Finding Your Writer’s Voice by Thaisa Frank & Dorothy Wall

Frank, Thaisa, and Dorothy Wall. Finding Your Writer’s Voice: A Guide to Creative Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

Thaisa Frank and Dorothy wall take an organic view of writing. It begins with the voice.

Voice is not something abstract. They mean a person’s actual, natural voice. It is our native instrument of communication and expression. Like a musical instrument or a singer’s voice, it can be mastered by practice and the developing skill of the instrumentalist or vocalist.

The early chapters of the book are devoted to getting to know your instrument. This is your raw voice. Voice has the advantage of being uniquely yours and fitted to you. Using your raw voice is more than just doing what comes naturally. Like mastering other instruments, one learns is range and the variety of notes and timbres it can produce. Several exercises are offered to help you get to know your raw voice and to explore all you can do with it.

The voice of the story is more like that of a composer. It understands the instrument, the raw voice, but it also engaged in making decisions about key, tempo, and amplitude over an entire piece and each movement and how it all fits together. The raw and story voices work together as the writer works, making writing improvisational, like a jazz musician using his instrument spontaneously while leaning on a mastery of scales, techniques and musical conventions.



Frank and Wall cover many of the things one might expect on a book on fiction writing: character, plot, point of view, tone, revision, and the writing life. In their book, voice serves the source and context of all these things. They spring forth from the raw voice of a person and are developed as a story by the polished voice of a writer. The craft of writing is developed on the job, working the materials supplied by the voice into stories.

Even in revising, there is an organic sense of spontaneity, improvisation and creative working within constraints. Revising is not a process of simple mechanics. It is a chance to creatively reengage a story, testing it with the creative force of raw voice and the helpful voice of internal editors who understand the workings of a story, a beautiful turn of phrase and how to get things write. Writers can easily get stymied at this stage, as they might at others, but frustration here is often an opportunity to take a story to a better level.

I should have given this book more time than I did (it was due back at the library). It’s a class for writers and, like most classes, getting the most out of it requires doing the homework.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Mastering Fiction Writing by Kit Reed