Master Voice in Your Writing

Writing can be precise and clinical, or dreamy and wistful, or quirky and playful. Having a distinct voice gives a book personality, making it stand out in readers’ memories—and in publishers’ inboxes. If you have trouble injecting that personality into your work, read on. We’re going to break it down for both fiction and nonfiction.

In Fiction

Think about who the narrator of your book is. If you’re writing in first person, it’s your main character. If you’re writing in close third person, it’s a narrator who shares your main character’s perspective. Whenever you describe an event, object, person, or landscape, do so through the filter of that character’s opinions and experience.

The cherry trees by the pond were coming into blossom, which was probably romantic and beautiful and whatever for people whose lives weren’t falling apart.

If you’re writing in omniscient third person or even second person, you might often do so in a plain, precise, objective way. The majority of books have unobtrusive third-person narrators who report on events without giving any impression that they are a person in their own right. But the books that get remembered for their voice have narrators with opinions! They comment on what characters are thinking and doing, make dire statements about calamities to come, and sometimes address the reader directly.

He hurried downstairs, unaware that she was, at that very moment, climbing in his bedroom window. This, as we shall see, was entirely characteristic of his love life.

Some books are written from multiple points of view—a tricky feat that first-time authors are often discouraged from trying. It requires writing multiple distinct voices that all come through cleanly in the narration and give the reader a sense of experiencing the story through a different lens with each character. Make sure you have a good grasp on the different ways your characters see the world, and the reasons for those differences.

The street was a joyous confusion of colour, scent and sound. It was rich with flowers, performers, food vendors, and people in their festival best. Agnes slowed her pace as she passed it by, drinking in every detail she could. Surely Aunt Prunella wouldn’t notice just a moment’s delay.

It was the usual festival trash on display, but all the bright-feathered merchants’ brats came flocking to buy and drink and get squeezed out of every last penny. Good pickings, if you had the stomach for all that cheeriness. Roach sneered.

In Nonfiction

You don’t have to flatten your voice just because you’re writing about facts! Here are some examples to get you thinking about how personality and accuracy can work hand in hand:

Sometimes, you are the narrator! You can speak directly to the reader, slipping often into the first person to describe your own experiences and individual perspective on the topic at hand.

Dr. Sato’s research completely upended scientific opinions on this matter. And on the day I met him at his lab, he completely upended my ideas of what a scientist should be.

You can write in the second person, predicting the reader’s experiences and responding to them.

Cooking on a weeknight is hard. Here’s a recipe you can whip together between hockey practice and ballet lessons.

Even in a more typical third-person narration, you can inject some voice by giving your narrator a distinct perspective on the world, à la David Attenborough.

Overpopulation drives deer to eat many low-quality forage plants that offer little in the way of nutrition. This frequently includes garden plants marketed as “deer resistant.” The deer, unfortunately, cannot read the labels and must suffer the resultant stomach-ache.

Tips to Find Your Voice

• Figure out who your narrator is and how they feel about matters at hand. Do they know more than the reader does? Have they already “written” to the end, or are they experiencing things alongside us?
• As an exercise, have them write you a letter about the state of affairs within your book.
• If you want an extremely distinct narrator who comments on the story without appearing in it, give them a name. A fantastic example of this technique taken to its limits is Lemony Snicket…but you don’t need to go so far as to build a pseudonymous alter-ego for yourself. Simply thinking of your narrator as a secret, invisible character will do.
• Examine every paragraph and ask, “How does my narrator feel about this?”
• If you’re writing in the third person, it can be hard to develop the knack of writing through the filter of a narrator’s experiences and opinions. To practice the skill, try re-writing some passages in the first person and see what comes up.
• If you’re writing fiction and the above advice isn’t helping, ask yourself if your character’s opinions and perspective are too bland. If they don’t have anything in particular to say about world events, their place in society, the problem at hand, or the characters they’re interacting with, dig deeper. Give them reasons to hold opinions, hopes, and even grudges. Then let those come through in your writing.
• You might opt to give your narrator distinct speech patterns or turns of phrase like slang, malapropisms, regionalisms, a smattering of words from their maternal language, a sarcastic worldview, or a propensity for puns and jokes.
• Some narrators are unreliable! If you really want to have fun with a narrator who interacts with the story and how it’s told, try writing one who gives false reports to the reader. The trick, of course, is to make them eventually give themselves away as unreliable.