Someone tells you they are looking for a distinctive voice, and the phrase lands like a personality test you already failed. It should not. Voice, on the page, is not a mystical residue. It is the set of choices you make often enough that a reader can feel the pattern: how long the sentences run, which words you trust, what the narrator bothers to notice, how close the mind sits, what you joke about, and what you never do. Patterns can be looked at. That looking is an audit. It will not make you interesting. It will show you where the draft is pretending.
The audit below uses your own pages. It does not score you against a genre average, and it does not ask you to sound like a writer you studied last month. If the pages already sound like that writer, the audit should catch the costume. The separate repair is in why a first draft sounds like someone else. Do the audit first so you know which passages are the costume and which ones are the cloth.
What to put on the desk
Choose three passages of your prose, about 500 words each.
- A scene you still like after a night's sleep.
- A scene you have rewritten until you dislike it.
- Something fast and unguarded: a journal entry, a letter, a timed freewrite, a chapter you have not revised.
Put them where you can see all three. You are looking for what stays constant and what changes when you are trying. The unguarded passage is often the most honest sample. The disliked passage is often the one where you were obeying a rule you do not believe. The liked passage should be tested, not trusted. Liking a scene is sometimes just relief that it is finished.
Francine Prose, in Reading Like a Writer (HarperCollins, 2006), asks writers to slow down at the level of the sentence before they talk about larger effects. The audit is that slowdown applied to your own work. You are not grading the scenes. You are naming the moves.
Mark rhythm without fixing it
Count the words in twenty sentences from each passage. Note the average and the spread. Then note whether the fast passage and the polished one share a pulse. Often they do not. The fast one shows the cadence you have when nobody is watching. The polished one shows the cadence you think prose is supposed to have. Neither is automatically better. The gap between them is where a lot of "this doesn't sound like me" actually lives.
If you want the fuller method — openings, punctuation, paragraph length, reading aloud — use the sentence-rhythm piece and bring the numbers back here. For the audit, a rough average and a note about monotony are enough. Do not get lost in the counting and skip the rest of the marks. Rhythm is one layer.
Mark diction the way you would mark a borrowed coat
Highlight words that feel like yours: a verb you overuse, a register that jumps, a kind of swearing or a refusal to swear, a technical noun you love, a Latinate word you reach for when you are nervous. Then ask three questions.
- Which words show up in all three passages? Those are candidates for a fingerprint. A fingerprint can still be a bad habit. "Suddenly" in every scene is a fingerprint. It is also a candidate for cutting. The audit's job is to see it, not to bless it.
- Which words appear only in the polished, disliked passage? Those are often borrowed. They sound like book jackets, reviews, or the last author you imitated.
- Does the register jump without a change in who is speaking or how close we are? A jump can be a joke or a person under stress. A jump in every paragraph is usually the writer changing clothes.
Read one highlighted sentence aloud and ask whether you would say it to a friend if you were telling them the scene. If you would not, the sentence may still be right — fiction is not speech — but you should know that you chose a written register on purpose. A sudden climb into formality, when you did not choose it, is how drafts start to sound like a committee.
Mark attention, because that is the part other people cannot steal cleanly
List the concrete details in each passage: objects, sounds, money, bodies, weather, social slights, tools, food. Then sort them. Are you drawn to what a body feels, to what a room costs, to who is watching? Do you describe the panorama and skip the object in the hand, or the reverse? Is there a whole sense you never use?
Attention is stubborn. A writer who cares about status will smuggle status into a scene about weather. A writer who cares about work will tell you what the job does to the hands. Those repetitions are voice in a way a vocabulary list is not. They are also a diagnostic for scenes that feel empty. An empty scene is often a scene where you described a generic room because you had not decided what this narrator would bother to see.
If the three passages notice entirely different categories, you may be changing narrators without meaning to, or you may be writing from research in one scene and from memory in another. Name that. A research scene can still carry your attention if you choose which researched fact earns a sentence. Ten correct facts with no pattern of attention read as notes.
Mark distance and tone
Go through each passage and mark where the prose is inside a mind and where it stays outside, looking. Note whether you move closer at the moment of feeling or step back and summarize. Many writers have a default distance they return to when they are tired. The disliked scene sometimes fails because it sits at the wrong distance for its event: a grief summarized from across the street, or a logistical scene trapped inside a panic the plot does not need. The longer treatment of that scale is narrative distance. In the audit, one sentence of observation is enough: "stays close, except when the scene gets hard, and then it summarizes."
Then underline anything wry, cruel, tender, or ceremonious. Tone is often where writers are most themselves and most defensive. If all three passages share a dryness, that dryness is part of the voice even if you wish you were warmer. You can choose to write against it for a page. You should not be surprised when the warmth sounds like a costume unless you build it from details you actually notice.
Mark the avoidances
This is the step people skip because it feels like an accusation. Look for what you never do.
- No dialogue longer than a few lines.
- No description of a face.
- No scene that ends without a verbal resolution.
- No joke.
- No sentence that states a feeling directly, even when the character would.
- No ordinary day. Every chapter is a crisis.
Avoidance can be style. It can also be a flinch. The audit does not require you to start describing faces if you have a better way of putting people on the page. It requires you to admit the flinch so you can test it once. A single scene in which you do the avoided thing will tell you whether the avoidance was protecting the book or protecting you. Both answers are allowed. Only the unexamined version is expensive.
Write the five sentences an editor could use
When the marks are on the page, write five sentences a colleague could use to recognize your prose: rhythm, diction, attention, distance, tone. Keep them concrete. "Lyrical but accessible" is not a sentence you can revise with. "Sentences often run past thirty words and then stop short after a discovery" is a sentence you can check. "Notices tools and money, skips weather" is a sentence you can check.
Read the disliked passage against those five sentences. The usual discovery is not that the passage is badly written in the abstract. It is that the passage violates one of the five: the rhythm of someone else, a diction you do not use, attention to the wrong objects, a sudden coldness, a joke you would not make. Revise toward the five sentences. Then, in the next project, break one of them on purpose so the voice does not calcify into a brand you are afraid to leave.
Repeat the audit when you finish a draft, not every week. Weekly auditing becomes a way to avoid writing. Once a draft, the three passages are enough to see whether the book drifted between chapter three and chapter thirty.
What the audit will not decide
It will not tell you whether the book should exist, whether the plot works, or whether an agent will care. It will not produce a score. If you find yourself wanting a score, notice that want and go back to the five sentences. Numbers are useful for sentence length. They are a poor description of attention.
It also will not replace reading. An audit of your own pages without any recent reading turns into a hall of mirrors. Read something that is not in your genre while you are in the middle of the audit, and steal nothing except the reminder that other patterns exist. The notes on how authors analyze voice are a short account of looking at pattern rather than at line-level polish. That is the spirit of the exercise. The about page says the same thing in the language of the site: direction you can see, not a verdict handed down.
If you want the audit to change a draft, pick one violation and repair it in a single scene before you touch the rest. A full-manuscript "voice pass" done in a weekend usually becomes a smoothing pass, and smoothing is how fingerprints get wiped off. One scene, repaired toward a sentence you wrote about yourself, will teach your ear more than a global tidy.
Your next step: choose the three passages and write the five sentences before you revise anything. If you cannot write the sentence about attention, list twenty details from the pages and sort them. The sort is the sentence you are missing.
