Voice in Writing: The Unique, Essential Self in Language
Sean Glatch | September 27, 2026 |
In literary circles, any form of praise, critique, or analysis of an author’s achievements will inevitably mention their voice. Voice is a word that critics, educators, and long-time writers instinctively know, feel, and respond to. But what is voice in writing?
Writing voice is bigger than just style, different than just word choice, and hard to identify in just a stanza or paragraph. Truthfully, there’s no easy definition. But understanding voice in writing is essential to both understanding literature and finding your own voice as a writer.
Understanding voice in writing is essential to both understanding literature and finding your own voice as a writer.
This article offers a few different thoughts on the topic of voice in writing. In no way does this offer a complete understanding of the topic: the discourse on writing voice runs deep in literary criticism—but the examples and links here will help you explore voice in its totality.
Let’s start with the big question. What is voice in writing?
Voice in Writing: Contents
What is Voice in Writing?
A writer’s voice is the set of qualities, decisions, and approaches to language that inform the unique, essential traits of a writer’s work.
Okay. That sentence is a bit complicated, so let’s break it down.
Voice in writing: the set of qualities, decisions, and approaches to language that inform the unique, essential traits of a writer’s work.
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The Decisions That Become One’s Writing Voice
When a writer writes something (whether that’s prose, poetry, or everything in-between), they make thousands of decisions—some conscious, some not—that inform the direction and scope of the writing.
Some of those decisions might be:
- What word do I use?
- How long is this sentence or line, this paragraph or stanza?
- What feeling(s) does my writing evoke?
- Does my writing evoke those feelings through sound, metaphor, or image?
- What literary devices or strategies will enhance my meaning?
- What is the point of view of my writing?
- How do I get my unique worldview across?
- What am I paying attention to, and what do I want to ignore?
- How does conventional language fail my purpose, and what am I doing to push language in new directions?
- What texts have I read that inform my approach to this particular piece I’m writing?
- How do I want to structure my ideas, images, and arguments?
These questions are not always conscious. Many of them occur at unconscious levels.
For example, if you live in New York City, you are more likely to write about skyscrapers and urban life; even if you don’t intend to write about those experiences, their images still appear in your work. (Or, you might long for a non-urban setting, and that longing tinges the way you write about the countryside.)
A different example: if you’re a mother, then language associated with motherhood can appear in your writing even if you are not writing about motherhood. Ditto any set of lived experiences that not everyone participates in.
A writer’s voice emerges from the gestalt of conscious and unconscious decisions.
A writer’s voice emerges from the gestalt of these conscious and unconscious decisions. It is the summation of a writer’s unique relationship to language. If you believe in the human soul, then a writing voice encapsulates that soul; certainly, voice is a kind of literary thumbprint—something unique to that writer alone.
In the same way that you encounter someone’s personality before you understand them at a deeper level, voice is your first encounter with a writer’s mind before you understand their soul. It is often felt before it is described. It evolves as the writer grows, learns, and changes. And it is one of the things that makes literature so exciting and important to human history.
Voice is a kind of literary thumbprint—something unique to that writer alone.
Writing Voice Vs Writing Style
Wait a minute! Aren’t some of the things I’m describing more “style” than voice?
Truthfully, it depends on whom you ask.
Some critics distinguish style as an iteration of voice. If voice is the function f(x), style is x=1; if voice is the writer’s holistic approach to language, style is one craft example of that approach.
We have an article on writing styles that enumerates those craft decisions. You’ll find that a lot of those decisions overlap with what I’ve just called voice.
In my opinion, voice is what happens when those decisions are authentic and unique to the author. Every voice is one-of-a-kind. You can feel the writer’s mind and life in the language, and know, on some deeper and unconscious level, who the person behind that voice is.
You can feel the writer’s mind and life in the language, and know, on some deeper and unconscious level, who the person behind that voice is.
Style, by contrast, happens when a writer’s voice is scrubbed out of their work solely for the sake of publishability. It’s easy, manicured writing, airbrushed of its textures and intricacies.
It’s easy to be stylish; ironically, stylish writing follows the rules. But voice in writing happens when the rules are just suggestions, and the writer decides, above all, to use language in their own unique and essential way.
