A few months ago, I was reading submissions from two writers who were telling very similar stories. Both had written literary fiction set in small towns. Both featured a woman returning home after years away. Both dealt with family secrets and the weight of the past. The plots were structurally similar, the themes almost identical. And yet one manuscript felt alive on the page, electric with personality and surprise, while the other felt like competent furniture, well-built but inert. The difference was voice.

Voice is the most important quality in writing and the hardest to define. I’ve been in publishing for over a decade, and I still struggle to explain what I mean when I say a writer has a strong voice. It’s easier to identify its absence than its presence. When voice is missing, the prose feels generic, like it could have been written by anyone. When voice is present, the prose feels specific, like it could only have been written by this particular person. But what, exactly, makes it feel that way?

Let me start by saying what voice is not, because I think there are some common misconceptions. Voice is not style. Style is a component of voice, but they’re not the same thing. A writer can have a polished, elegant style and still lack voice. Style is about technique: sentence structure, word choice, rhythm, the mechanical choices a writer makes at the prose level. Voice is about something behind the technique, the personality, the worldview, the specific way a writer sees and processes reality. You can teach style. You can’t really teach voice.

Voice is also not tone. Tone is the emotional register of a piece of writing: funny, somber, angry, wistful. A writer can shift tones from book to book or even within a single work. But their voice remains consistent. Joan Didion writing about grief sounds different in tone from Joan Didion writing about California, but the voice is unmistakably the same: precise, slightly detached, analytical, with an undertow of unease. The tone changes. The voice persists.

Voice is not quirkiness, either. This is a trap that a lot of young writers fall into. They think that having a distinctive voice means writing in an unusual way: sentence fragments, invented words, experimental punctuation, self-conscious asides. Sometimes these techniques are part of a genuine voice. More often, they’re affectations layered on top of a voice that hasn’t developed yet. The quirkiness is a disguise, and when you strip it away, the writing underneath is unremarkable. Real voice doesn’t need tricks. It just needs to be itself, which is simultaneously the simplest and most difficult thing in writing.

So what is voice? Here’s my best attempt at a definition, knowing that any definition will be incomplete. Voice is the evidence of a mind at work on the page. It’s the accumulation of choices, conscious and unconscious, that reveal how a writer thinks, what they notice, what they find funny or sad or strange, how they understand the relationship between words and the things those words point at. Voice is the writer’s fingerprint. It’s what makes you read a sentence and think, “Nobody else would have written it exactly this way.”

I’ll give some examples, drawn from writers I admire, to try to make this concrete. When I read Toni Morrison, the voice is lush and rhythmic, drawing on oral storytelling traditions, with a moral authority that feels ancient. When I read George Orwell, the voice is stripped-down, direct, almost confrontational in its clarity, like someone who refuses to let you look away. When I read Lorrie Moore, the voice is funny and sharp, with a wit that masks profound sadness, the kind of writer who makes you laugh and then realize a beat later that you’re heartbroken. These writers don’t sound alike at all. What they share is that each has a voice so distinctive that you could identify their work from a single paragraph.

Voice comes from, I think, several sources. The first is reading. Every writer’s voice is shaped by the voices they’ve absorbed. You can hear, in a writer’s prose, the echoes of everything they’ve read. This is not the same as imitation. It’s more like the way a musician’s sound is shaped by the music they grew up listening to. The influence is deep and diffuse, not a matter of copying specific techniques but of internalizing certain rhythms, certain attitudes toward language, certain ways of constructing a sentence or a scene. The writers who read widely tend to have richer, more complex voices than the writers who read narrowly, because they’ve absorbed more raw material.

The second source is life experience. A writer who has done things, lived in different places, worked different jobs, interacted with different kinds of people, will have a voice that carries the texture of that experience. This doesn’t mean you have to live an extraordinary life to have a good voice. It means you have to be paying attention to the life you’re living. The specificity that makes voice come alive on the page comes from noticed details: the way a particular building smells, the sound a specific machine makes, the precise expression on someone’s face when they’re trying not to cry. A writer who notices these things and stores them and uses them will have a more interesting voice than a writer who deals in generalities.

The third source is opinions. This might sound odd, but I think having strong opinions is directly related to having a strong voice. A writer who takes a stand, who has a point of view about the world, who is willing to say “this is how I see it” rather than hedging into bland neutrality, will almost always have a more compelling voice than a writer who tries to be balanced and fair. I’m not talking about political opinions necessarily, though those can be part of it. I’m talking about opinions about everything: food, weather, architecture, the way people talk, the way institutions work, the proper way to make coffee. Opinionated writers are interesting writers. Their voices have edges, and edges are what make prose memorable.

