Nine Ways to Powerfully and Playfully Connect with Your Writing Voice
Tips for unleashing your writing voice no matter what draft you're working on.
Over the weekend, my husband and I returned to The Adventure Challenge for Couples we’d abandoned a few years ago.
Our assignment: Purchase clothes at a thrift store for your mate. That night, wear your new outfits to a public event.
The timing was perfect since we planned to attend a cooking class on Sunday evening.
My husband has a background in actuarial science and population health. He generally wears solid-colored polo shirts and chose a frilly gauze shirt, silver scarf, and janky tights for my ensemble. I paired a Shazaam superhero long-sleeve shirt with a polka-dot button-up he begrudgingly wore. (BTW: The chefs thought his shirt was so cool!)
As we neared the checkout, I spied this six-dollar gem.
It felt like a clear and beautiful expression of who I am—which is exactly what our writing voices should do.
Throughout January, we’ve explored writing voices and how to cultivate this beautiful expression of who you are. To wrap up, here are nine ways to work on your writing voice, regardless of the draft you’re working on.
Find Your Joy
Play with Your Process: Visit a thrift store and buy something that feels so utterly and completely like you that it makes you smile. Use it as inspiration while you play with your process. Work in unusual places. Doodle. Scribble. Write in a spiral or another shape. Parody your normal writing voice. Draft something silly.
Experiment with Your Ideas: Create something completely audacious. Incorporate poetic language and extend metaphors to their extreme. Connect seemingly unrelated ideas and see where this takes you.
Get Messy: Write in the margins of your notebook. Footnote your stories with additional thoughts. Let your intuition guide you to the next idea without thinking about its logic.
Identify Your Values
Claim Your Strengths: Identify what makes your voice unique so you can capitalize on it. Read something you’ve written that you’re proud of and highlight the lines you love. If you’ve shared this with others, highlight readers’ favorite lines in another color. Do you agree with your readers? Do you know why those lines resonated with them?
Play with Other Voices: Handwrite four paragraphs from a book featuring a writing voice you admire. Note how the author constructs their sentences. Pay attention to rhythm, word choice, and punctuation. Embody that form by applying their sentence structure to a portion of your story. How does writing in their style tell you more about your own?
Note Where You Are Afraid: Our voices falter when we try to express ideas that scare us—either because they’re hard to say or we fear their reception. We drop into passive voice, become wordy, or pollute our ideas with convoluted, circular thinking. Hiding is a natural response to fear. Yet, we are more powerful than it. When you encounter fearful prose, ask yourself what would make it safe to write clearly and be audaciously, fully yourself?
Let Yourself Sing
Reconnect with Your Center: Early drafts can disembody us to the point where we’re completely in our heads. Yet your intuition, which lives largely in your gut, knows what truly works. As you finalize your projects, reconnect with your body’s wisdom. Wiggle toes. Inhale deeply through your nose and exhale through your mouth. Complete a few twists. Try goddess pose.
Sharpen Your Ideas: Once you’re centered, chisel away unnecessary words until you’ve identified the clearest version of your work. To find the fluff, read your piece aloud or have someone else read it while you follow along.
Return to Play: Once your ideas are clear, identify sentences you can recast in bolder, more effective language. Use a word frequency generator or word cloud generator to identify your most frequently used words, then look for alternatives or new ways to revise your sentences. Don’t worry about finding THE ONE right word or sentence structure. Keep the stakes low by trying on several contenders, like outfits at a thrift store. You never know when something you’d normally dismiss might become the thing that makes this work cool.
May all the ways you claim your voice in 2025 empower and support you as you write on.
Warmly,
Lisa
Your Turn: What’s one item you own that feels like a deep expression of who you are? Tell us what it is or share a photo in the comments.
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PS: Be sure to spread the love by reading and sharing the stories and essays written by this month’s Red-Hot Writers and Milestone Makers.
