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Differences: Author Voice vs. Character Voice vs. Tone

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There is an article, about just this subject, on the Writers & Artists website by Claire ADMIN (sic) It is dated 4 December 2024, and, as it is well written, I’m presenting it.

Unfortunately, it isn’t clear who Claire ADMIN is. A search on the website reveals four authors named Claire, and the link to ‘Claire ADMIN’ doesn’t work.

“Writing terms can be difficult and confusing. We break down the difference between author voice, character voice and tone.

Voice is the author’s personal style. It’s all about how you – the author – describe things; your choice of words, punctuation styles, whether you use short sharp sentences, long running sentences, or a mixture of both.

Voice isn’t something that can be taught, but it is something that can be developed. An author’s voice is instinctual and unique, just like a finger print, however it can take years for an author to develop their own clear voice.

So what makes a strong author voice? If you hide the cover of a book, read the opening page, and know who the author is then they’ve done a great job of creating a strong voice. Here are a few examples from some of my favourite authors and how I recognise their writing.   

  • Kiran Millwood Hargrave has a distinct poetic, melodic prose.
  • Katherine Rundell writes playfully and has some of the most visual metaphors out there. I bet good money that I could pick a Katherine Rundell metaphor out of a line-up!
  • Sally Rooney writes clean, simple language. Snappy sentences and short, sharp scenes of action are then followed by lengthier moments of character interiority

Think about the authors whose books you will automatically pre-order. What keeps pulling you to them? What is it about their writing that stands out? 

Character voice

Yet, an author’s voice isn’t to be confused with character voice. This is all about how your characters come across on the page and how they express themselves, both externally and internally. Character voice can be dictated by many things including their backstory, background, quirks and foibles, motivations and inspirations, personality traits, which can include strengths and flaws, as well as their dialect and word choice. 

A character’s voice will end with that book (unless it is a series) whereas the author’s voice will usually remain consistent throughout all of their books. Each character in your book should have a distinct voice and this is all to do with creating a band of characters who have different interests, quirks, strengths and weaknesses etc. 

The strength of a character’s voice is intertwined with the strength of the initial character creation. Think about some of your most memorable characters in fiction and make a note of what it is about them that stands out. 

For example, Violet Baudelaire in A Series of Unfortunate Events is always rational and brave, even in dire circumstances. When she ties her hair with a ribbon, she is able to access her technical, logical mind and come up with an invention that will save her and her siblings from harm.

Tone

Tone is a writer’s attitude toward the subject and the mood implied by an author’s word choice. Tone can change throughout a story, based on the different situations, conflicts or settings that are introduced. A clear tone can help readers to understand the emotion of a particular scene or part in a story. There are many different types of tone, from happy to sad, sarcastic to serious, creepy to light-hearted, curious to conflicted etc. Sometimes, If you don’t convey the right tone for the right situation, readers will feel confused and unsure as to how they are meant to be feeling towards specific characters or moments in your plot. 

Finding your author voice, character voice and the right tone are important to get right because without them, your story might lack depth and your readers could struggle to fully connect with your story.

Just Jump

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Harry Bingham, the Founder and CEO of Jericho Writers, makes a good point about the inertia we sometimes feel as writers.

He says, “Just Jump!”

Harry says, “

Ray Bradbury, the author of Farenheit 451 and much else, was a fan of the future. A fan of boldness and technological adventure.  In an interview with the New York Times, he said, “If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business because we’d be cynical: ‘It’s gonna go wrong.’ Or ‘She’s going to hurt me.’ Or ‘I had a couple of bad love affairs so therefore …’ Well, that’s nonsense. You’re going to miss life. You’ve got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.”  That cliff-jumper is you. It’s me. It’s all of us.  It’s certainly true for any first-time novelist. My first book was a giant 180,000 words long. (And yes, it went to print at that length. And no, it’s not a length that publishers are especially looking for. But if a book is good enough, the length is kinda immaterial.)  I was naïve. I literally had no idea that writing a book and getting it published might be hard. I just assumed I could do it, and would do it. My track record (Oxford University, fancy American bank) was one of achievement. I knew I liked reading. I’d always assumed I’d end up being an author. So: write a book – how hard could it be? I knew how to write a sentence, so just do that over and over, and I’d have a book.  Everyone receiving this email is less naïve. The tone of voice needed for a fast commercial adventure-caper was not the same tone as that had produced success in Oxford philosophy essays. Once I’d written 180,000 words, I looked back at the start and realised it was … ahem, in need of vigorous editing. The kind of editing that involved selecting 60,000 words and hitting Delete. So I deleted the rubbish and rewrote it. Wrote it better.   But:  That wasn’t a failure. It was the second most important step on the road to success. The most important was writing the first word, the first sentence, the first paragraph, the first chapter. The most important step is always the same: it’s jumping off the cliff in the first place.  Deleting 60,000 words was the next crucial step: acknowledging that what I’d done wasn’t good enough; that more work could fix it; that I needed to design and use some better wings.  But you don’t get to the better-wing-design stage until you’ve got to the plummeting-downwards-out-of-control stage. You need them both.  And honestly: the challenges probably get a little bit less as you write more books, get them published, get paid, learn the industry, build a readership. But each book is its own cliff – its own well of uncertainty.  As you know, I’m a huge believer in nailing an elevator pitch before you start writing. I don’t care about pretty formulations – I don’t mind whether you have the kind of phrase that would look good on a book jacket or movie poster. But a list of ingredients that would spark interest in a potential book-buyer? That’s essential.  But oh sweet lord, there is a huge gap between knowing that you have, in theory, a commercially viable novel and actually making it so. I have sometimes written books that flowed, start to finish, with no huge mid-point challenges, but those have been the exception. Mostly, there’s been a hole – a gap – a problem.  I’m not a huge fan of pre-planning novels in vast detail. (But do what you like: it’s whatever works for you.) The only way to find that hole is to leap off the cliff. It’s the flying through the air that tells you what wings you need.  So jump.  Be uncertain.  Jump anyway.  Take the biggest boldest leap you can, knowing that you don’t have the answers.  Just jump.  Jump knowing that your wings aren’t ready. They get born by jumping. Wings that surprise you and delight you and complete you.  So jump.  Good luck. And happy Christmas.     

World-Building with Sound

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Jaimi Ryan has an article dated 11 October 2025 in Writer’s Digest on the subject of using descriptions of sound creating the world of a novel. She says, “Audio drama isn’t just about dialogue. It’s the hiss of a radiator, the crunch of boots on dry leaves and the pause before a truth is revealed. Just as novelists use language to build immersive worlds, audio creators use sound to transport listeners into spaces that exist only in the imagination.”

Jaimi Ryan is a seasoned Podcast Producer and Sound Designer with a background in music production. After pivoting from music to podcasting in 2017, she has had a wide range of podcasting experiences including podcast creation, remote recording, audio restoration, post production, content editing and hosting.

Jaimi Ryan

Jaimi offers ten examples of how sound effectively in fiction deepen world-building and heighten storytelling. Sound provides another sensory dimension to our creation of the world in the reader’s imagination.

1. Establish Setting Through Ambient Sound

Think of ambient sound as the aural equivalent of a setting paragraph. In prose, you might write: The bustling tavern smelled of smoke and spilled ale. In a podcast, you can build the same tavern with clinking glasses, murmured conversations, a lute playing softly in the corner, and the occasional burst of laughter.

A great example of this is The Magnus Archives, which often drops listeners into a location without explanation, simply using a faint hum of fluorescent lights or the drone of a tape recorder to situate listeners in an archival office.

2. Use Sound as Characterization

Characters don’t have to be introduced only with dialogue. Their sound signatures (the objects, rhythms, or textures that follow them) can give immediate recognition.

For instance, maybe a character’s arrival is always marked by the swish of warm-up pants or heavy footsteps with an irregular gate. A fantasy warrior might be defined by the clanking of armor, and maybe a futuristic smuggler always powers down a ship with a metallic sigh. These repeated cues become auditory shorthand.

3. Control Pacing With Silence

Writers know the power of white space. A sentence fragment on its own line can punch harder than a full paragraph. In audio, silence has the same effect.

A long pause before a confession can feel like holding your breath. A sudden drop into stillness after a loud scene can jar listeners into alertness. Even half a second of silence can sharpen a joke’s timing.

Think of silence not as empty, but as intentional space. The absence of sound is still a sound choice, and you want to be sure there are no unintentional silences.

4. Layer Sound for Emotional Resonance

Prose layers tone through metaphor, diction, and rhythm. Dialogue sits in the foreground, but what happens underneath can amplify emotion.

Example: A tender scene might include a faint piano or the distant chirp of crickets, lending warmth. A horror moment could include barely audible whispers under a monologue, or a low drone slowly increasing in volume, unsettling the listener without ever being directly acknowledged.

The trick is subtlety. Too many layers muddy the track. But the right two or three can make a scene unforgettable.

5. Build Tension With Repetition

Writers often use recurring images or motifs, and sound can do the same.

Consider the steady drip of water in a dungeon scene. If it returns across episodes, it builds anticipation: Why does it matter? Or a few distant, unexplained “monster roars” early on. Each recurrence adds dread until the beast finally appears.