And again, plenty of critics and theorists might disagree. For some, style and voice are relatively interchangeable; for others, style is an expression of voice, not at odds with authenticity. I make no claim that my use of these words is the best. But let’s look now at how the idea of writing voice has evolved in the past 200 years.
Voice in Literature: Craft, Character, and Personhood in Modernity
Voice is the culmination of writing craft. While individual elements—plot or point of view; metaphor or line breaks—can be individually thrilling, the aspect of writing that people most frequently fall in love with is the author’s voice.
“I love how this is written”; “The writing gave me chills”; “It made me laugh out loud”; “I couldn’t put it down”; “I’ll never forget this piece”—these reactions are all the products of voice.
Voice in writing offers an interesting window to examine where literature has been and where it might be headed.
You will also hear, over and over again, that literary agents are most attracted to the voice of the writing they champion, because everything else (plot, character, POV, etc.) can be remedied, but voice is impossible to teach.
Impossible to teach, but not impossible to discuss. Voice in writing offers an interesting window to examine where literature has been and where it might be headed. Below are some thoughts and observations on how writing voice reflects the craft and culture of successful literature.
Voice in 19th Century Writing
Writers have always had voices. Shakespeare is distinct from Milton, Chaucer ushered in a new era of the English language, and the essays of Blaise Pascal sound little like the letters of Madame de Sévigné.
But the 19th century ushered in an explosion of voices in literature. The reason for this is threefold:
- New ideas about personhood shaped 19th century cultures. The Romanticists in England and the Transcendentalists in America each revered the sacredness of the individual. Poetry, in particular, could be written about the poet’s own self, life, and perspective—whereas literature prior to the 1800s was typically heroic or romantic in nature, and often fictional. All of this happened while new ideas about democracy and democratic governance spread in Europe and America. A culture that upholds the sanctity of the self and of self-governance will naturally care more about a self that is wholly expressed in language.
- New technologies, particularly the cast iron printing press, expanded the production of books. It became much easier to print and distribute books in the 1800s, leading to an increase in literacy. More people read and wrote at a time when individuals were given more empowerment.
- An expanding middle class resulted in more time and access to reading and writing. More people had more leisure time and better education, which meant more people could read and also write, which meant that more people could explore their own truths in language.
A culture that upholds the sanctity of the self and of self-governance will naturally care more about a self that is wholly expressed in language.
All of this came at a great cost for the lower classes: both poverty and wealth greatly expanded during this century of technological and democratic proliferation; poor day laborers and factory workers created the conditions in which middle and upper class citizens could read and write.
As a result, literature became not just a place to share ideas, explore lofty possibilities, and examine the totality of human experience. Poetry and fiction became sites of personal exploration and self-examination: writers began localizing their own place in the history of the world. The voices that emerge from this time period are a result of such writing.
The 20th Century Voice in Literature
It’s been said that the 20th century novel was the novel of the voice.
Don’t take my word for it. I often reference Stephen Marche’s fantastic LitHub essay here, in which he juxtaposes the literary selves that populate 20th and 21st century fiction.
The argument is simple: 20th century authors were empowered to explore the limits and possibilities of voice in their work. A novelist might have two completely different voices in two completely different novels, but still contain something indefinably unique that makes their authorship obvious. Modernists, in particular, were interested in how prose can transmit different fluid voices flowing into one another. Open a random book to a random page, and you could guess, based on the words alone, who wrote it.
20th century authors were empowered to explore the limits and possibilities of voice in their work.
Of course, some authors stuck to one voice, which grew and matured over a career that uncovered the innermost depths of the author’s self—and often did so in fiction.
These authors, Marche writes, “shared a vision of literature, an understanding of their social purpose, and even a moral certainty. They were distinguished by the distinctness of their voices.”
If anything, the 20th century voice in writing is the conclusion of the 19th century’s radical emphasis on selfhood. Despite a chaotic century of wars, genocides, technological changes, nuclear armaments, colonial expansions and restructurings; despite a world that became unrecognizable to itself, writers managed to document it all through voices as fully realized and distinct as thumbprints. Even better, the canon slowly expanded to include more nonwhite, nonmale, nonmajority writers—whose voices were more necessary than ever.
