Life is a series of stories. It really is as simple as that. As social human beings, most of us are pretty adept at telling them, too. So how is it that we often forget all those years of training we’ve had when we sit down to write a short story or a novel? That, you see, is the over-think. It’s the point when we tr y, as writers, to ‘come up’ with a narrative voice. Huge mistake. There’s no real magic about narrative voice. The only way for it to be natural and to make it convincing, is for that voice to be your authentic self. We’ve all read books when it feels as if the author is trying too hard, or the style feels fake, and that inevitably is because the adopted writing style isn’t the author’s real voice.
By the time I came to writing books, I was very lucky. I’d had years to think about how to use my voice to be persuasive, although I really didn’t think
