What Is Author Voice and Can You Actually Develop It?

Before getting into what voice is, it helps to clear out what it isn’t, because writers spend a lot of time chasing the wrong thing.

Voice is not the same as style. Style is the surface level of the prose—sentence length, vocabulary, punctuation habits, paragraph structure. Two writers can have similar styles and completely different voices. Style is what the prose looks like. Voice is what it feels like to be inside it.

Voice is not the same as tone. Tone is the emotional register of a piece of writing—dark, funny, melancholic, urgent. Voice can contain multiple tones and remain consistent. Katie Bunny’s voice is funny and scared and sideways and specific, and it contains all of those tones at once without losing itself.

Voice is not a technique you can apply. You cannot read a craft book and come away with a voice. You cannot study another writer’s voice and reproduce it. What you can do is create the conditions under which your own voice becomes audible, which is a different project entirely.

• Why it worksWriters who understand this stop trying to sound like someone else and start paying attention to what they already sound like. In Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, the advice to write a shitty first draft exists partly for this reason: the first draft is where the writer’s actual voice shows up before self-consciousness has a chance to edit it out. The polished draft often has less voice than the messy one because the writer has revised the personality out of it along with the errors.
  
  In On Writing by Stephen King, voice is described as something that exists before craft, not as a product of it. King’s own voice—that specific dark humor and the way he makes the ordinary feel wrong—is visible in his earliest published work. It didn’t develop over time so much as it became more fully itself.
• How to do itRead your own first drafts looking for the moments that feel most like you. Not the most polished moments. The most specific ones. The detail only you would notice. The joke only you would make. The observation that came out sideways and surprised you. Those moments are your voice showing you what it is.

Voice comes from the accumulation of everything a writer has read, experienced, noticed, and cared about. It’s the specific shape of a particular person’s attention. What they find funny, what they find frightening, what details they notice in a room that other people walk past.

This is why you can’t manufacture voice from the outside in. You can’t decide to have a dark sense of humor if you don’t have one. You can’t decide to notice small specific details if your attention naturally moves to the large picture. Voice is the shape of your attention on the page, and that shape is already there before you sit down to write.

• Why it worksWriters with strong voices are almost always writers who have read widely and specifically. Not just in their genre. Not just in fiction. In everything that interests them, across forms and subjects and styles. The accumulation of that reading shapes the attention in ways that eventually show up on the page as voice. In The Art of Fiction by John Gardner, the argument is that the writer’s sensibility—the specific way they perceive and organize experience—is the raw material of voice. You develop that sensibility by living and reading and paying attention, not by studying craft alone.
• How to do itRead outside your comfort zone and notice what you respond to. Not what you’re supposed to respond to. What actually stops you, surprises you, stays with you. The things that catch your specific attention are telling you something about the shape of your voice.

The specific texture of Salt & Bone comes directly from what I find interesting and frightening and worth noticing. The clinical language Lisa uses to file her own feelings. The tactical way Jack moves through a room. The specific wrongness of a world where the CDC is the threat rather than the solution. None of that was engineered. It came from paying attention to the things that genuinely interested me and letting that attention shape the world of the book.

The honest answer is: sort of.

You cannot develop a voice you don’t have. You cannot decide to be funnier or darker or more specific than you naturally are and have that decision produce an authentic voice. What you can do is develop the conditions under which your existing voice becomes more fully audible.

• Why it worksVoice develops through volume. Writers who produce a lot of work over a long period of time develop more fully realized voices than writers who produce a little work very carefully. The volume gives the voice more opportunities to show itself, and the writer more opportunities to recognize it and protect it rather than revise it out.
  
  In Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, the ten thousand hours argument applies here in a specific way. The hours don’t produce the voice. They give it room to become itself. Rachel Vincent’s voice across her Shifters series is more fully realized by book four than it was in book one, not because she learned new techniques but because she had more practice getting out of her own way.
• How to do itWrite a lot. More than feels comfortable. More than feels productive. Write in the first draft with as little self-editing as possible, then revise with the specific goal of finding and protecting the moments of genuine voice rather than polishing them out. Do that enough times and the voice becomes more consistently available, more recognizable, more fully itself.

My voice across both series is more consistent now than it was in the original Rabid manuscript. Not because I learned to write differently but because I wrote enough to recognize what sounded like me and stop revising it into something more generic. The Katie Bunny who notices Trevor who liked trains at the worst possible moment is the most fully voiced version of that character. The version in earlier drafts was smoother and less herself. Voice develops by getting out of its own way, and getting out of its own way takes practice.

One more distinction worth making: author voice and character voice are not the same thing and shouldn’t be.

Author voice is the sensibility behind all the choices. Character voice is the specific way a particular character speaks, thinks, and notices. Both are necessary and they operate at different levels of the work.

When they’re working correctly, character voice is a specific expression of author voice. Katie sounds like herself. Jack sounds like himself. Lisa sounds like herself. And underneath all three of them, there’s a sensibility—a way of noticing the world, a sense of what matters and what’s funny and what’s frightening—that is the author’s.

• Why it worksWriters with strong author voices can write very different characters who still feel like they belong to the same world. The characters are distinct from each other but coherent within the larger sensibility of the book. In The Secret History by Donna Tartt, every character has a distinct voice and they’re all clearly products of Tartt’s specific attention. In A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, the book changes form and narrator constantly and remains coherent because Egan’s author voice is consistent underneath all of it.
• How to do itWhen writing character voice, start from who the character is and let their specific consciousness shape what they notice and how they say it. Then check whether those choices feel true to your larger sensibility as a writer. The character should sound like themselves. The book should sound like you.

Voice is not something you develop so much as something you uncover. It’s already there in the specific shape of your attention, in what you find funny and frightening and worth noticing, in the details you reach for without thinking.

The work is getting out of its way. Writing enough that it has room to show itself. Revising carefully enough that you protect it rather than smooth it out. Reading widely enough that your attention stays specific and strange.

Do that long enough and the voice becomes more fully itself. Not because you built it. Because you stopped covering it up.

• Read about Salt & Bone
• Read about The Death of Me
• Sign up for the newsletter to get weekly tips
• Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
• On Writing by Stephen King
• The Art of Fiction by John Gardner
• Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt
• A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan