What is Voice?

My simple answer to this is that voice is the mistakes that you make on purpose. When you have run-on sentences, or fragments. When you don’t have subject/verb agreement or you use colloquial phrases or you use the wrong word for an effect—that’s voice. Voice is when you deliberately choose to annoy your copyeditor and when your mother, who is an English teacher, will frown at you and correct your sentences over and over again, trying to be helpful.

But voice is more than just sentence choice. It’s also the choice of the story you tell, the characters who inhabit your story, the metaphors you use, the feeling that your reader gets when opening the book. Voice is all the other authors that you have read who come through when you make allusions. Voice is you believing that you have the most important story in the world to tell. Voice is when you’ve read everybody else and you know why they are the greatest writers in the world, and you still are arrogant enough to think that you matter even more, that your story is the story that people should be reading today.