THE VOICE in Creative Writing

Image by Hrayr Movsisyan from Pixabay

Irene Cooper | February 1, 2026

What We Talk About When We Talk About Voice

The Voice—the reality competition that brought us Adam Levine, CeeLo Green, Christina Aguilera, and Blake Shelton (with his Big Gulp) in big red swivel chairs— has a straightforward agenda: to choose and coach a talented singer to victory, to be The Voice of that season. But let’s be real, a competition amongst talented people—while entertaining—is a little arbitrary. They’re all good singers. The implication is that one voice in particular stands apart from the rest.

That’s fine, maybe, for a television show (about actual singing), but we’re writers, and while we might not be in direct competition with our peers to out-voice them, we do want our work to be distinctly and recognizably ours. We want to imbue each of our characters with a unique and compelling voice. As writers, we’ve heard the concept of voice bandied about. Sometimes it refers to an author’s voice; other times it relates to the voice of a specific character. So, what are we talking about—as we will this coming class at The Forge—when we talk about voice in creative writing?

Arguably, voice is one of the more elusive and pitchy of literary qualities. You know it when you hear it (or read it). Many readers have a favorite author or two, and that preference may well be due to that author’s particular voice—think Dostoevsky, Octavia Butler, Elmore Leonard, Ottessa Moshfeh, James Baldwin, George Sauders. Arthur Conan Doyle. Larry McMurtry. Terry Pratchett. Sally Rooney. So many fabulous voices, so wide a variety of writing styles and genres.

Character Voice & Narrative Voice

Maybe it’s a character that’s unforgettable; Harper Lee didn’t write a lot of books, but she created and gave voice to Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird. Shakespeare wrote a ton, yet Hamlet is unlike any other of his characters.

I might argue that character voice is built and stands (or sings)—after its ideation, after its moment of writerly invention—on attention to craft: the linguistic, physical, psychological, and social specificities that make this character sound and act the way they do. You are in complete control over how your character presents (even if you’re not entirely sure, at all times, what they’re going to do).

Narrative voice, in its simplest definition, is point of view—first person, second person, third person omniscient, and third person close, to name several of the major players. How close your narrator is to the story affects the narrative voice—first person narration is super close-up, limited to a single (often questionably reliable) perspective. A narrator in third person omniscient can see everything, but from a distance. The former tends to be more intimate (or claustrophobic); the latter can feel cooler in tone. Narrative voice is another decision the writer has the power to make, and with which they can experiment.

Authorial Voice. That’s You.

Authorial voice can be a bit of a mystery. If you write, you’ve got one. It develops with practice. Lots of practice. George Saunders has admitted he spent many years trying to write like famous authors of the twentieth century canon, only to fail miserably. It wasn’t until he was messing around with short fragments that bloomed from his particular fascinations and diction that his personal brand of weird and wonderful was revealed to him. He then built on that revelation to produce a body of work that is singular to him.

As for competition, leave that to the reality shows. My favorite vocal artists range from the dudes who chant Gregorian hymns to Billie Holliday to Antonio Carlos Jobim to

Sinead O’Connor to Erykah Badu and many, many more—no two alike, each one unforgettable. Put in the work. Be unforgettable.

Ready to light a fire under your writing? Get in touch for a chat to see if The Forge is a fit.

Finishing Lines: completing work by the force of your will

by Ellen Santasiero | January 2, 2026

When I arrived at graduate school, the director of my MFA program bid us new students to file into an old-fashion classroom with tiered seating; the seats were the wooden ones with that paddle-shaped desk thing issuing from the right side. Outside the windows, the wind spun snow against a navy sky while our take-no-prisoners director chalked on the blackboard, “Always Be Closing.” The phrase comes from a scene in David Mamet’s film Glengarry Glen Ross, where boss Alec Baldwin verbally abuses his real estate agents for their dismal sales. Our director was trying to scare us straight, especially those of us unable to finish the writing we started.

“Always Be Closing,” commanded blue-eyed Baldwin, and so did our director who had either rued his own unfinished works, or who anticipated how to justify the value of the MFA program before a fusty Board of Directors and whose case would more favorably fly if he showed that his graduates could in fact “close,” i.e. publish. For there can be no publication until a piece is finished, at least to a certain degree.

