From https://thewritepractice.com/writing-voice/:

10 Questions to Find Your Unique Writing Voice

by Joe Bunting | 39 Comments

Why is it that when you love someone’s writing, you want to read every book they’ve ever written? Why is it that some readers will buy all of J.K. Rowling’s books, even if she’s writing in a completely different genre than the Harry Potter series? And for us writers, how can we go from “unknown writer” to “published author”?

What Is a Writing Voice?

Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, you must find your writing voice. But what does that mean?

Your writing voice is not your particular writing style, although style is part of voice. It’s also not the tone of your writing, although tone is part of voice as well.

Your writing voice is your unique way of looking at the world.

A writer who sees the world the same as everyone else has either lost their voice or never found it in the first place.

Readers lined up for the next Harry Potter book because J.K. Rowling has a unique way of looking at the world. She revealed a hidden world, filled with extraordinary people, secret wars, and magical creatures.

Readers are so impatient for George R.R. Martin’s next book because he has a unique way of looking at the world. In his world, heroes are killed, the bad guys win (at least for a while), and what’s right isn’t always what’s smart.

J.D. Salinger has a unique way of looking at the world, as does J.R.R. Tolkien, Cormac McCarthy, Anne Rice, Tom Clancy, Ernest Hemingway, and so many other writers people love.

If you want to be a great writer, you need to find a unique voice.

How to Find Your Writing Voice?

It starts by developing your sight. Here’s an exercise to help you see the world in a unique way:

What Do You Value Most?

Morality is essential to every story, regardless of whether you’re writing fiction or non-fiction. Even business books have a moral viewpoint (e.g. making money = good, waste = bad).

What is your moral worldview:

• What is most important in life? Family, love, courage, sacrifice?
• Do the good guys always win? If you only enjoy books where the hero wins at the end, then this is an important part of how you see the world.
• What’s not okay to you (e.g. poverty, selfishness, rape, orphans, infidelity, loneliness, betrayal)? Write about that!

People Watch

Next time you’re in a public place, look at the people around you. Really see them.

• What are they hiding? What are their secrets? Everyone has something that they think if people found out, they would be rejected and excluded.
• Is he a good guy? Is he a bad guy? And remember, even the villains think they’re the good guy.
• What does she want? What’s stopping her from getting it? A good story requires desire and conflict.
• Who does she rely on? Most protagonists have a sidekick. (Most antagonists have a sidekick too!)
• What is their ideal place? What would be the most terrifying/uncomfortable/lonely/boring place for them?

Observe Your Surroundings

Setting is an important character in every story, whether you’re writing fiction or non-fiction. Take a deep breath and look around you:

• What are your eyes drawn to? If you squint, what do you automatically look at? Describe that!
• How does what you’re seeing make you feel?

The Secret Ingredient to Becoming a Great Writer

What’s the secret ingredient to becoming a great writer?

The secret is that there is no secret ingredient. J.K Rowling can’t help you. Neither can George R.R. Martin or Ernest Hemingway or any other great writer.

It’s just you.

YOU already have a unique way of looking at the world. YOU already have a unique writing voice.

You’re not one in a million. You’re one in six billion.

To unearth your writing voice, all you have to do is write word after painful word. Today is a great day to start!

From https://www.enchantingmarketing.com/how-to-find-your-writing-voice/:

The Easy-Peasy Method for Finding Your Voice: 4 Examples of Writing Voice

by Henneke

1. Be concise

A strong voice starts with clarity of thought. You need to know exactly what you want to communicate, so you can present your ideas clearly. Without frills. Without distractions. Without blabbering.

Look at the examples above again—they don’t use any redundant words. They present their thoughts clearly.

What do you want your reader to remember from your content? And what action should he take? Can you explain this in one sentence?

Cut away the fluff that doesn’t contribute to your message. Brush off the dirt. Chisel away the ugly parts, so your message pops and sparkles.

2. Appeal to your reader

We often think that writing is a one-way process.

We sit at our desk. We type our thoughts. We edit.

But this is far from the truth.

Good writing is a conversation with your reader. You sneak into his mind because you want to answer his questions, help him with his struggles, overcome his objections to buying from you.

