When I started blogging, I was not really writing in my own voice. I was reading other people’s work, people I really enjoyed and I tried to copy them. The problem is, I am not those people.
I don’t have their experience or their writing ability. So my early blogging was stilted. It would vacillate between encyclopedia dryness and overly jokey. Doing this for a while, my results were mixed. Sure, I was reaching some people, but writing was not an enjoyable experience for me.
I needed to find a better way.
A few friends of mine who had started podcasting at the time kept pushing me to give it a try. I was resistant and with good reason. With a script I sounded like a slightly advanced robot reading from the phone book. Freedom and inspiration came to me when I dropped the script and just started talking. For the first time on the internet, I was putting out the closest thing to who I was. The process was slower without a script, but I had found a solution that made me happy.
One of the disadvantages of this way of podcasting is that it is very heavy on editing. That editing though would be a boon. It was during one of these editing sessions, when I was listening to myself talk about a TV show I loved as a kid, that I realized, this is also how I wanted to sound in my writing.
Good or bad, from that point on, my writing would reflect me.
Suddenly writing was much easier. I write now like I am speaking. It was so much more enjoyable that I found myself going back to older posts. Posts I had struggled to get through were now not what I wanted to share with the world. So I rewrote many of them and the second time around, it was just got easier.
So if you are having a hard time finding your voice, remember it is already there. With technology, you can literally hear how you sound and work towards aligning how you write with how you sound.
I am not saying that everyone is going to love what you write, but if you keep at it, someone is going to find it and like it. If you can just make it easier yourself to share what’s in your head, to tear down barriers that will make blogging easier, you are going to find those people a whole lot sooner.