself.
Easy right?
Maybe.
I’m going to tell you a little secret about me. I try to be open and genuine pretty much constantly, but I find it deeply uncomfortable. My vulnerabilities are a challenge for me.
But when people want to hear your voice, they want you, naked, on the page. Vulnerable, honest, flawed, you and your stamp is just the thing.
The more you write with yourself embedded into each word, the more your word choices, your skills, your choices, all come into view. That’s voice.
Want to really understand your voice in writing?
Write yourself a story, or a series of action lines with some emotional reactions.
Now grab your phone and start recording. Read the script out loud. When you’re finished, don’t stop recording. Go find someone close to you and tell them as much of the story as you can remember without looking at what you wrote.
Then stop recording and listen to the difference. You’re going to have embellishments, skip sections, add descriptors. You’re going to just tell a story, your own way. That’s what your voice is. It’s how you tell a story and embed yourself into what you do.
This develops more and more with each new writing project you take on. I’ve been writing since I was in grade 8, and it’s impossible for me to strip my voice out of my work. I can alter tone and volume, but my voice is stamped on each page. If you are getting notes about voice in your script, do the recording challenge, and listen to how you tell a story.
Also, read a few professional scripts and see where you can pinpoint what makes each author different in terms of writing. Find their voice. Analyze the greats!
I believe voice forms naturally in writing. Where I’m much more interested in it is in pitching.
What Weddings Can Teach You
I consult with a lot of couples, from all walks of life, regarding their wedding ceremonies. They have one big area of concern (which ironically, affects me the least in a wedding ceremony): the vows.
How do I teach people, from all walks of life, of wildly varying degrees of writing skill, how to pour their heart out on one of the biggest days of their lives?
I hadn’t exactly considered how I did this until this year. I was advising someone on writing a ceremony for people they are very close to. This individual has ample public speaking experience, but this called for writing that is profound, right?
I gave them the same advice I give to couples regarding their vows.
The most challenging aspect of writing a speech, vows, a wedding ceremony, or something else of personal importance, is the pressure to bring meaning to the words. To say something big and beautiful, to have your words impact your audience in a way that means as much to them as they do to you. That’s a big ask of anyone.
But here’s the thing. For any couple, there’s only really two people who truly matter when it comes the vows: the two people getting married. And guess what? Those two already love each other for who they are. They don’t need to work hard to impress each other. They need to speak from the heart… but they don’t need to be someone they are not. They don’t need words that are not theirs. They don’t need to find a way to express a sentiment in a way that is foreign to them.
The couple fell in love without those things. They don’t need them now. They certainly CAN do that, but I encourage everyone to be the person their partner knows and loves already. I said the same thing for the friend creating a ceremony. The couple already is honored to have you do this ceremony; the act is more meaningful than most words you can put together.
When pitching, I have a goal for the overall pitch. It’s to be myself. It’s to have an honest interaction with whomever I’m meeting. Be genuine. I’ve had pitches where that means I just say hi and pitch, but I’ve had others that are actual conversations with my pitch sprinkled in.
This is because people resonate with each other. I mean, not always, but this is why my goal when at festivals or networking events is to find my people. People I really enjoy. People who really enjoy me. The tribe grows!
But… If you’ve been here awhile, you might be thinking to yourself, gee Lawrence, didn’t you tell us you were painfully shy? Yeah. Yeah, it’s been a journey. Let me tell you what really helped free me from the worst of my shy fears.
What Will the People Think?!?
I don’t provide a lot of the lessons my dad provided me growing up, because this blog isn’t rated R. But this one was so pivotal for me. I was painfully shy and introspective. My dad is not.
He is charming and charismatic and colorful. Very colorful. He’s unapologetic. Whenever I mentioned being worried about something, his answer was simple.
“Fuck ‘em.” “Who cares?!?” “What difference does it make what they think?”
This gives me a weird fearlessness when it comes to public speaking and creation. I care about the audience I’m directly speaking to. I care what the couple thinks of my wedding ceremonies. I care what you think about my blogs. I care what buyers think of my script, my pitch.
But I don’t really care what strangers think of me.
They’ll like me or they won’t. I find my people by being me to the fullest extent possible. The people that don’t like me for me aren’t going to like me regardless.
This was one of the best cheat codes I’ve ever learned. It does come with a caveat: this isn’t free reign to be an asshole. I could dig into the psychology of people who “don’t care,” and are super toxic. That’s not what this lesson is. That’s not who I am. Far from it.
This lesson is designed to free you from the fear of rejection on a personal level. If you be you, and people aren’t responding, well, keep looking. But as you realize you can be open, genuine, and even a little vulnerable, honest, and curious as you meet people, they’ll naturally be drawn to you.
This also isn’t trauma dumping or rambling for ten minutes about who you are.
This is about having a conversation where you are free to respond honestly, ask questions with curiosity, and listen with intent to understand.
Social Masking
Let’s try to explain this another way.
Social Masking is when you subconsciously guard your reactions and conversation in certain groups of people. It’s exhausting.
If you’ve never seen certain people in bad moods, or just less energetic, this is a sign they’re masking. It’s often a way people protect themselves.
We all do this in a job interview to some degree.
My goal, when doing any sort of public speaking, consultation, pitch, networking event, anything, is not to socially mask. I don’t let bad moods bring me down (I work hard to reset to neutral), but I just… be.
This is another way to say, lean into your natural strengths. Lean into how you tell a story, while also applying all the advice for strong writing.
It requires an openness for people to say, “that sucks, and you suck.” Or better yet, the greatest line ever from the show Futurama, where Zoidberg yells, “Your music is bad and you should feel bad!”
That will hurt. But you’ll find way more people that genuinely like you, and be interested in your life, your work, and your struggles.
Your voice is simply you. On the page, in a conversation, in the pitch. You just need to practice delivering you to the rest of us. And we’ll love you for it!
What are some tricks you’ve learned to showcase your voice in writing?
And as always, Happy Writing!
Great insights as always, Lawrence! I have devoted huge swaths of time to studying voice over the years and especially in the past couple and find it fascinating how every one of us expresses things in our own unique way (this is one of the things AI is robbing many of us of...) I am 100% behind encouraging all of us to discover, cultivate, and share our own voices with the world do this piece resonated deeply.
I also love the approach you lay out here––I literally just watched Paul Schrader talk about his process and it's very similar. He used to sit a friend down at a bar and tell them the 45-minute story turn by turn, pay attention to where he lost them, where they lit up, etc. Then he'd refine accordingly and track down his next victim, ad nauseam until he felt he had it. Then he'd go write the screenplay. Old school, and awesome. Good enough for Taxi Drive and Raging Bull and and and... probably us, then, too ;).
Hehehe your Dad, I can just hear him! Great blog, Law! Love this!