The 21st Century Voice in Literature
Marche’s assessment of contemporary literature is rather sobering.
He writes that, if the 20th century sponsored a literature of the voice, the 21st century has so far been defined as a literature of the pose.
Pose being what it sounds like: a performance, rather than a voice, with the qualities that could be singular to that writer airbrushed out of the text. It is language for the sake of entertainment, information—which, I think, limits the extent to which the writing can explore the human experience.
Marche writes that 21st century literature has so far been defined as a literature of the pose.
This kind of writing can be defined by shorter, declarative sentences, an over-emphasis on show, don’t tell, a limited sense of interiority, a lack of experimentation, and themes limited to topics of identity or contemporary cultural discourse.
None of these aspects are inherently “bad” on their own, but their combination reveals an approach to writing that is uninterested in complexity or individuality. It is writing that tries to appease as many readers as possible—which is understandable, given how hard it is for authors to make money, but not necessarily the path to literary greatness.
It’s worth noting that there are plenty of counterexamples. The 21st century still has excellent writers with compelling voices. I also don’t like some of Marche’s most fatalistic conclusions about language and culture. They feel, to me, like the doomerist response to troubling times. I write this article from a place of optimism—that writers can, and will, develop their un-posed voices.
What About Fictional Characters?
Fiction reveals the extent to which voice represents selfhood, because fictional characters, when written well, each have their own unique voices. Moreover, these voices exist interdependently with the voice of the author.
Here’s an example from George Eliot’s 1871-72 novel Middlemarch. Pay attention to how the differences in syntax and language quirks reveals something about each character’s voice:
[Mr. Brooke, Dorothea’s uncle:] “Well, but now, Casaubon, such deep studies, classics, mathematics, that kind of thing, are too taxing for a woman—too taxing, you know.”
“Dorothea is learning to read the characters simply,” said Mr. Casaubon, evading the question. “She had the very considerate thought of saving my eyes.”
“Ah, well, without understanding, you know—that may not be so bad. But there is a lightness about the feminine mind—a touch and go—music, the fine arts, that kind of thing—they should study those up to a certain point, women should; but in a light way, you know. A woman should be able to sit down and play you or sing you a good old English tune. That is what I like; though I have heard most things—been at the opera in Vienna: Gluck, Mozart, everything of that sort. But I’m a conservative in music—it’s not like ideas, you know. I stick to the good old tunes.”
“Mr. Casaubon is not fond of the piano, and I am very glad he is not,” said Dorothea, whose slight regard for domestic music and feminine fine art must be forgiven her, considering the small tinkling and smearing in which they chiefly consisted at that dark period. She smiled and looked up at her betrothed with grateful eyes. If he had always been asking her to play the “Last Rose of Summer,” she would have required much resignation. “He says there is only an old harpsichord at Lowick, and it is covered with books.”
“Ah, there you are behind Celia, my dear. Celia, now, plays very prettily, and is always ready to play. However, since Casaubon does not like it, you are all right. But it’s a pity you should not have little recreations of that sort, Casaubon: the bow always strung—that kind of thing, you know—will not do.”
“I never could look on it in the light of a recreation to have my ears teased with measured noises,” said Mr. Casaubon. “A tune much iterated has the ridiculous effect of making the words in my mind perform a sort of minuet to keep time—an effect hardly tolerable, I imagine, after boyhood. As to the grander forms of music, worthy to accompany solemn celebrations, and even to serve as an educating influence according to the ancient conception, I say nothing, for with these we are not immediately concerned.”
“No; but music of that sort I should enjoy,” said Dorothea. “When we were coming home from Lausanne my uncle took us to hear the great organ at Freiberg, and it made me sob.”
Here are some observations:
- Mr. Brooke’s voice:
- Frequently uses the phrase “you know,” sometimes after repeating the phrase he most wishes to emphasize.
- Interrupts himself in such a way that can only be conveyed through liberal use of the em-dash.
- Speaks often of culture and politics to people who do not necessarily care or share his knowledge.
- Mr. Brooke is, perhaps, a character that thinks highly of his intelligence and also is insecure about it, anxious to be understood but not challenged—not challenged, you know.