A strong voice speaks the reader’s language, uses the phrases the reader recognizes and understands. No jargon. No academic rigmarole. No complications.

3. Paint clear pictures

Being concise is often confused with using as few words as possible.

But this is wrong.

Sometimes you need to use more words to make an emotional connection. To touch, tickle, and dazzle.

Stating the bare facts doesn’t communicate your message. To connect with your readers, you need to make them feel your words.

Paint a picture in your reader’s mind. Make your words more sensory and emotional.

4. Add rhythm to your writing

A monotone voice is flat and boring.

It drones like a humming aircon. Without excitement. Without surprising the reader. Without stressing key points.

To avoid boring the boots off your readers, you need to vary the rhythm of your writing. Mix long sentences with short sentences. Use one-sentence paragraphs to stress certain points.

The staccato of short sentences makes your voice more dynamic.

The truth about your voice

The key to developing a strong voice is to cut away the monotony, the boredom, the wordy sludge hiding your message.

When you focus on concise and clear language, your voice will appear as by magic.

Your content will shimmer and shine.

And your readers will fall in love with you.

From https://thewritepractice.com/first-line/:

7 Keys To Write the Perfect First Line of a Novel

by Joe Bunting

Perfect First Lines Are Vivid

Here’s the line from Ulrica Hume’s “Poppies” that caught my attention.

I was born upside down, the umbilical cord looped twice around my neck.

It’s a simple sentence, but I love it. “Born upside down.” There’s something at once whimsical and perilous and messy about that image. Don’t you instantly get a picture of the hospital room, the tiny baby, perhaps with a bit of hair, being held upside down by the doctor, still slightly blue and screaming.

Great first lines instantly invite us into an image.

Here’s another vivid example from my favorite novel, All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy:

The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door.

Isn’t that a cool image? The light from a candle being reflected and twisted by a door. One of the reasons so many of Cormac McCarthy’s novels have been adapted into films (e.g. All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road) is that his writing is so cinematic, focusing on seemingly small details to invite us into the lives of his fascinating characters.

Great first lines, like the opening montage of a film, lead us into a scene. They use images, lighting, and tone to set the mood that the rest of the opening pages will take.

Perfect First Lines Establish a Unique Voice

We like to hear stories from people who sound interesting and unique, and perfect first lines introduce the reader to a character’s unique voice.

Voice is the peculiar vocabulary, tone, and phrasings our characters use. For example, here’s a classic example of the first line from Catcher In the Rye by J.D. Salinger:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

Notice how conversational this is. All the rules we were taught in school—don’t use adverbs like really, don’t use slang like lousy, and definitely don’t use words like “crap”—Salinger breaks them. And it works because this isn’t a school paper; this is one friend talking to another.

The remarkable thing about a unique voice is that it can be just as vivid as description. Don’t you instantly get an image of a sarcastic, teenage kid (perhaps wearing a red hunting cap backwards) while reading this? Voice can spark your imagination to create whole worlds.

Speaking of strange worlds, here’s J.K. Rowling’s first line from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone:

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.

You can just hear the Dursleys saying that huffily, can’t you? “Thank you very much. Such Nonsense.” I also think it’s fascinating that for such a magical novel, Rowling chose to begin with the least magical people in the whole story, which just increases the contrast between the magic and “muggle” world. Brilliant.

Perfect First Lines Are Surprising

This might be the most important tip in this post.

Be surprising. So many of these examples of great first lines are surprising. Case in point, here’s the opening line from 1984 by George Orwell:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

How do you quickly show the world you’re describing is slightly off from the real world? Alter the way time is tracked. Genius.

Snakes are an easy way to surprise your reader. Here’s the opening line from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal. Here is a copy of the drawing.

Nothing like boa constrictors and drawings of boa constrictors to catch your reader’s attention.

Here’s another example from One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Firing squad? Discovering ice? So much strangeness here I couldn’t help but read on.

And in honor of Christmas, here’s Charles Dickens’ first line from A Christmas Carol (thanks Magic Violinist for the recommendation):

Marley was dead: to begin with.