Upcoming Events
January
February
San Francisco Writers Conference
February 6 - 9, 2025 | Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, CA
Sunday 2/9 @ 9:15: Writing About Trauma Without Traumatizing Yourself
Sunday 2/9 @ 10:30 FUNdamentals: How to Plan A Podcast: The Ultimate Guide
Sunday 2/9 @ 11:45 Writing the Complexities of Friendship
Sign up for The Psychology of Memoir Conference Master Class on Sunday 2/9 @ 2:00 PM
March
Memoir Backstory: What to Keep, Cut, and Repurpose
March 5, 2025 | 1:00 PM | Jane Friedman Webinar
New Podcast Episode: Writing Rituals for Staying Grounded
How do you write about really tough, or even traumatic, life events, in a way that connects with your audience and the truth, without losing yourself? Join me and the multi-talented Natalie Buster as we explore how grounding techniques, breathwork, and mindful rituals can help you connect with their your truth, heal through their stories, and navigate vulnerability.
My January Appearance In the World
“Lisa Cooper Ellison on Trauma Healing, Trauma-Informed Writing and More” on the You Make It happen Podcast
ICYMI
Recent Writing Your Resilience Episodes
Craft Articles:
“How to Write Memoir About Family Mental Illness, with Author Sarah LaBrie” Interview by Marion Roach Smith
“Quitting Time: Why You Need to Let Go of that Writing Project” by Allison Williams
“Are You Writing a Bad Book or the Wrong Book?” by Kate McKean
“Query do's and query don'ts for 2025” by Courtney Maum
“Key Methods for Direct and Indirect Foreshadowing in Your Story” by Tiffany Yates Martin
The Writing Life
“This One Quick Wellness Hack I Discovered” by Kate McKean
“The Promethean Power of Burnout” by Maria Popova
“When It Lights Up–and When It Doesn’t” by Anne Carley
“Post-Publication Retirement.” by Karen Debonis
“3 Aspects of Managing the Clutter-Tidiness Continuum” by Anne Carley
The Biz
“How to make six figures writing books” by Leigh Stein
“The Key Book Publishing Paths: 2025–2026” by Jane Friedman
“My 2024 Year-End Review: Most Notable Publishing Industry Developments” by Jane Friedman
Posts That Touched Me or Made Me Think
“Writing secrets of a heavy metal frontman turned bestselling author” by Catherine Baab
“I was writing a horror novel. Real life horror interrupted.” by Catherine Baab
“Every Moment is the Start of a New Year” by Sarah Chauncey
“After I Cut Off Contact From My Mother, I Was Shocked By The Brutal Move My Sisters Made” by Lea Page
“6 habits for mental, emotional, and spiritual growth in 2025” by Chani Nichols
“Making Friends with Uncertainty” by Elizabeth Kleinfeld
“Do You Feel This” by Rebekah Taussig
“Demi Moore’s Golden Globes Speech Made Me Realize Something Unexpected About Myself” by Lisa McCarthy
Books on My NightStand
The Creative Cure by Jacob Nordby: This manifesto on the importance of creativity is chock full of not just arguments for embracing and nurturing your creativity, but practical exercises to help you do so.
The Dead Are Gods by Eirinie Carson: Eirinie’s exquisitely written memoir is a love letter to grief and how friendships define us.
Life is a Movie by Samman Akbarzada: This touching novel explores the harsh realities of life and survival in Afghanistan.
It’s Not Your Money by Tosha Silver: This spiritual guidebook helps you explore where your abundance comes from and how to radically accept and live through anything life throws at you.
Red-Hot Writers
Julie Lambert
My essay “Connective Tissue” was published in Short Reads.
Kiely Todd Roska
My essay “Grief Is a Question” was published in Lunch Ticket, and my essay “God's Love is Two Women From a Quilting Guild” was published in Clever Magazine
Deborah Prum
My essay, “Don’t Let Anyone Break Your Creative Heart,” was published in Streetlight Literary Magazine
Milestone Makers
Jody Hobbs Hesler
My novel, Without You Here, won the 2025 Independent Press Award.
Casey Mulligan Walsh
My debut memoir, The Full Catastrophe, will be published on February 18th!
If you’ve read this far, thank you so much for your valuable time and attention! I’m so grateful to have played a role in your writing journey. You can support this work and yourself even more by becoming a paid subscriber. Benefits include quarterly ask me anything sessions and subscriber only events and content.
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I definitely do not play enough, Lisa, so I appreciate this post. Last year, I began upcycling clothes--buying from thrift stores and remaking items to suit me better. I'm going to pay a visit to Goodwill with an open mind to see what else I can find. And thanks for the shoutout!
love (LOVE) your new bag! :)