- Mr. Casaubon’s voice:
- Speaks in circuitous sentences—he travels the dictionary to make a point.
- Often invokes lofty and abstract phrases and words, which lends a sort of pomposity and arrogance to his speech.
- Despite his grand elocution, he is rather measured in his speech and desires to cut off further discourse on topics he does not care about, which includes most topics.
- Dorothea’s voice:
- Is simple and direct—which should not be confused for unintelligent. She has quite a lot of depth; she simply arrives at her point in linear fashion.
- Although this passage is a bit short on Dorothea’s own dialogue, Eliot gives us some clues towards an interior that is rich and richly felt, both in Eliot’s descriptions of her interiority and in other passages of the text which make great use of free indirect discourse.
The narrator’s voice, by contrast, is almost cosmic in its scope. She often reflects on the totality of human endeavors with a knowledge that feels god-like. And she is not afraid of poking fun at the culture or human folly; her own observations occasionally lend an air of satire to what is otherwise a sharply realist novel.
Fictional characters, when written well, each have their own unique voices.
All of these voices are unique. They each reveal something about the psychologies of their respective characters. And they are interdependent with George Eliot’s voice: they come from her, are perhaps facets of her, and yet also are their own unique selves. Many of these characters were unquestionably influenced by people Eliot knew and observed in real life, but they existed in her mind before they existed on the page, and they couldn’t exist without her own voice mingling amongst them.
More Examples of Voice in Writing
Because voice is both real and abstract, felt yet hard to identify, it is worthwhile to examine a few more examples of voice in writing.
Excerpt from The Waves by Virginia Woolf
‘Now once more,’ said Louis, ‘as we are about to part, having paid our bill, the circle in our blood, broken so often, so sharply, for we are so different, closes in a ring. Something is made. Yes, as we rise and fidget, a little nervously, we pray, holding in our hands this common feeling, “Do not move, do not let the swing door cut to pieces the thing that we have made, that globes itself here, among these lights, these peelings, this litter of bread crumbs and people passing. Do not move, do not go. Hold it for ever.”‘
‘Let us hold it for one moment,’ said Jinny; ‘love, hatred, by whatever name we call it, this globe whose walls are made of Percival, of youth and beauty, and something so deep sunk within us that we shall perhaps never make this moment out of one man again.’
‘Forests and far countries on the other side of the world,’ said Rhoda, ‘are in it; seas and jungles; the howlings of jackals and moonlight falling upon some high peak where the eagle soars.’
‘Happiness is in it,’ said Neville, ‘and the quiet of ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent, or, perhaps, bethinking us of some trifle, suddenly speak.’
‘Week-days are in it,’ said Susan, ‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday; the horses going up to the fields, and the horses returning; the rooks rising and falling, and catching the elm-trees in their net, whether it is April, whether it is November.’
‘What is to come is in it,’ said Bernard. ‘That is the last drop and the brightest that we let fall like some supernal quicksilver into the swelling and splendid moment created by us from Percival. What is to come? I ask, brushing the crumbs from my waistcoat, what is outside? We have proved, sitting eating, sitting talking, that we can add to the treasury of moments. We are not slaves bound to suffer incessantly unrecorded petty blows on our bent backs. We are not sheep either, following a master. We are creators. We too have made something that will join the innumerable congregations of past time. We too, as we put on our hats and push open the door, stride not into chaos, but into a world that our own force can subjugate and make part of the illumined and everlasting road.
The Waves is a novel with a mastery of writing voice. It is Woolf’s most experimental project: it charts the lives of 6 friends from childhood to old age. Pay attention to how each voice varies from one another and showcases a different set of preoccupations.
These friends’ voices flow into one another, informing each other both consciously and unconsciously, no matter how physically close or far apart they are in life. The result is a novel that discovers something about a more collective unconscious, the voices that unknowingly undergird ours, the voices that our voice undergirds.
Excerpt from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami
When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.
I wanted to ignore the phone, not only because the spaghetti was nearly done, but because Claudio Abbado was bringing the London Symphony to its musical climax. Finally, though, I had to give in. It could have been somebody with news of a job opening. I lowered the flame, went to the living room, and picked up the receiver.
“Ten minutes, please,” said a woman on the other end.
