Writers looking for their voices

Cheri Block Sabraw

Cheri Block Sabraw

Cheri Block Sabraw, a writing teacher, has an amusing post on her students’ struggle to find their voices as auteurs. Voice, she says, is a “fingerprint, a signature, unique to each writer”. The trouble is that you’re born with a fingerprint, but you have to search hard to find your voice.

The Buddhist insight for her students is this: We’re all in the same boat. Amy Tan is. I certainly am. All of us are, even and especially those who write in the first person, hoping that this automatically takes care of it, which it does not.


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3 thoughts on “Writers looking for their voices

  1. Andreas,
    Yes. Rule #4 concerns writing in the first person.

    Example: Grace, I know I begin many of my sentences with “as” and I overuse words such as “vibrancy”, “trump”, and “of course” (not to mention parentheses out the ying-yang), but my first person narration just makes it my voice, right? Grace??? Where did you go, Grace?

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