I, for one, was busted. I had much to learn and improve on, but finishing my pieces probably topped the list.

In a recent Forge class, we discussed “Always Be Closing,” and some strategies that help writers finish. One was to write a “hermit crab” piece in which the writer fits their story, or content, into a pre-existing non-literary form such as a resume, sermon, or recipe. The idea is that the pre-existing form is already finished; you just follow its contours by pouring your content into it. Think ribbons of cold cake batter unfurling into a Bundt pan. Take it out of the oven, and voila! you have a finished piece!

The resulting draft may not be felicitous, it may not be edit-ready, but the exercise gives the writer a feel for an ending, a sense of how a piece might finally turn and lay down to rest.

Other ways to learn how to finish are less prescriptive. My esteemed Forge colleague Irene Cooper asks her students, “When can, or does, process include product?” which is a wonderful head fake. The question assumes that process is the main thing going on at the writer’s desk (which it is) and that product, or publication, might be an afterthought. Ha ha.

I tried a less prescriptive technique recently after I attended a webinar by a local literary luminary (yes, we Forge instructors continue to take classes ourselves) who urged us to “Write With Intention.” This means to choose a home for your writing (a publication you like), write to that place’s specifications, and commit to a deadline for submission.

(Why, you might be thinking, such an emphasis on publication? To that, I say, why not? Many writers want to wield this type of currency in the literary world. Besides, even the rejections—which will come—signals to your writer’s soul that you are serious about this business.)

After listening to the local luminary, I pulled out an essay I’d been picking at for a couple of years, one that I’d actually wanted to appear in an online journal I admired. This journal publishes personal essays that discuss works of art and works of literature in conversation with one other, a subject that has long fascinated me. My essay about a contemporary photograph and an early twentieth century novel, for which I had already inked many, many paragraphs, was about time and rocks and, ultimately, my divorce. After many drafts, I still could not figure out how to end the piece.

Newly energized, I checked the journal’s web site: the next deadline was in four months. Over the ensuing weeks, I settled on the one thing I wanted to say in the piece, made some more revisions, and wrote a good-enough conclusion. It was mid-November, the sky a dark berry, and the stars were just coming out when I hit send. One month and two days later, I received an email acceptance.

This story has everything to do with figuring out what I really wanted to say, revision, persistence, and letting go. But today, it’s also about committing to “Writing With Intention,” which included a deadline. I simply promised myself that I would submit it on that date, and that meant, to the best of my ability, I would make the piece turn and lay it down to rest.

Dipping a Toe into Workshopping

by Mike Cooper

We’re finishing up the generative phase of The Forge 2025-26. Our Smithys are freewriting to music, then organizing and revising and sharing with their peers for feedback and revision. We’ve given each other some feedback so far, especially in our discussions on the Discord channels, and now we’ll dip our toes into the process of workshopping.

And why workshop?

Hemingway said, “The only writing is rewriting.”

John Updike said, “Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.”

E.B. White said, “The best writing is rewriting.”

Dorothy Parker said, “I would write a book or a short story, at least three times—once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.”

Roald Dahl said, “Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.”

Workshopping is an important step in the rewriting/revising/editing process. We generally know what we mean when we write something down. We understand all the thoughts and feelings that our characters have because we are who we are—we project all our life experiences onto the page, whether we fully understand them or not. We know what it felt like when Aunt Marge squoze our faces into her ample breasts at Thanksgiving, and that later we would be an accomplice in getting Auntie Marge a little more of the brown liquid from the bottle with the picture of the turkey on the front—which smelled a lot like her perfume—and that it would be “our little secret,” and how we were thrilled and frightened by “breaking the rules” and how our illicit collusion made us feel “grown up.” But if we just say, “I/he/she/they got Aunt Marge some more bourbon,” our reader doesn’t get the full nuance of the moment—and how it has/will affect our character’s thoughts and decisions.

So our readers are there to give us feedback. Feedback is saying, “This is what I see. Is that what you meant?” And we either say “Yes” or “Sort of” or “No, not at all,” and we go back to the page to clarify our intention.

Another great aspect of workshopping is that we get to apply our critical analysis skills to other people’s work. And in doing that, we can’t help but compare it to our own work. We therefore learn to avoid areas that we find don’t work so well in our peers’ writing, and to apply the things that we think do work well to our own work.