Post #8: Finding My Voice (Again)
It’s been a while.
Long enough that opening Plot Holes & Progress again felt a little like walking back into a room I’d left mid-conversation. Everything was still here—the manuscript, the notes, the half-finished thoughts, Minnie somewhere in the background undoubtedly wondering where I’d been.
The truth is, I didn’t stop writing because I stopped caring about the story. Life simply became louder.
There were other projects. Other creative ideas. Work. Plans. Decisions. The ordinary business of figuring out what comes next. I was still making things, thinking about things, scribbling things down. I just wasn’t here.
And somewhere in that space between writing, not writing, creating, planning, and generally getting on with life, I started thinking about something I had already been struggling with before the break.
Finding My Voice as a Writer
Somewhere between the early drafts and the endless edits, I lost my voice. Not my literal one, though the amount of muttering that happens during revisions might count. My writer’s voice.
That rhythm, that spark, that particular way of stringing words together that feels like slipping into your own skin. For a while, everything I wrote sounded like someone else. Every sentence was cautious. Polished. Correct. I started mimicking other writers without meaning to, trying on their cadences like borrowed coats. I reread passages I admired. I studied structure. I edited and re-edited. And the harder I tried to make the writing better, the less it sounded like me.
So I went back through old drafts, looking for evidence. How did I sound before all this? Before the feedback. Before the editing. Before fatigue and fear and that irritating little voice insisting that a “real writer” would surely know what she was doing by now.
And somewhere in all that searching, I realized something. Voice doesn’t vanish. It hides.
It waits for you to stop performing and start listening again… to the heartbeat beneath the structure, to the sentences that scare you a little, to the part of you that still writes simply because there is something inside you that wants to be said.
Finding My Writing Voice by Letting Go of Perfection
So I did something radical.
I wrote badly on purpose. I wrote letters to my story. Journal entries to my characters. Fragments that went nowhere. Emails I would never send. I stopped chasing beauty and started chasing honesty.
That sounds simple. It isn’t. There is something deeply uncomfortable about deliberately abandoning all the things you’ve taught yourself good writing is supposed to be. Structure. Precision. Lovely sentences. The perfect metaphor. But sometimes all that polishing becomes another form of hiding.
If you’ve been following Plot Holes & Progress, you already know that Helen and I have a somewhat complicated working relationship.
I wrote about it in When My Characters Ignore Me, when I discovered that forcing Helen to follow my carefully constructed plans was usually a reliable way to make her stop talking to me altogether.
Apparently, I had not fully learned that lesson. Because while I was struggling to find my own voice again, Helen went quiet too.
Coincidence? Probably not.
The more polished and careful my writing became, the less she sounded like herself, or how I wanted her to sound. And the less she sounded like herself, the harder I worked at fixing the sentences, which, naturally, made everything worse. Eventually, I stopped trying to fix the scene and started talking to her instead.
One very late night, somewhere between frustration and caffeine, I opened my notebook and wrote:
Sometimes Writing Badly Is Exactly What You Need
It wasn’t pretty. It certainly wasn’t polished. But something cracked open. Somewhere between the exhaustion and the honesty, I could hear myself again—not the tidy version trying to impress someone, but the rough-edged one who actually meant what she was saying. And maybe that’s what this break has reminded me of too.
Creative lives don’t move in straight lines. We disappear for a while. We become fascinated by something else. We make plans. We change direction. We get tired. We live our actual lives. Sometimes we need distance from the thing we love before we can see it clearly again. And then, one day, we open the notebook. Or the manuscript. Or the abandoned blog draft.
And something is still there waiting. Not exactly as we left it, because we aren’t exactly as we left ourselves either.
Returning to Writing After a Break
I used to think consistency was one of the requirements of being a writer. Keep showing up. Keep producing words. Keep moving forward. There’s truth in that. But I think there’s another truth we talk about less often: sometimes stepping away is part of the process too.
A break from writing doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve abandoned it. Sometimes we’re just gathering things without realizing it. You know, experiences, observations, frustrations, ideas, bits of conversation, strange questions. Life keeps feeding us even when we aren’t sitting at the keyboard.
The challenge is coming back without demanding that we immediately become the writer we were before we left. Because we aren’t. And perhaps we shouldn’t be.
Finding My Voice Again Isn’t Really Going Back
That’s the paradox of creative recovery: sometimes we have to write through the ugliness, or step away from the writing altogether to get back to the truth.
Voice, I’ve learned, isn’t rediscovered through perfection. It’s reclaimed through surrender. So perhaps finding my voice again isn’t really a return. It’s a reckoning. A conversation between the writer I was, the person I’ve become, and the part of me that still refuses to give up on meaning. And after a rather long intermission, I think I’m ready to have that conversation again.
May our words come home, even when they take the long way back.
