For the bonus WRITE BETTER NOW this week, I wanted to focus a tiny bit on voice since one of my students at the Writing Barn is going to be lecturing on it in a couple of weeks. A new session begins in September.
As I was thinking about this upcoming lecture, I realized I haven’t talked a lot about voice in my years as a writer and editor and coach. This is because I am secretly lazy and writing about voice is hard. It has so many elements and it’s so vital to making an immediate, powerful story.
This post? I’m going to stop being quite so lazy about it.
Dialogue and voice both do some amazing things in your story. They provide context and subtext, make things interesting and show character differences.
What is Voice?
“In writing, “voice” is how you speak and think. It’s all about the words you use and the patterns in your writing.
Do you use a lot of rhetorical questions? Long or short sentences? Slang?
Those are all ways your voice might come through in your writing.
Your “voice” is different from your writing style.
Your voice is about how you communicate. In any conversation, on any given day, you’re using your natural voice.
Style is about how you approach the reader. It’s either geared toward persuading the reader, explaining something to the reader, telling the reader a story, or describing something to the reader.”
In fiction writing, the term "voice" has two different meanings. The author's voice refers to a writer's style, the quality that makes their writing unique. A character's voice is the speech and thought patterns of characters in a narrative. The latter voice is one of the most vital elements of a story for readers of fiction.
And that’s an important distinction, right? Max made it too, but differently. I love how everyone does this just to confuse us all.
Ginny divides it like this:
AUTHORIAL VOICE is your style, word choice, what you write about, and how it all shows up in attitude on the page. Hunter S. Thompson is always obviously Hunter S. Thompson. Audre Lord is always Audre Lord.
CHARACTER VOICE is the character in your novel and how they string together their words, their choice of words, their sentence structure, their attitude.
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