How do you find your voice?

At least three times in the past 21 years, since I first began the blog Perspective, I have deliberately sat down with a disciplined attempt to write in order to find a voice. 

The very first time was naturally when I first began blogging and the very first prototype of Perspective was called Prescience, it was private and hidden, and I can't recall the software but it wasn't one of the big blog hosts then populating the interwebz. I tried that for most of March 2005, before finally launching Perspective on typepad in April 2005. Back then what I had was a voice (now that I know the concept of having one) but no focus, according to one of my readers. Although, within a year or so, once I found a focus I simultaneously found an audience. At one point I was voted among the Top 40 bloggers on design. I think it was by 2007 or 2008.

The second time is less clearly identifiable so I'll pick June 2011 as the illustrative time period when I was authoring on someone else's blog as a guest and kept being guided into a more generic, more "professional", and less personal voice - that was probably the first time I have a clear memory of understanding a writing voice. That was also the beginning of the end - for years - when I felt I was moving further and further away from the blogger who began Perspective. 

This voice would keep sputtering like an engine with a blockage in the fuel pipe. It ended in writer's block interspersed with sporadic outbursts. It was never an easy voice to write in nor did it ever motivate me to blog the way my first voice, my design blogger, and Perspective voice did. That is, there was no personality. Today, I guess we would say those kinds of professional blog voices are what AI churns out by the mile in minutes.

So, now we come to the third time, in March 2021. Not only was I emerging from at least 5 years of a writer's block but I was well into my second year of doctoral studies with not a single research publication in sight. I had some rough first drafts but struggled in the middle income gap between having to unlearn 20 years of professional final report writing for clients and simultaneously having to learn the discourse of different research journals as well as find myself an academic voice. 

What I needed, I felt, was to sit down and learn how to write in academese - the language of the research articles accepted for publication by peer-reviewed journals. 

What I discovered was that it was not simply a writing style, it was an entirely different way of thinking.

I think discovering this fact contributed directly to the thesis I have now recently written and submitted for examination. Not it terms of helping to write the manuscript itself but in terms of the research presented in the manuscript. I will come back to disentangle bits of this as a means to decompress over time, not right now.

Now, I want to find a voice for Perspective once more. 

Someone just asked me the question which titles this post. How I answer it will probably reflect my strategy. I'll pick up from here in another post. This one feels as though its reached its end. On the other hand, this approach itself might be the strategy. Start writing in bite size pieces. Stop when you find yourself forcing out a sentence. Pick it up again the same day if you feel moved to write. Treat it like a playground. Nobody is coming to peer review this piece of writing.