Voice - do you have it?

So tell me, how many of you have agonized, like me, about Voice—that elusive quality agents and editors wax poetic about? I sure did. I worried like crazy wondering if I possessed that mysterious somethin’. Would my pages elicit the same oohs and aahs? What if they didn’t? Was it something I could learn, develop over time? But how could I if I didn’t even know what it was?

It took the charming LEE CHILD to explain the mystery of it all. And I’d like to share some of his wisdom with you—paraphrasing with a dash of my wacky brand of humor .

Lee Child took me all the way back seven million years ago: we’re grunting—zero articulation, zero words, zero book deal. Fast-forward half a million years and—drumroll—we’re stringing sentences together. Sort of. Then, maybe around hundred thousand years ago comes this giant leap: we go from non-fictional reporting (“I saw a mammoth”) to fiction storytelling (“The mammoth was this big, it chased me, and then a huge eagle saved me, thank you very much”). Boom. Storytelling was born.

Then sixty to seventy thousand years ago, music made its grand entrance. And I mean not just humming, but some cave guy rocking out on a hollow bone with drilled finger stops (yeah, the original Neanderthal flute solo). Cave paintings came a tad later, around fifty to sixty thousand years ago (Yep, the original graphic novels minus the speech bubbles). Both required tech—tools, pigments, primitive brushes. But stories? Stories needed nothing but a voice and a captive audience. Which makes storytelling possibly a hundred thousand years old.

And boy, did those cavemen storytellers bring their A-game. Imagine the #1 bestseller of the day: the cave dude or dudette perched on their stone stool around the fire with a rapt audience of maybe twenty or thirty, mesmerized by their voice, and the progress of the story. And believe me, the voice had to be compelling—warm, intimate, irresistible! Now picture the poor dude who was not doing so great on the bestseller list in the next cave over: stumbling through his story, forgetting character names, his three listeners all fidgety and restless, pretending they left something on the fire. Worse case scenario: ready to club him on the head . Those early Goodreads reviews were brutal.

The point being, voice was literally that: a human voice. It had to pull people in, keep them waiting for the next word, the next twist. If you think about it, when you read words on a page today, you’re not just scanning for meaning—you’re hearing a voice in your head. We subliminally process words into sound first, then meaning. It’s as if the page conjures up a spectral storyteller who whispers the tale. That inner narrator is your built-in Audible app, and it connects you straight back to that hundred-thousand-year-old campfire tradition. Which is why voice is everything.

Some people are just better at it. You know it when someone tells a story, or a joke—you want them to keep talking. Remember, the voice that you have is the voice that shows up in your text. And the best way to test it is to read your stuff out loud. Not Broadway style with jazz hands. Mumbling or muttering works just fine. It immediately identifies bad rhythms, poor word choices, awkward phrasing, or dialogue that sounds like two robots on a bad date. The voice takes us back into the back of the brain, and through millennia, where this was the only way we consumed story.

Now picture yourself back in that cave: sandy floor, fire flickering, a storyteller holding court. You can’t flip back ten pages if you forget who’s who. You can’t raise your hand and ask, “Wait—who’s Grooba Dooba again?” That’s why oral stories had built-in reminders. It’s not a bad thing. As writers, we need to do the same thing. Don’t expect your reader to remember a detail from forty pages ago. Help them out. It’s basically a conspiracy between you and your reader: you do the heavy lifting; they get to coast along and have fun. The reader should feel like they’re stretched out in the backseat of a luxury car. They don’t need to know about the gears grinding or the suspension creaking—that’s our job to make the ride seamless.

So how do you “find” your voice? You already have one. It’s the same one you use when you gossip with a friend, or rant about the maniac who cut you off in traffic, or tell a joke. The only way to ruin it is to get all stiff and formal. Don’t “dress up” your words. Just talk. That’s your voice. Preserve it. Guard it. Don’t ruin it.

Because at the end of the day, voice is simple. Your readers are back on that cave floor, fire crackling, listening to you with rapt attention. Are they restless, wishing they were anywhere else? Or are they starstruck, glued to your every word, desperate for the next twist? If it's the latter, that’s voice.

Thank you, Lee Child, for teaching me this .

By Kitty Wright

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