Way back in the olden days, after my seventh book (
Embrace in Motion), my publisher decided it made sense for me to publish more often than once a year. But she didn’t want me competing with myself, so we decided on a pen name.
For me, this meant I could experiment under a new name, stretch genres and so on, without giving my existing readers whiplash. I wrote sci-fi romance, gothic romance, and romantasy (which was in existence already way back then), and I had a grand time doing so.
Readers figured out it was me with the first book. And that, my friends, is how I learned that I had developed a Voice.
Reading is How I First Learned to Write
I am not a traditionally trained writer. I don’t have an MFA, never did a writer’s workshop, haven’t ever felt the need for – or been able to relinquish control to – a writing group. (Control is also likely why the idea of using alpha, beta, epsilon, or omicron readers makes my skin crawl.)
I learned to write because I’m a sponge. I read thousands of books as a kid, teen, and young woman. Thousands. Good books, great books, bad books. So much white male canon – I crammed all the Humanities and English classes I could into a business administration degree. Not unexpectedly, what I thought possible in content for publication was limited to what I’d read, which had consequences.
I had to hold a lesbian fiction book in my hand to believe it existed. To wonder if maybe I could write that.
All that reading became an instinct. I used writer’s tools I sometimes had no names for. Foreshadowing, point-of-view, interior monologue, dialogue, and all the rest. It simply felt right. Because I had read books that didn’t use the tools well, sometimes I didn’t either. But I’d also read good books, and slowly – with the help of good editors – my ear could hear when a choice was a sour note, and not the music I was going for.
That’s why I adore the editing process. I learn every single time. I fix the sloppy stuff and try not to do it again so next time my editor can teach me another new thing.
Voice. Say What Now?
A specific thing I didn’t understand in the early years was Voice. As I said above, however, I learned that I’d developed one. Once I realized I had it, I began to see its power when it came to creating and animating characters. There is, naturally, a tight relationship between the writer’s Voice and that given to characters. Learning to modulate my Voice has made characters more distinct from each other and from characters in earlier works. It makes it easier to write characters who are not like me.
I’ve discovered other benefits too:
- As a tool that I consciously use, it shades many of the other tools, like narrative, tone, internal monologue, even exposition.
- I write plenty of words that aren’t my fiction – like this blog. My Voice is all over this post. It’s in my emails, my social media posts, speeches, and on and on. What you read here is me voicing me, with a lot of cuss words left out. Most of the time.
Ultimately, I feel that my Voice is my authenticity. I have worked for decades to continuously strengthen it. I’d like to think that I can now use Voice consciously and to much better purpose and power.
A reader will know that nobody but me likely wrote that character, but the character stands on their unique own: the words sound like my writing, but the character doesn’t talk or think like me.
Confused? Yeah, it took me a while too. But here’s the good part: when I finally worked out what Voice was and could be, my confidence in my own skills blossomed. And boy howdy y’all, confidence is the biggest hammer I have as I deal with the perpetual bad guest called Imposter Syndrome. More about that another time.
Voice is What Generative AI Can’t Get Right
Here it is, the year 2026, and to me it looks like the only thing AI can’t steal from a writer is our Voice. It tries. It really wants to. AI companies want us to believe it can.
The irony is that generative AI writing lacks a discernible Voice, even when it’s trying to mimic the Voice of a human. Instead, it arrives at a kind of hyperbolically bland version of whatever human it’s trying to copy. There’s no heartbeat of originality, no tweaking of idioms, no word play at all. It can also have an uncanny perfection – it’s just too much of what it’s trying to be.
What’s Generative AI?
It’s important here to note that I’m talking about generative AI. Generative AI takes what a Large Language Model (LLM) program can do with the recognition of text and speech and images, and churns out different arrangements of that data. Other forms of AI don’t have the ethical problems that Gen AI does, but I also have to mention that the data centers powering all AI use huge amounts of water and energy resources at a time when both are increasingly precious for our survival.
When I say that generative AI has ethical issues, I want to be clear about that: it is a theft machine. Gen AI was trained on words stolen by software engineers from every writer you’ve ever heard of, with deliberate intent to steal and not pay anyone but themselves. People who use generative AI to write books, or sell any form of art, are trying to profit from that theft.
AI companies desperately want us all to use gen AI to mask the magnitude of the crime. How can it be wrong if everyone’s using it, right? many many curse words
Readers and AI Accusations without Proof
This is a tangent. It’s become unfortunately common for readers who don’t care for a story to suggest that maybe AI wrote it. Writers with experience and newbies first time published are being blindsided by the accusation. Sometimes it’s a very bad joke. Sometimes it’s malicious. A reader can’t know if it’s true or not, not without proof.
What’s proof? Finding an AI prompt in a published work. The author admitting they use gen AI. That’s proof. I read lots of samples and sometimes have suspicions, but they’re not proof.
Readers, there’s nothing wrong with saying that any author’s book didn’t connect with you, had a plot hole, or poor editing. But don’t suggest that it wasn’t our own work. Don’t deny us the agency of our choices, even when they might be bad choices.
Please give me all the credit when you love my work, and give me all the credit when you don’t.
Gen AI Can’t Fake Let Alone Build A Writer’s Voice
Increasingly, I believe that using gen AI will prevent a newer writer from ever developing a Voice, and smother any writer’s real Voice by replacing it with an uninspired imitation. That’s in direct opposition to how a Voice is grown: through putting words out there, learning from successes and mistakes, and doing it again. And again. And again. You have to do the work, and AI doesn’t let you do the work.
The work is not just putting words down on paper. That’s about the only thing gen AI can do.
- AI can’t look at photos of the dark side of the moon and be awed.
- AI can’t get lost in Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”
- AI can’t be blown away by a book, a movie, a concert to the point of thinking about it for days afterward.
- AI can’t kiss its best friend for the first time and feel wonderful and terrified all at once.
- AI can’t be transported to another time and place remembering the best gelato in Italy, Thanksgiving pumpkin pie, or the sticky, enthusiastic hug of a toddler now all grown up.
- AI has no instinct, no history, no emotional discovery or dissonance, no lived reality to draw on.
Experience enlarges the universe of ideas I can draw on. Those ideas end up on paper with a stronger more-me-than-ever Voice.
Because, at least the way I do it, the living is the real work that creates the writing.
The Integrity of Doing the Work
I learned from a great editor many years ago that if I always do the best I can at that moment in time, my work has integrity. And I can own all my mistakes with the same truth as my successes. It’s my work. I’m learning. Next time it’ll be better.
I write ALL my words – good, garbage, mediocre, magnificent. No matter how a reader reacts to them, they’re still mine.
I’m looking at a couple million words in the rear view mirror, and every project has the same lifecycle.
I learn.
I write.
I learn.
I publish.
I learn.
I write.
I learn.
I publish.
I learn…
For me, that’s the whole deal of living a writer’s life. Living becomes the work, the work becomes the writing, and the writing being read is all the joy. Why would I let a machine have even the tiniest bit of that?
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