I’m good at recognizing people’s voices, but this was not one I knew.
“Excuse me? To whom did you wish to speak?”
“To you, of course. Ten minutes, please. That’s all we need to understand each other.” Her voice was low and soft but otherwise nondescript.
“Understand each other?”
“Each other’s feelings.”
I leaned over and peeked through the kitchen door. The spaghetti pot was steaming nicely, and Claudio Abbado was still conducting The Thieving Magpie.
“Sorry, but you caught me in the middle of making spaghetti. Can I ask you to call back later?”
“Spaghetti!? What are you doing cooking spaghetti at ten-thirty in the morning?”
“That’s none of your business,” I said. “I decide what I eat and when I eat it.”
“True enough. I’ll call back,” she said, her voice now flat and expressionless. A little change in mood can do amazing things to the tone of a person’s voice.
“Hold on a minute,” I said before she could hang up. “If this is some new sales gimmick, you can forget it. I’m out of work. I’m not in the market for anything.”
“Don’t worry. I know.”
“You know? You know what?”
“That you’re out of work. I know about that. So go cook your precious spaghetti.”
“Who the hell-”
She cut the connection.
Murakami’s novels have recurring preoccupations: classical music, simple cooking, mysterious women, lonely and disaffected men. I’ve read most of his books, including his nonfiction, and as a result I often wonder about how his characters’ voices overlap with his own. His characters often seem slightly anxious to be understood, perceptive of others’ quirks but unaware of their own.
Clearly, this is a voice different from any other excerpt we’ve read. Its style is perhaps slightly more in the 21st fashion, but it works for his characters—many of whom have interiors that they struggle to access, embarking on journeys of self-forgiveness, if not absolution.
Excerpt from Beloved by Toni Morrison
124 was spiteful.
Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old—as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the door sill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once—the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn’t have a number then, because Cincinnati didn’t stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them.
What I’m always drawn to in Morrison’s voice is its confident, poetic precision. If anyone else used a phrase like “baby’s venom,” I would lose faith in the work. Not here. The writing has great attention to imagery, a commanding sense of story, some kind of forward-moving tension, and something else, something ineffable that makes these words deeply felt and deeply personal to Morrison. I’ve tried to understand for many years now what she does to sound this way in her prose. For now, I just have to accept that her work is incredible.
How to Develop Your Writing Voice, Briefly
There’s no shortage of advice on how to be a better writer. This recent article on writing skills is emblematic of that advice: read a lot, write a lot, be patient, think deeply, know the rules, break them.
That advice works, and it will help you develop your writing voice. But what I want to emphasize most is this truth, which I’ve begun dispensing liberally in all my writing and teaching:
Tunnel into the particularity of your strangeness.
We all have quirks of language. Words we overuse and words we hate; sounds we love to make, redundancies and repetitions, particular ways of thinking, arguments that feel true but make no sense.
Our quirks are valuable because they’re human. And their humanity is amplified by the fact that you are the only person who contains your unique set of quirks.
Tunnel into the particularity of your strangeness.
Lean into those quirks. Use them in your writing. Make apparent your unique relationship to language, and explore that relationship to its logical extreme. This is vague advice, but it makes sense when you start doing it—when the words you use to sound like yourself in real life, over text message, via email, or on a phone call suddenly populate your stories and essays and poems.
This is how we might resist Stephen Marche’s literature of the pose. Not by writing literature that’s publishable—which is really just an attempt to satisfy every reader without taking risks. No. You develop your voice by loving what makes you strange and particular, then letting your language express it.
More Resources for Developing Your Writing Voice
Here are some additional articles, essays, and craft guides to help you think through your relationship to language:
- 36 Creative Writing Exercises to Become a Better Writer
- Revising and Editing for Creative Writers
- 30 Poetry Writing Exercises for New Poems
- 8 Tips on Learning How to Write
- Resources for Learning to Write Poetry
- On Writing What’s Already Been Written
- Let Your Poems Be Weird
Develop Your Writing Voice at Writers.com
The more you write, the more you’ll find your writing voice. The classes at Writers.com are designed to keep you writing. Take a look at our upcoming online creative writing courses, where you’ll receive feedback and guidance on the voices you come to write with.
