How to Use Brand-Building Techniques to Find Your Voice as a Writer (Trust Me On This)
Yes, my two loves are about to joust in the sandbox.
Language is a window to who we are as people. Through the words we use and how we use them, people access a part of us, who we are. But if we want our voice to have an impact, one rule applies: Consistency breeds legitimacy. Legitimacy breeds trust. Trust breeds influence, and influence breeds impact.
This rule applies to whether you’re building brands or writing novels because people don’t trust a Sybil. Our brains crave the comfort reliability and consistency breeds. We’re confused when we see someone act one way and that way changes on the daily. They’re performative instead of real.
In marketing, our “voice” is the personality we embody when we show up for our audiences, community, partners, and employees. It’s our vibe and flavor, the words we use and how we use them. We can dial up and down facets of our personality depending on the environment. Sound familiar? It’s called life.
We build trust when — interaction after interaction, channel after channel — we come across as the same “person.” In marketing, a verbal identity helps everyone who communicates on behalf of a brand to express themselves consistently so their audiences have the same powerful experience regardless of where they encounter the brand.
But I’m not here to rehash a fifteen-minute tutorial I wrote eighteen months ago, rather I want to show you how to apply methodical tools and tactics to cultivate your prose or writing voice.
I didn’t find my voice until I was thirty-seven and I’ve been writing since I was six — you do the pitiful math. Because like everything else in my life, I chose to go at writing the hard way instead of seeing the symbiotic nature of what I was doing for a living (building brands and telling stories) and how I could employ the tools I learned and built for myself in my writing life.
For years, I kept the warring factions in my brain disparate because I never thought fiction and marketing could play harmoniously in the same sandbox until it occurred to me that both, at their core, are about telling stories. My on-duty life centered on telling stories about products and companies while my evenings were spent telling stories about the strange people playing house in my head.
Before I found my voice and style, I never felt confident about my writing. My stories and first book felt like a suit that never quite fit. But that April in 2013, I turned on a spigot and didn’t look back. Maybe because I had just left a job that was slowly killing me. Perhaps it was the fact that I hadn’t written anything save for emails and pitch decks for four years that I was too exhausted to think about how I was telling a story — I just told it.
And then I realized my voice had been there all along, yet it was smothered by expectations and constraints, what and how other people were creating and how I allowed their voices to crowd in my head. I mimicked and copied writers I admired, but I felt like a bland photocopy of a terrific original. I wasn’t going to ferret out my voice by pretending to be someone else — I found it by letting go and looking in.
Your voice is innate to you, it’s only a matter of finding it.
But that sounds pithy and nebulous and the Type-A, process-lover in me wouldn’t dump vague in your lap and bounce. No, habibi, I’m going to make you scream in terror by showing how you can use marketing tools and techniques (gasp! quelle horreur!) as an artist-in-training.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Hermit Diaries to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.