Want to create surprise? Apparently you should begin your story with someone dying (as three of our examples do).

Perfect First Lines Are Funny

Humor is closely linked with surprise, and great first lines are often very funny. For example, here’s a silly image from J.R.R. Tolkien’s very funny novel The Hobbit:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

“And that means comfort.” I love that part. I can imagine Tolkien’s four children squealing with delight at this opening line.

And here is Jane Austen exhibiting her slyly satirical wit in the first line of Pride and Prejudice:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Of course he must. How could he not?

Perfect First Lines Are True

Some novels begin with a philosophical truth. Take the iconic first line of one of the bestselling books of all time, A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness…

… and so on. It’s quite long, so you can read the full line here. This line is so famous that when I first read A Tale of Two Cities I was surprised to realize it came from a book. By now, this line has become a truism, but in its day, it was a philosophical reflection on the subjectivity of history and human experience.

Great first lines can do that. They can take a look at an entire culture as a whole and You can’t, of course, stay there forever. Eventually, you have start teaching again. But a little philosophy at the end of a novel doesn’t hurt.

Perfect First Lines Are Clear

Many great first lines do little more than introduce us to the characters we’re going to be following through the book. For example, from Melville’s Moby Dick:

Call me Ishmael.

And here’s a quick synopsis of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in its first line:

Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids.

Great first lines are often clear, we instantly know who the narrator is, where we are, and what this story  will be about.

Perfect First Lines Contain the Entirety of a Novel

Perfect first lines don’t just begin a novel, they someone manage to compact the entire story into a single sentence.

For example, take Kafka’s The Metamorphosis: 

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.

You can see Samsa’s entire journey, from the realization of his plight to his painful alienation to his eventual death.

Here’s another example from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

In this single, perfect sentence Nabokov reveals all the passion, poetry, and disaster that will follow.

Just as William Blake said, “To see the world in a grain of sand,” so the first line of a novel can contain its entirety within it.

How To Write the Perfect First Line

From all these examples, I hope you’ve seen that perfect first lines take many shapes and forms. In fact, the title of this post is misleading because there is really no such thing as the perfect first line. There is only a perfect first line for your story.

Be patient as you look for it. It might take longer than you think to find it. You may discover it, and then find another, then discard that one for something better still.

Remember, a great first line can hook your reader through the rest of your story. Keep searching for it. It’s worth it.

From https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-write-a-catchy-first-sentence-for-your-story#how-to-write-the-first-sentence-of-your-story:

How to Write a Catchy First Sentence for Your Story

Written by MasterClass

First lines can be anything as long as they’re interesting to your readers. Below are a few writing tips to help find your opening line when you write a short story:

1. Open with the unknown. A starting line full of mystery but just enough detail to intrigue your audience can keep them reading to find out where it will all lead. It could be a ‘what if’ question that will be answered by the end (or left open for the reader to decide). It could be a singular quote by a mysterious speaker that establishes foreboding, or someone trying to describe something supernatural that cannot be easily described. Something that sets up a few holes to be filled or prompts a curiosity in the introduction to quell later on is important in keeping the attention of your reader.
2. Open with tension. A tense starting point can instantly draw your reader in. Your characters took the perfect vacation to a cabin in the middle of nowhere, and right at midnight there’s a knock at the front door. Your high school character is running a race and their rival trips and falls in front of them. What will your characters do next? Their behaviors can define what kind of characters they are, and establishing key figures is helpful as a short story starter.
3. Open with a shocking memory. Start writing fiction with a particularly painful or powerful memory that will grab your reader? How will this first explosive line lead to the rest of the story? What will be the wider context this memory is presented with? If your setup is interesting enough, the reader will stick around to find out what you do with it.
4. Open with something visually striking. Whether it’s a landmark or a menacing object or the most beautiful tree anyone has ever seen, describe it to the reader and make them feel like they’re right there looking at it. While short fiction writing does not provide enough real estate to waste too much text describing anything at length, the opening line of a good story must capture the imagery enough so that the reader envisions your scene the way you’ve intended.
5. Open with intense dialogue. Dialogue can both set up the scene that’s taking place, as well as start to establish the personalities of your main characters. An argument between characters or a scathing line can grab an audience’s attention. Even an unexpectedly blunt statement like “I had never killed a person before tonight” is a story starter sentence that can really invest the reader. The words your characters speak can greatly inform who they are, which can save time on exposition—an integral skill of short story writing—and also help set up what the ensuing conflict will be.
6. Open with a first time (or a last time). “It was the first time/last time I had ever…” is a good sentence starter (and creative writing prompt) that sets up a level of intrigue for your audience. Whether it is the first time or was the last time a character used drugs, had sex, went on a roller coaster, or sang in front of a crowd, this line creates an expectation for the story of what they’ve done. When did this person do this? What led to them doing it the first time? Or why was it the last time? What happened after? If effective enough, your reader will want to know too.
7. Open your favorite books. Read the various opening lines of notable short story authors you admire and see if they prompt any fresh creative writing ideas for beginning your own story or writing project. You can also lookup existing short story prompts to help get your creative juices flowing and encouraging writing outside your comfort zone, which can sometimes lead to finding a first line in unexpected territory.

