M.B NOVELS®

For a long time, I thought finding your voice as a writer meant figuring out what you wanted to say. I thought it was about having opinions strong enough to put on paper. About developing a style people could recognize. About eventually writing a sentence and thinking, yes, that sounds like me.

I don’t think that’s quite right anymore.

I think finding your voice has less to do with deciding what you want to tell the world and more to do with listening closely enough to figure out what you’ve been trying to tell yourself.

Some of the things I’ve written were never really meant for an audience. They began as questions I couldn’t answer, feelings I couldn’t name, or thoughts I was too embarrassed to say out loud. Sometimes I didn’t even realize I was writing about myself until the story was finished and I looked back at it with the uncomfortable realization that I had apparently been leaving clues everywhere.

I started noticing that the stories I cared about most were the ones that answered questions I hadn’t known how to ask. I wanted to read about complicated feelings without having them neatly resolved by the final page. I wanted characters who could be contradictory without immediately being punished for it. I wanted books that could say, yes, this is ugly, without immediately adding, but everything will be okay.

There is a particular kind of loneliness in feeling something you don’t know how to explain. You can be surrounded by people and still feel like you’re speaking a language nobody else understands. You know something is happening inside you, but the words refuse to cooperate. Then you find a sentence in a book, and suddenly someone else has done the translating.

That experience changed the way I thought about writing.

I think writers spend a lot of time worrying about whether their work is useful. Whether it has a message. Whether it will change someone. Whether it is important enough to deserve being read. I’ve worried about all of those things, but a book doesn’t always have to change your life.

Throughout the years, I’ve become less interested in sounding impressive and more interested in sounding honest. Less interested in writing what I thought a writer was supposed to sound like and more interested in writing the sentences that felt true in my own mouth. There are versions of myself I have written for without realizing it. Younger versions. Heartbroken versions. Angry versions. Hopeful versions. Versions who needed permission to want something. Versions who needed to hear that they weren’t foolish for caring.

I can’t go back and give every past version of myself the right sentence at the right moment. I can’t rewrite every conversation or prevent every heartbreak. I can’t reach into the past and make someone stay, make myself speak, or make a difficult thing hurt less. But I can write. And somewhere, years later, another person might find the sentence I once needed.

Words that begin as something deeply personal don’t necessarily stay personal. Once they leave the page, they belong partly to whoever finds them.