"Look, talent comes everywhere, but having something to say and a way to say
it so that people listen to it, that's a whole other bag. And unless you get
out and you try to do it, you'll never know. That's just the truth."
Jackson Maine, A Star is Born
A writer’s voice: hard to pin down, impossible to do without.
One of the easiest ways to describe "voice" as a concept is this: if you were
given a stack of, say, fifteen books that you hadn’t read before, by five
different authors, and the titles and authors’ names were invisible, you could
likely still sort them by author.
Why? Because one of the hallmarks of a skilled author is a distinctive voice.
It’s there in the way they form sentences, in the vocabulary they use, in the
tone of the story, in the themes they depict and the subject matter they
choose.