From https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/7-ways-to-create-a-killer-opening-line-for-your-novel:

7 Ways to Create a Killer Opening Line For Your Novel

Guest Column

1. A statement of eternal principle.

This technique is a staple of European classics. Think of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”) and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”). Of course, the story or novel you write must confirm the proposed principle. If it turned out that Mr. Darcy didn’t want to wed, or that Anna was happily married, these openings would certainly leave readers wanting. (An excellent contemporary example is from Jane Hamilton’s The Book of Ruth: “What it begins with, I know finally, is the kernel of meanness in people’s hearts. …”)

2. A statement of simple fact.

The entire weight of the narrative can sometimes be conveyed in a single statement. Think of, “I had a farm in Africa” (Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa) or, “It was a pleasure to burn” (Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451) or, “I am an invisible man” (Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man). No gimmicks. No fireworks. Just—as Mr. Gradgrind demands in the opening line of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times—the facts.

3. A statement of paired facts.

In many cases, two facts combined are more powerful than either one on its own. The paradigmatic example is the opening line of Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter: “In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.” A town with two mutes is not necessarily compelling, nor are two inseparable men. But a town with two inseparable mutes? Now that locks in our interest.

4. A statement of simple fact laced with significance.

Because readers don’t read backward, it’s possible to bury a key piece of a story in an opening so that, by the time it becomes relevant, the reader has forgotten it. Agatha Christie mysteries do this often. The key to solving the crime in Murder on the Orient Express, for example, is embedded innocuously in the opening sentence. So is the key to the heroine’s psyche in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, the opening of which explains, “Scarlett O’Hara wasnot beautiful. …”

5. A statement to introduce voice.

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.” Vladimir Nabokov’s celebrated opening is not designed to convey characterization or plot, though both are present, so much as to introduce his distinctive style. Anthony Burgess opens A Clockwork Orange (“What’s it going to be then, eh?”) without any plot, characterization or setting at all—merely the ominous voice that will accompany the reader through the text. Stories that begin with a highly unusual voice often withhold other craft elements for a few sentences—a reasonable choice, as the reader may need to adjust to a new form of language before being able to absorb much in the way of content.

6. A statement to establish mood.

Contextual information not directly related to the story can often color our understanding of the coming narrative. Take Sylvia Plath’s opening to The Bell Jar: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” While the Rosenberg execution has nothing to do with the content of the narrative, it sets an ominous tone for what follows.

7. A statement that serves as a frame.

Sometimes, the best way to begin a story is to announce that you’re about to tell a story. English storytellers have been doing this since at least the first recorded use of the phrase “Once upon a time” in the 14th century. Mark Twain’s The Adventures ofHuckleberry Finn starts off this way, as does J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. After all, a brilliant opening can be as straightforward as: “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler …” (which really does start exactly that way).

For more examples of great first lines, check out these links:

https://www.dailywritingtips.com/20-great-opening-lines-to-inspire-the-start-of-your-story/

https://www.ranker.com/list/100-famous-novels-with-catchy-first-lines/info-lists