So how can you do it? Here are three tips.
1. Figure out what you want to say and say it. This sounds so simple. We all have points we want to make, right? Except when we actually sit down to write. Then it seems like our brains turn to cornmeal mush and we end up babbling pointlessly.
If you’ve ever been there—and you have, my friend, we all have—the absolute best thing you can do for yourself and your writing is answer this simple question in one, crystal clear, non-equivocal sentence: “What do I want to say?”
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve sat with a student and asked, “What are you saying in this paragraph?” and been forced to listened to five straight minutes of hemming, hawing, and lavishly circumlocution followed by blank staring. I mean no insult to my students here because I’ve done my share of hawing and staring as well, many times, in response to the same question.
The simple fact is this: If you cannot say it in one sentence, then you don’t really know what you’re trying to say. If you don’t know, your reader sure as heck isn’t going to figure it out for you.
2. First thought, best thought.
Honestly, this Buddhist adage isn’t always literally true—some of my first thoughts are ludicrous—but going with your first thought, letting it spill onto the page, “trusting the gush” as author Tom Romano puts it, is a good way to get at your authentic voice.
Getting your ideas onto the page before you clip, snip, block, and bar them them can help your authentic voice escape before your editor brain locks it down. “Free-writing”—the term I use for writing without editing, without stopping, without even thinking—is the best practice ever devised for setting your authentic voice free.
Sit down without expectation and spill it: Your first thought. Then your next first thought. Then your next.
3. Write the way you talk.
From time to time, I hear a person—usually someone prone to complaining about “these young folk today”—say that students write poorly because they write the way they talk. I’m not sure what put this idea in people’s heads, but I don’t know any actual writing teachers who say it, and for good reason; There’s not a bit of truth to it. In fact, learning to write more-or-less the way you speak is a skill that you should develop.
Of course, I don’t mean you want to be as repetitive, fragmented, and downright boring as most of us are in everyday speech. I mean you want to be as natural. When you’re speaking, you’re usually just being who you are. Unless you’re giving a presentation in front of your boss or addressing the graduating class of a major university, you’re not trying to impress anyone. Hopefully, you’re not trying to sound smart or witty. You’re just being you, saying what you want to say.
There will be plenty of opportunity to go back to your writing to polish and hone, correct your grammar and punctuation, experiment with sentence rhythm and find the perfect word. But first, just write as you talk. Naturally.
Authenticity is all about being yourself.
It’s that simple—and that hard. That person who is you? The one inside who is free and natural, present and real? That is the person you want to bring to the page. Become that person on the page. Become you.