Learning to write voiceless

     So my first and biggest goal in learning how to work as a writer is something that will sound terrible to most people who want to be or are trying to be writers. I'm trying to learn to completely suppress my personal "voice", or the tone that any writer naturally has or develops in his or her writing. Eliminating my verbal personality might seem counter-intuitive, since what I'd eventually like to be doing is holding down a regular column somewhere, but there is a pretty decent reason for it.

     At the moment, I think my best shot at ever getting any kind of decent job is building up a monster of a resume, and that means doing as many different kinds of writing for as many people as possible. I need to be able to illustrate to a potential client that I can write what they want, and to some people that means showing them that I have the ability to stop writing what I want.

     Take pure bottom-end content generation, for instance. There are a lot of sites out there that generate content for people who can't do or can't do it well themselves. When you write for those kind of sites, you get paid but you don't get credit. In some cases, the clients want to pretend they wrote it themselves, and in some case authorship just doesn't matter, like a description on a retail site for a purse or a pair of sunglasses. For those kinds of jobs, you have to write clean, because you don't actually matter in the process. The idea is just to get a product, written words, out there.

     As I mentioned before, I'm doing some work for Cracked.com, which lets for some reason despite the fact that they really, really shouldn't. Cracked has a very distinctive voice, but its not my voice. Not only do they not need my personal style since they already have their own, but everything I write that doesn't contour to what they are already doing actually makes more work for the editors.

     There are some professional voiceless styles, at least if I understand them correctly. AP style, which is that dry newsprint format, is completely voiceless. It's sortof impressive once you realize that every news story you've ever read could have been written by any journalist as long as they were following the AP Stylebook point for point. Anyway, wish me luck as I squelch my individuality.

-Elijah