Adding Voice to Your Story

how to find yours

Jun 04, 2025

If you are a writer with an eye on getting published, you’ve probably heard about voice. An agent might say that a manuscript isn’t “voicey enough,” or “I like the voice but didn’t connect with the story.” People talk about honing their voice, finding their voice, amping up the voice.

At a certain point, you hear it so much that it starts to lose meaning. It’s like someone saying, “I didn’t connect with this story’s camel,” and “it felt like the camel wasn’t strong enough.” You’re like, “I understand what a camel is, but I have no idea what we’re talking about here.”

So let’s talk about it. Permit me to meander into talking about clothes. It’s relevant, I promise.

If you’ve been reading my newsletter for a while, you know one of my other obsessions, besides writing, is sewing. I’ve gotten into sewing my own clothes in the past six years or so, and I love it so much.

I am still learning. I am learning in terms of knowing how to do specific sewing techniques, and also in terms of what I even want to sew. Sewing is having a bit of a boom right now, and there are literally thousands of patterns to choose from. Some of them are an easy no—I hate wearing turtlenecks, so I’m not going to sew one. I’m not going to make something backless. I don’t live a backless-garment life.

But other times, it’s harder to know. There are a lot of patterns with statement sleeves, for instance. I saw Poor Things.

Emma Stone in *Poor Things* (costume design by Holly Waddington); the Freya pattern by Veronica Tucker; the Harmonic pattern from Pattern Fantastique

Giant sleeves are fun! They are also an interesting challenge to sew. But I hate wearing them. They look so cute on other people, but if there is a puff or a flounce or a lantern shape to my sleeve, I resent it all day long.

I kept both of these for about 12 hours before donating them. (It’s the Billy pattern by Notches, if you sew and love sleeves like this.)

This sleeve has voice, but it’s not my voice.

I had to take a lot of time sewing some of these up to understand this.

Part of the fun of sewing your own clothes is that you can make one-of-a-kind garments that fit your unique body. The vastness of that prospect can be overwhelming. I can make patchwork floral-and-striped pants that fit me perfectly, but do I want to? (Maybe!) Once you see all of the possibilities, you sort of tip forward off a cliff into a swirling tornado of fabric and patterns. Anything is possible. It just takes time.

And so it is with writing. Once you’ve gone through the initial beginner stages of acquiring some writing skills, you are suddenly awash in possibility. I could write about an aardvark who pilots a spaceship looking for love! I could invent my own dialect and have the people of a mysterious mountain town speak it, confusing visitors! What if I wrote Goodnight Moon meets Die Hard?

The truth is, you might spend months writing a story that, in the end, doesn't feel like you. I once wrote an entire novel about a secret world underneath a puddle, where only kids lived. There were dreams, boxing, glitter, and a main character grieving after the loss of his parents to addiction. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t me. I was copying someone else’s voice, and, like any writing, was worthwhile as far as a learning experience, but for me it was like statement sleeves—copying someone else’s style (in this case, Jerry Spinelli’s Hokey Pokey).

The trick is to play around with writing different voices until you know when one feels right. Some will be right for one story and not the other, and some will be right for another writer but not you.

You can even play around with a seemingly incongruous voice. Write a first day of school story in the voice of a hardboiled private investigator. Write a story about a kid making friends, in the voice of an Elizabethan letter writer. Write a story about a new sibling, in the voice of a 1950s how-to manual. Some of these will be over the top, but you can see what you like and what feels like you, and tone down (or turn up!) the voice as necessary.

Metafiction told in a classic midcentury semi-condescending storybook voice.

The thing to avoid is having no voice at all in a story. This usually happens when you get an idea for a plot, and you write it out, getting all of the elements of the story down. The plot is good. You can imagine how cute the characters will be when they’re illustrated (if it’s a picture book). But something about it will bug you. There’s no voice. It’s flat. Even the best librarian would have trouble bringing this book alive at story time. You try to fix it by adding in an exclamation point or throwing in a word like “golly,” but it’s still flat.

In sewing terms, this is the flat fabric after it has been cut into pattern pieces, but before you’ve sewn anything together. You can see what it might be, but it's not anything yet. It’s just flat shapes.

Wait, Julie, I did all that work to write up this story, and now you’re saying if it doesn’t have voice, it’s not even a story yet? It’s just shapes?

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.

