Okay, voice. How do you do that?

Someone asked me a followup question about last Friday’s post called What I learned reading debut novels, in which I talked about an exercise Miss Snark gave us: spend a year (or a few months, I guess) reading recent debut novels.

I did that, and the only thing they had in common (as far as I could tell) was a strong voice.

There’s more about it at the far end of that link above.

Anyway, someone asked me the question in the subject header, and I surprised myself by having a ready answer. This has been on my mind a lot lately, but I only just then realized what I’d learned. And it’s pretty simple:

Ask yourself how the point of view character and/or the narrator feels about the events of the book, and reflect that in the text in an interesting way.

That’s how I do it, anyway.