What Everybody is Looking For: Crafting Unique Voices

Discussion notes

I’ve grouped the conversation by theme. What people said is paraphrased, names are left out, and personal stories are kept general.

Specificity and universality

We talked about how writing rooted in one particular life can reach readers whose lives are very different.

An audience member described writing a mother character grounded in a specific family and cultural context. Readers from other backgrounds nevertheless recognized their own mothers in her. The specificity gave readers something concrete through which to recognize a relationship or emotional pattern.

Another example concerned readers expecting characters living under oppressive conditions to be defined by suffering. Their surprise at encountering happiness revealed how expectations can narrow the lives readers imagine for others. Oppression remained part of the characters’ circumstances, but the story focused elsewhere. Pleasure, intimacy, humour, and ordinary life also belonged to those characters.

You can’t reliably write for a universal audience. What you can do is render a particular experience fully and leave room for readers to bring their own knowledge and experiences to it.

Fiction, judgment, and instruction

One approach we heard about was to open a door, show readers what’s inside, and let them make up their own minds.

This raised questions about how strongly a writer should direct interpretation. Characters can become less convincing when they exist primarily to teach a lesson, demonstrate a position, or deliver the author’s judgment.

We kept coming back to understanding characters on their own terms. A writer’s values may inform the work without determining everything a character thinks or does.

Contradiction and the “messy middle”

An audience question asked whether a character holding opposing feelings or beliefs creates particular dramatic power.

The answers came back to how ordinary these contradictions are. Someone can enjoy an event while worrying about something else. A person can care for another person and resent them. Conflicting emotions often coexist without a clean resolution.

Allowing these tensions onto the page can make characters more convincing. The same principle applies to moral complexity: presenting a villain only as monstrous can limit the character, while acknowledging mixed motives and vulnerabilities can deepen understanding.

“The messy middle” became our shorthand for human experience. Several people tied the value of art to the recognition readers feel when they meet characters struggling with contradictions they know themselves.

Understanding characters without liking them

The panel drew a line between understanding a character and approving of them.

Writers may need to inhabit people whose actions or beliefs they dislike. Convincing characterization requires attention to the reasons those people understand themselves as they do.

That led us to ask whether the author and the character should be travelling in the same direction. A character can diverge from the writer’s beliefs while remaining part of a work shaped by the writer’s concerns and aesthetic choices.

The practical question becomes whether the character’s actions arise convincingly from their experience, rather than whether those actions express the author’s position.

Authorial style and character voice

We separated a writer’s recognizable style from the voices of individual characters.

Authorial style might include:

• Sentence length, rhythm, and syntax.
• Approaches to dialogue and punctuation.
• Patterns of scene construction.
• Recurring subjects, questions, or preoccupations.

Character voice involves a particular consciousness: what someone notices, how they interpret events, what they want, and what they cannot readily acknowledge.

A recognizable authorial style can accommodate characters with substantially different voices. The challenge is to inhabit those characters fully enough that they retain their own perceptions and motives.

One person suggested that too much authorial explanation can be a sign the writer hasn’t yet gone deep enough into the character’s experience.

Listening to characters

Several people talked about what goes wrong when a writer forces a character toward a predetermined outcome.

A stalled scene may indicate a mismatch between the writer’s intended destination and what the character would plausibly do. One suggestion was to reconsider the character’s needs and motives before pushing the plot forward.

Practical approaches included writing letters to characters and journalling in their voices. These exercises can help a writer investigate a character beyond the immediate requirements of a scene.

We talked about these as ways to understand a character better and find out what’s possible.

What early writing reveals

Asked what their voices sounded like before they sounded like themselves, people described different starting points.

One answer was fear. Early writing felt guarded, stiff, and overly controlled, shaped by concern about judgment and uncertainty about what the writer was entitled to say.

Another was learning to trust yourself. Growing confidence meant becoming better able to judge whether a piece had achieved its intention, even without knowing whether other people would like it.

A third went back to oral storytelling. Familiar stories could be retold with new flourishes, embellishments, and rhythms. Moving into written fiction brought additional expectations about structure and completion. A vivid scene might satisfy its writer while leaving a reader asking what happened next.

Developing voice involved both continued practice and a clearer understanding of what each piece needed.

Confidence, experimentation, and strangeness

Several people linked confidence with a greater willingness to experiment.

Trusting personal judgment allowed writers to take more risks, follow unusual impulses, and become less restrained by imagined expectations.

A brief conversation about AI led to an argument for embracing more of your own eccentricity: distinctive choices, unusual associations, and a willingness to get stranger on the page.

