28 July 2026·3 min read
What voice actually means
Being told your writing lacks voice tells you nothing. Here is what the word is pointing at.
Voice is the pile-up of small choices about what gets noticed, in what order, and how long it is allowed to hold the page. Vocabulary has very little to do with it.
Two narrators walk into the same kitchen. One notices the smell before the room. One counts the exits. Neither has used an unusual word, and they are already different people.
How to spot a borrowed voice
Prose that reads as written rather than spoken is usually prose that has been smoothed out.
Every sentence lands cleanly. Nothing is ever slightly the wrong word. The result is competent and anonymous. Real speech is a bit off. A narrator who sometimes reaches for an imperfect word sounds like a person. One who never does sounds like prose.
How to find your own
Read your pages out loud and mark every line you would not have said.
Not the badly written ones. The ones that are not yours. What is left is your voice, and the job is to write more of that and less of the other thing.
Read more
Everything above came out of one of these. If any of it was useful, they are where it gets explained properly, with more examples and more patience than a short piece has room for.
Consider This · Chuck Palahniuk
Odd, occasionally annoying, and the best thing written on how prose feels.
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers · Renni Browne & Dave King
Two working editors. Every rule comes with a before and after from a real manuscript.
Steering the Craft · Ursula K. Le Guin
Short and exact. The exercises are the point, so do them.
These are search bait. I spent about five minutes on each. The letter you get back is nothing like this. Why that is
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