Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.

Meg Rosoff
About This Quote

Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul. What you say is what you mean.

You may even tell a lie in a way that sounds true. The greatest gift a writer can give a reader is not a gift wrapped in pretty words and phrases, nor a gift that speaks one truth but hides another. It's a gift that's naked and raw—a gift that speaks honestly from the heart and then leaves the rest up to the reader to decide whether it's wise or right or kind. The gift of honesty must be offered freely, always with the hope that the reader will accept it and use it for their own benefit. To achieve this gift, however, requires a tremendous amount of work from the writer.

It requires writing from the heart, revealing every aspect of a character’s personality and innermost thoughts and feelings, all while still being true to that person’s story. When I ask my students how they write their chapters for our fiction workshop class, I always get two answers: "well," or "I'm just making it up as I go along." No other answer surprises me more than these two. In this quote from Stephen King, he explains why students need to stay true to their characters despite how ridiculous or difficult they may feel doing so: Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences.

In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul." A few months ago I finished reading The Princess Bride by William Goldman and was very impressed by it; especially by his writing style (it was incredible). Today I came across this quote: "The greatest gift in life is not knowledge but courage; not intelligence but integrity; not skill but kindness; not strength but compassion; not beauty but love." After reading this quote several times I came to realize how much courage it takes to write whatever we want without worrying about what people might think about us and how we might be judged for our writing style or subject matter: Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none. Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who

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