Many writers, especially those just beginning to write fiction, worry about how to develop their author voice. You may have read that “voice” is very important in literature and may even determine whether you secure a traditional publisher, which tends to be every novice writer’s wish.
But unlike learning how to write good dialogue or description or some other aspect of the writing craft, author voice is something that evolves over time and cannot be learned from a book, a course, or a workshop.
But what is author voice?
Some students of literature (aka literary experts) equate author voice with style; others consider the two to be separate though closely related.
Jeanne Cavelos, who served as a senior editor at Bantam Doubleday Dell where she ran the Abyss horror imprint before becoming a bestselling science fiction author, says in the chapter titled “Innovation in Horror” (The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing, Writer’s Digest Books © 2002) that your writing style, which she also calls “your voice,” is a reflection of your personality and that your voice is influenced by your beliefs and by “your concerns,” or what matters most to you in life. She adds that by writing, you are commenting on “the human condition.”
Novelist Deborah Ratliff, on the other hand, in her blog article “The Writer’s Voice and Other Elements of Style” (The Coastal Quill: November 11, 2016) says that author voice is one of the three elements that make up a writer’s style, the others being sentence structure and word choice. Each writer has a unique voice, she adds, and that voice derives from the writer’s personality and is impacted by that writer’s choice of words.
I like to think of it this way: what you write is your story, how you write it is your style, and the intellect and personality behind all that is your voice.
To my way of thinking, your voice dictates your style, not the other way around. And yet, the style you use may be different in different stories even though you are the same author for those various works. In other words, your author voice is something separate from your normal, real-life persona and may vary across different books and over the lifetime of your writing career.
Regardless of whether you use a serious or humorous tone in your story or write in a languid literary or a hard-boiled detective style, your voice will be shaped by your true personality, which has been formed by your socioeconomic and cultural upbringing, your education, your life experiences, and your philosophical beliefs.
I suppose the bottom line here is that there is no need to worry about your author voice. Even if you don’t know it, you already have one. And the more you write, the more you think, and the more you live, the stronger and more distinctive your voice will become.
Just as a house may be remodeled or renovated on its original foundation, your voice may evolve and expand supported by the structure of craft you have learned over the years. So, if you want to improve your writing, my advice is to forget about voice and concentrate on craft. The stronger the foundation, the better the voice that rests upon it.
© 2022 Ann Henry, all rights reserved.