As much as I love the rest of the holiday trappings—the tree, the weather, the roast beast—I might love the music more than any of them. I don’t practice the religious tradition I was brought up in, but you never lose things you were exposed to in your earliest years. The familiarity of pieces like the Hallelujah Chorus or Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella (my father’s favorite carol) carry waves of memory and emotion.

Last Saturday, Anne and I sat in the magnificent Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Portland and enjoyed what has become an annual tradition, the performance of Portland’s Choral ART Christmas concert. The voices, individual and massed inspired awe and started me thinking about voice.
For writers, voice is the elusive and unmistakable sound he or she brings to the prose. It’s composed of word choice, tone, how sentences and paragraphs are structured. It’s the sound of the writer’s consciousness coming through.

Voice is what gives readers confidence, so that when an author says “Call me Ishmael,” they come along
There are a couple ways of looking at voice: the authorial voice and the voices of the individual characters. Authorial voice is the overall inflection and intonation the writer brings to an entire piece. A strong authorial voice identifies a writer as clearly as the name on the cover of a book. No one, for example, would mistake Elmore Leonard’s authorial voice for anyone else’s, even though he didn’t write series characters.

In a good novel, each character has an individual voice, depending on their role in the story, their interactions with other characters, their actions and their thoughts. No one would confuse Chili Palmer’s voice in Get Shorty with Ray Barbone’s.

Voice is not necessarily pleasant or congenial. The narrator William Lee in William Burrough’s Junky, for example, is not someone you want to spend time with. But it is Burrough’s voice, clearly and consistently, and probably the best expression of him in prose.

An authentic voice can’t be faked. As with Christmas music, readers have an emotional response to voice. They also have sophisticated detectors for falsehood and authorial uncertainty. Voice is an expression of a writer’s authenticity, a way of sharing with the reader, who must be able to trust it, allow the writer to tell them the story. A superbly constructed story told in an inauthentic voice can fail. A clunky piece of writing with a thrilling and engaging voice has a better chance.

How do we develop voice? It’s in the work. Jazz has the concept of “woodshedding,” where you work out the techniques of your instrument in practice, either with your peers or on your own.

Finding your voice is a function of doing that work, writing the stories only you can write, inhabiting your characters and your plot as fully as possible. It takes time, patience, and love to give voice to your story. So get yourself back in the shed.