The Work Behind the Words 002: How Writers Find Their Voice

Or, Stop Trying to Sound Like a Writer and Listen

Voice is not something forced or fabricated — it reveals itself in silence, when we slow down, stop performing, and listen.

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A Parable

In the deep woods they say there is a wild language — a tongue only the wind and the wolves understand.

No one can teach it.
It isn’t written.

There are only rumours — passed from mouth to mouth, firelight to firelight — that the tongue can be caught.

If you’re willing to disappear for a while.

So the brave and the broken would leave their cities. The bards, the wanderers, the half-mad poets. They follow the trails until the trails disappear. Until the trees hummed with ancient magic.

Out there the woods grew thick and the air changed.
Out there, in the wilds, the silence would watch you.
Out there, they say, the ones what returned, you could feel eyes on you — not just wolves or hawks — something older.

Something that wanted to see what you might become, out here, on the edge.

The old rumour said if you stayed long enough in the deep woods — stayed through hunger, through sleepless nights, through the ache of not knowing who you were anymore — you might begin to hear it.

Not in your ears.
In the pause between heartbeats.
In the stillness between thoughts.
The wind would start to whisper.

At first it feels like insanity, like something wild and archaic.
And then its words seemed to calm something older than fear.
The words were free.

That was the tongue.

Not a language of words, but of witnessing.
Of feeling without flinching.
Of truth that didn’t need to be polished to be powerful.

The bards, the wanderers, the half-mad poets, if they stayed long enough, quiet enough, honest enough — they would return transformed.

It was not answers they came back with; it was a voice.

They’d sit by your fire or in the corner of some flickering pub and speak in that wild tongue.

Not loudly.
Not to impress.

But their words would stick to your ribs and their stories would sink into your skin.

You would feel haunted —

and also you would feel more alive.

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Explained…