Compare and Contrast: On Writing Well, Ch. 20 and Finding Your Voice

To compare the papers; they were written about the same topic: your voice as a writer. Besides that though? I can’t find many more similarities. The On Writing Well Chapter was more of a lesson, more of a how to find your voice. It listed the elements of your voice and how to obtain them – taste, eloquence, etc. Finding Your Voice, on the other hand, was all about how truthfully our lives are not lived in houses with white picket fences; instead they are truly “monstrous” and deep and dark. But the whole point of the paper was to not write about the imaginary dream of houses with white picket fences, but on the contrary write about the monsters inside us and what life is really like for us. Don’t write by someone else’s stories, write by your own, no matter how bad you think they are. And therefore you will have your own voice, because you are writing from somewhere that no one has before; inside of you. That paper used a LOT of analogies to make its point, and those analogies worked great. I loved the “diving down into the deep holes of the ice” part, it really made me believe I was down swimming in icy cold water trying to survive… and made the point at the same time. So to sum that up, the On Writing Well was more of an instruction step list of how to find your voice, and the other was simply making the facts about life obvious to us and encouraging us to write from our own experiences, no matter how “monstrous” they are.