Voice can keep developing across a writing life.

Personal experience and fictional distance

We looked at how personal material gets into fiction, sometimes before the writer fully understands what it means.

One example concerned a fictional character whose difficulties gradually prompted the writer to recognize something in their own life. The character remained a distinct creation, but the writing became an early form of reckoning.

That material could be approached more directly in memoir years later. The earlier fiction still mattered as the work the writer could make at that particular time.

This complicated the separation between writer and character. Personal experience can inform fiction without making the character a direct representation of the author.

Narrative distance and emotional readiness

We talked about when emotional closeness helps the writing and when it makes the work harder to shape.

One example involved an early first-person draft dominated by anger. Writing it allowed the anger to be expressed, but a later version required more distance so that the experience could become a story a reader could enter.

An audience response questioned whether separation between the writer and the person who experienced an event is always desirable. Some of the most powerful material may be precisely what feels difficult or exposing to write.

Both can be true. Emotional intensity can give writing force, while some material may require more time before the writer can make the necessary narrative decisions.

Putting work aside is a legitimate choice when the experience is still too immediate. The question is whether you’re ready to work with the material, and the emotion can stay in it.

Truth, aspiration, and hope

An audience question asked how fiction balances showing the world as it is with imagining what it could become.

The answers depended on the writer and the project.

One approach involved writing about trauma while leaving some possibility of hope. A hopeful ending did not have to resolve the characters’ problems. It might suggest that change or repair remained possible beyond the story’s immediate conclusion.

Another approach emphasized witnessing. A story could ask readers to look closely at something and continue thinking about it after the book ended.

We also talked about how to bring readers into traumatic material without leaving them wholly inside it. This could involve showing other dimensions of a life, asking what might happen next, or creating space for a different possibility.

The writer did not necessarily need to provide a solution.

Changing voice to serve the story

Examples of revision showed how a change in voice can alter a reader’s access to a character.

One writer described an unlikeable character whose interior voice initially relied heavily on anger and contempt. Revising toward insecurity and concern about his place in the world made him more understandable while retaining the qualities necessary to the story.

Other examples involved changing narrative perspective to create more distance or reveal aspects of a situation that were difficult to show from the original viewpoint.

Voice is something you can reconsider during revision, along with structure, perspective and characterization.

Finding where the story begins

One participant described discovering that a manuscript’s voice and energy did not properly arrive until several chapters into the draft.

The earlier chapters had helped the writer reach the story, but that did not guarantee they belonged in the finished work.

Recognizing a tendency to warm up on the page made revision less personal. Early material could be useful to the writing process and still be removed.

Seeing that helps you become less protective of every passage and pay more attention to where the work actually gains momentum.

Trusted readers and editorial judgment

A long-standing relationship with a trusted reader can support direct, even blunt, feedback. Familiarity with a writer’s work may make a simple recommendation to cut a passage useful and credible.

We also talked about understanding a draft before sharing it. Revision can help a writer distinguish between feedback that identifies a problem and feedback that conflicts with an intentional choice.

Sometimes a suggested cut is right. Sometimes the writer has a clear reason to retain the passage and can explain what it contributes.

Editing while drafting

The panel took up whether editing as you draft gets in the way of discovering voice.

One approach involved working slowly and extensively on each page before moving forward. Although drafting took a long time, much of the revision occurred during that process.

Another involved producing a rapid exploratory draft and undertaking substantial revision afterward.

Both can work. You might reach a finished manuscript in about the same time and just distribute the work differently.

Revising as the writing develops can help some writers continue. For others, it can delay progress. The useful question is whether your process helps you finish the work and make it stronger.

Planning and exploratory writing

Plotting versus discovering a story as you write got a range of answers too.

Some writers needed to follow a sentence, scene, or character without knowing the eventual structure. Others found that planning made it easier to begin a writing session with a clear sense of the scene ahead.

Several described combining the approaches. Exploratory writing generated material; planning became useful once the project’s concerns and possibilities were clearer.

This could involve deciding later whether the work needed a linear sequence, a different arrangement of scenes, or another form altogether.

An outline could reduce uncertainty about what to write next without necessarily making the writing itself fast.

Audiobooks and performed voice

A question about audiobooks introduced the literal voice through which a listener encounters a book.

One example involved an author being invited to listen to potential narrators and help choose the reader. The author also supplied recordings of names and places to guide pronunciation.

We talked about how much the narrator interprets. Timing, emphasis, pronunciation, and delivery shape the listener’s experience of the language.

Authors also have different levels of involvement in audiobook production, and not everyone gets to choose a narrator or offer guidance.