Losing your voice

Judging by the 19,300,000 search results it turns up, "finding your voice" must be a pretty hot topic for a lot of writers. And it's true, every writer sounds different. Jack Kerouac sounds different from James Thurber. Cormac McCarthy sounds different from Philip Roth.

But advertising writing isn't about finding your voice. It's about losing it.

Novelists and writers of other literary forms write for themselves (I suppose you could argue they are writing for their readers, but most would never put themselves through the sheer hell of writing if they did not draw some deep personal satisfaction from it), and for them, the development of a personal voice is critical.

Journalists write for a standard (personified in an editor) that places a value on brevity, balance, accuracy and a structure that makes the written word scannable, and entire colleges thrive on helping students learn to write to that voice.

Advertising writers, though, are anomalies. We do not write for ourselves. We do not write for a standard. We are true proxies.

And as a proxy, developing your own voice is irrelevant. In fact, you should strive to lose your own voice.

What's far more important are the voices of those you write for -- your clients' brands. Think of each of those brands as a character, with a story it is trying tell. Become those characters. Understand those stories. Learn those voices. Learn how each speaks differently. A brash challenger brand will speak more aggressively than an established, market-leading brand. A brand with a large blue collar audience will speak differently than a brand that caters to the high-end luxury market. Learn to hear the differences in how they speak -- their cadences, their vocabularies, their style.

Once, in college, I took a class in essay writing. I struggled early -- I was a punk with no real life experience and not much to say, but with a deep belief in the importance of saying it, and my writing was, as you might expect, pompous and self-inflated. But then the professor assigned us to write essays in the voice of one of the writers we had read. It forced me to stop thinking about how I used language and instead understand how others used it. And it changed the way I thought about writing. Writing became much less an exercise in talking. And much more an exercise in listening.

As an advertising writer, when you've mastered that, you will have found the only voice that matters.