I don't do very many writing-craft posts...

(jeez, have I ever done a craft post?)

...but I'm participating in this mentorship program organized by the awesome Sacha Whalen, and I wrote a long email about voice to my mentee, Adam Veile, and he kindly gave me permission to repost parts of it here because I've always had trouble articulating what I mean by voice, and I managed to get closer this time.

Voice has to do with BELIEVING, which is, I think, the most crucial skill for a writer. You have to truly and completely believe in your characters, inhabit their headspace, take on their attitudes, see what they see, think the way they think. With belief comes voice.

And here's what I wrote to Adam (this all relevant to the close third person point-of-view he's using in his middle-grade novel):

Voice lies in the intersection of style and point-of-view, and is evident in the rhythm and the word choices. It's style informed by point-of-view. Using voice is a way of getting even closer to your character's experience, and it helps your reader get closer, too.

Voice partly means that what is seen is described in words the protagonist would feel comfortable using. Here's an example. Rusty is a 12 year old kid, so how would he describe the other kids in his class? As "pupils"? As "fellow students"? As "the other kids"? Probably that third one. A book that had an omniscient narrator might use "fellow students," and an intrusive narrator might say something clever, like, "the other little horrors in his class."

Voice also means, at least some of the time, using the rhythms your character might use when speaking, even if you're in the third person pov and not the first.

As you can see, voice as it applies to word choice and rhythm is tricky, but it's something you can tune your ear to 'hear.'

[Here's part of Adam's first paragraph, used with his permission]

Rusty Monroe drifted through a crowd of his 7th grade classmates. They followed a chubby tour guide with a plastic sheriff’s star pinned to his chest down the main street of Silver Strip, a Montana ghost town about an hour from New Buck Hills Middle School. Rusty gazed at the old houses with crooked wooden walls that lined the outskirts. Businesses along the street were semi-original, but now, with props staged inside and out, they felt like a movie set. The only thing that looked truly authentic to Rusty was a massive, brick-lined vault that stood in a pile of sandstone, the crumbled bank building’s remains. He briefly tuned in to what the tour guide was telling them...

The first two sentences here are an example of insufficient voice, because they sound like dry data from a more omniscient narrator, not the world as Rusty sees it and using words he might use. As the paragraph continues, would Rusty use the words "outskirts" or "semi-original" or "authentic" or "briefly"? If he were a smart cookie, he might, but those choices don't seem quite right for the character you've presented here. I could hear Rusty saying "really real" for "authentic" and "for a second" instead of "briefly."

Or here's an example from the bottom of page three: "...making it clear to Rusty that he expected a response." The diction here is a little formal. Better might be "...making it clear to Rusty that he wanted an answer." Do you see the difference there? It might seem like a minor thing, but those word choices are hugely important in maintaining the sense of voice across a whole book.

By way of illustrating this further, I've put the first page from my next book behind a cut tag. Unlike The Magic Thief books, which are in the first person, this one is in the close third. I've tried to point out [in brackets after each paragraph] examples of where voice is evident, so you can see the sort of thing I'm trying to describe. Also note here