Your Voice Isn't in Your Prose

Something about authorial voice has never sat quite right with me. But being almost chronically online, it’s also not something I see talked about often, either, and I’m very shocked for its absence.

I would wager every writer has more than likely heard the advice at some point or another, or has just come to understand in their own intuition that you’ll find your voice eventually. Read enough and you’ll understand what voice looks like or keep writing and one day your voice will simply emerge.

The major problem I have is that none of those things really explain what voice is. I dislike how they describe it as though it’s something waiting to be discovered, because they rarely go that extra step and explain to newer or intermediate writers where it’s hiding.

Discussions about it drift toward prose. We start talking about things like varying sentence rhythms, vocabulary, metaphors, description, and all the little stylistic fingerprints that make one writer sound different from another.

Those things absolutely matter, and they never stop mattering to the writer. I just don’t think they’re where voice can be found, and I have a few good reasons why.

Here’s what keeps pulling me away from that explanation:

Imagine two writers beginning with exactly the same premise.