Writing up the plot is laying it out, and counts as work, but it’s not yet a manuscript that will be published. The good news is that you have already done a bunch of work. You’ve got the pieces. The other good news is that figuring out the voice and adding it in is a thrill. The story comes alive. It takes the shape it’s meant to.

But how, Julie? I’ve got you—here are my own techniques for adding voice to a story:

First of all, don’t start writing until you can hear the voice in your head. Take plenty of notes about how you want the story to be, free-write to your heart’s content, but don’t sit down and start writing the actual words to the story until you know what the voice will be.
Which Parks and Rec characters populate your story? Decide and revise accordingly. I promise you that, unless you’re directly ripping off dialog from the show, no one will realize your chicken sounds like Leslie Knope. It doesn’t have to be Parks and Rec, of course. Pick a TV show you know well, with strong characters who have very different voices from each other. Or sometimes there is a show like Succession that is built around the premise of characters who are similar to each other but different from us. I write books with contrasting characters, but you could go the Succession route too, as long as the voice is clear and strong.
Who is the ideal person to narrate the audiobook of your story? Rewrite it to make sure it all would sound correct (and amazing) in their voice.1
Your narrator is a voice, even if they’re not an actual character in your book. It can be fun to contrast the narrator’s voice with your characters. Make one enthusiastic and one deadpan and droll. It can be fun to have a character repeat what the narrator said, but adding their own voice. In Rick the Rock of Room 214, the narrator tells us how Rick (who lives on a nature finds shelf inside a classroom) has learned about outside rocks and all of the exciting things they do. That leads to this passage:
He is a rock, and a rock is made for adventure.
“I am made for adventure!” he says. “I am going outside!”
My editor and I went back and forth about this line. The narrator has just told us Rick is made for adventure. Is it worth the words to have Rick repeat it? I argued that it is. It is a funny read-aloud moment when Rick repeats the line, but in his own voice. Contrasting the narrator voice and Rick’s voice “amps up the voiciness,” if you will.
Start again from a blank page. It can be hard to add voice into your flat story. But if you have the bones of your story down, great. Print that out, and start again. You can refer to your draft for the story beats or any moments of voice that did make it in, but rewrite the whole thing, now with voice in mind.

Like so many things with writing2 you learn how to add voice into your work by taking the time and playing around with it. Ultimately, the voice in your story will be the voice in your head combined with the story’s voice. When you add in your own writer voice and the voice of the idea you came up with, you will have a book that only you could write.

Thoughts and Links

Happy Pride Month! Drench yourself in rainbows. If ever there was a June to loudly proclaim your support of LGBTQ+ family, friends, and neighbors, 2025 is it. I love you all and am so glad you’re in my life!
This essay isn’t the first time I’ve talked about choosing your audiobook narrator and which Parks and Rec characters are in your book as a way to breathe some life into your writing. Here is an essay about how to add more layers into your story.
Amanda Guinzburg asked Chat GPT which of her essays she should query to an agent, and “What ultimately transpired is the closest thing to a personal episode of Black Mirror I hope to experience in this lifetime.” Her account of their exchange, when it takes a turn, literally made me gasp. What even. Read this. And then don’t ever ask Chat GPT anything.
Relatedly, Ben Greene quoted someone saying “why would I be bothered to read something you couldn’t be bothered to write?” and I’m thinking about that a lot.
Why not play some Joy Bingo? I’d argue that the construction of the bingo board might be more than enough joy all by itself.
Did you find a baby bird? Here is a chart from Rosemary Mosco about what to do.

Books I read recently and loved

Disclosure: book links in this newsletter are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, a site which supports independent bookshops.

Someone told E. B. Goodale about The Writer (a picture book by Davide Calì and Monica Barengo), and she inter-library-loaned it based on the cover. Then she told me about it, and I did the same. I’m tempted to tell you what it’s about, because it’s hilariously relevant to my own daily schedule, but I don’t need to. All I need to tell you to do is go look at the cover. You’ll order it too.
Jess Hannigan’s Spider in the Well is so incredible, I was a little nervous to pick up her second book, The Bear Out There. Silly me. I shouldn’t have been. This one is even better. If you are in any capacity to lead a read-aloud for five- and six-year-olds, get this immediately.
I have tried for three summers to read The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, but it is so comforting and so cozy, that it put me right to sleep (in the best way). This was the summer I finally finished it. You’ve probably all read it already, but if you haven’t, go get it now and read it before the end of August. It is the mood of an ideal summer, despite touching on grief and aging.