The fourth source, and this is the one that’s hardest to talk about, is selfhood. Voice is, ultimately, an expression of who you are. Not who you think you should be, not who you’re trying to impress, not the version of yourself that shows up at dinner parties, but the real, unguarded, slightly messy version that exists when nobody’s watching. Finding your voice as a writer is, to a significant extent, finding yourself. This is why voice often emerges slowly, over years and many drafts, and why it can’t be rushed. You have to write a lot of bad prose, a lot of imitative prose, a lot of prose that sounds like someone else, before you burn through all the pretenses and arrive at something that’s genuinely yours.

I see this process all the time in the submissions I read. A young writer submits a manuscript that’s technically skilled but voiceless. The sentences are clean, the plot is structured, the dialogue is competent. Everything works, and nothing sings. Three years later, the same writer submits something new, and it’s completely different. It’s rough in places, less polished, but it has a pulse. The writer has stopped trying to write like a “good writer” and has started writing like themselves. That transition, from competence to authenticity, is where voice lives.

As an editor, my relationship with voice is complicated. I can recognize it instantly. I can tell, within a page, whether a manuscript has voice or doesn’t. But I can’t create it. I can help a writer refine their voice, sharpen it, remove the things that are obscuring it. I can point to passages where the voice is strongest and encourage the writer to lean into those qualities. I can identify moments where the writer is slipping into someone else’s voice, usually a writer they admire, and gently redirect them. But the voice itself has to come from the writer. It’s the one thing I can’t supply.

This is why voice is the first thing I look for when I read a submission, before plot, before character, before theme. A manuscript with a strong voice and a weak plot can be fixed. A manuscript with a brilliant plot and no voice is dead on arrival. I’ve turned down technically excellent manuscripts because they lacked voice, and I’ve championed rough, imperfect manuscripts because the voice was undeniable. Every editor I know has a version of this story. We’re all, in the end, listening for that signal in the noise: the sound of someone saying something only they could say.

I want to address something that comes up often in conversations about voice: the concern that voice can be faked or manufactured. Especially now, with AI writing tools that can generate text in different “styles,” there’s a worry that voice is just a collection of tics that can be assembled mechanically. I understand the concern, but I think it misunderstands what voice actually is. A language model can mimic patterns, sentence lengths, vocabulary ranges, syntactic habits. What it can’t do is have a relationship with the world. It can’t have opinions born from experience. It can’t notice the specific detail that a human notices because of where they’ve been and what they’ve lived through. The surface features of voice can be copied. The thing underneath them can’t.

This is also, by the way, why voice is so hard to maintain over the course of a career. A writer’s first book often has the strongest, most natural voice, because they’re not yet self-conscious about it. They haven’t read reviews of their work that identify their stylistic habits. They haven’t been compared to other writers. They’re just writing the way they write. After the first book, things get complicated. Some writers become more polished but less distinctive. They sand off the rough edges that made their voice interesting. Others become so attached to their own mannerisms that the voice calcifies into a caricature. The writers who sustain a living voice over many books are the ones who keep growing, keep reading, keep being surprised by the world. Their voice evolves because they evolve.

For writers trying to develop their voice, my best advice is: write a lot and read a lot, and don’t be in a hurry. Your voice will emerge on its own schedule, and there’s nothing you can do to speed it up. Write badly on purpose sometimes. Write about things that embarrass you. Write without thinking about the audience. Write the sentence that scares you. Your voice lives in the places you’ve been avoiding, the subjects that feel too personal, the opinions that feel too strong, the observations that feel too small. Go there. That’s where the interesting writing is.

I want to say one more thing about voice, which is that it matters beyond literature. Voice is what separates interesting communication from boring communication in every context: journalism, criticism, business writing, personal essays, even email. We live in an era of increasingly homogeneous prose. Corporate voice, internet voice, social media voice, they all tend toward the same breezy, flattened register, stripped of personality and specificity. Against this backdrop, a genuine individual voice is startling. It wakes people up. It makes them pay attention. Whether you’re writing a novel or a newsletter, a memoir or a marketing plan, your voice is the thing that makes people want to read what you have to say.

When we publish a book at ScrollWorks, the first question we ask is: does this writer have something to say that only they can say? It’s not about the plot or the subject or the genre. It’s about the voice. Is there a person behind this prose who is thinking and feeling and noticing the world in a way that’s unmistakably their own? If the answer is yes, we want to publish that book. If the answer is no, no amount of technical skill will change our mind. Voice is the thing. Everything else follows from it.

And as a reader, the same principle applies. The books that stay with you, the ones you recommend and reread and think about years later, are almost always the ones with the strongest voices. The plot fades. The characters blur. But the voice, that particular way of seeing and saying, that stays. It becomes part of how you think. It changes, however slightly, the way you experience the world. That’s what a real voice does. It doesn’t just tell you a story. It gives you a new pair of eyes.