6. Use Perspective and Proximity

Audio production can mimic point of view. A voice whispering directly in one ear (using stereo panning) creates intimacy, an almost conspiratorial feel. A muffled argument heard through a wall distances the listener, making them an eavesdropper rather than a participant.

This is the audio equivalent of close third-person versus omniscient narration. Ask yourself: how “close” should the audience feel to this moment? Then adjust the sound perspective accordingly.

7. Contrast Soundscapes

Sometimes the most effective worldbuilding comes from playing the sound against the situation. A gruesome scene underscored by cheerful music, or a high-stakes conversation happening over chirping birds or children playing can disorient the listener in interesting ways and create dramatic tension.

8. Map Geography Through Sound Cues

Listeners can “see” a space through audio cues. Footsteps shifting from tile to gravel tell us a character is moving outdoors. A voice echoing differently in each room maps an environment in our heads. For even more immersion, consider stereo panning sound effects to the left or right, or even moving from one ear to the other to put the listener in the middle of a scene. Those footsteps can move from tile to gravel, and they can also move from the left ear to the right as though the character is walking by the listener.

9. Treat Sound Effects as Symbols

Sounds can function like symbols in prose. A tolling bell might signal both time passing and the inevitability of death. If you repeat sounds strategically, they accrue significance. They become thematic shorthand, much like recurring images and motifs in a novel.

10. Marry Soundscape and Dialogue

Finally, remember that sound is your setting, your imagery, even your punctuation. Pacing is heavily affected by the way the dialogue interacts with the sound environment.

A rapid-fire exchange over pounding rain creates urgency. Slow, deliberate dialogue against a hushed forest soundscape encourages reflection. Moments of soundscape without dialogue can create immersion, tension, reflection, or whatever mood you’re trying to build while also giving the listener a moment to digest what is happening in the story.

As you experiment, listen to how other audio dramas and films use sound. Notice when a silence unnerves you, when a sound effect feels over-the-top, when background noise deepens immersion. Don’t forget to have some fun with it, audio is an exciting medium for creative storytelling.

Getting Accents and Dialects Right

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Harry Bingham’s email of last week deals with the tricky subject of how to write in accents or dialogue convincing but not condescending.

Harry is the founder and CEO of Jericho Writers.

Harry said, “So here is an example of transcribing a character’s voice in a patronising way:

“Eet eez ’orrible to ’ear ze proud Frensh race beleettled in zis stooped manner.”

But what the character involved has actually said here is:

“It is horrible to hear the proud French race belittled in this stupid manner.”

The first sentence, by transcribing its pronunciations in a very literal way, makes the speaker come across as ludicrous – cartoony, a circus clown with a striped jumper, a string of onions and a comical moustache. But what’s actually comical? The sentence itself displays perfect command of English, and what’s being apparently laughed at here is an accent, over which the speaker has very little control.

And, golly gosh, that’s a slippery slope.

Most people writing a non-English character in this way will (if English) speak roughly RP, or Received Pronunciation – in effect, roughly what a BBC newsreader used to sound like. In the US, it’s much the same thing, except that the reference dialect is Standard American English.

(And, please note, in RP English, we say “She placed the glahss on the grahss next to her great big – handbag.” But we wouldn’t even conceive of inserting the letter H into the two italicised words to mark the weird pronunciation. Nor do we adjust the spelling to take care of the flat “a” sound in American and North-British versions of those words. So when it comes to our weird pronunciations, we don’t even think of trying to reflect them in spelling.)

And of course, as soon as you start to accord any kind of typographic privilege to a particular accent – whether RP or SAE – you get into all sorts of bother.

It’s one thing to have a comical Frenchman – France is a nuclear power and can look after itself – but do you really want to apply the same diminishing treatment to, say, a black resident of Harlem? Or a Scouser? Or a northern woman of Pakistani heritage? Or a Mexican immigrant?

The answer, if you haven’t already figured it out is, No, certainly not. Don’t go there. Step away from the quirky spellings.

That’s partly because of a perfectly legitimate anxiety about racism.

But it’s also just a recognition of modern linguistics. The RP / SAE dialects are simply two dialects amongst many, many others. They don’t come with a halo over them that says, “the king/President speaks this way, so this version is right and everything else is wrong.” The fact is that we all speak the dialect of our culture and each dialect has no more or less validity than the next.

That’s not just true of pronunciation. It’s true of grammar too. Any significant dialect has its own grammar, which may differ from SAE / RP grammar (which, by the way, each differ from each other.) So African-American Vernacular English has its own strict rules of grammar, that are just different from SAE – and not just different, but with subtleties that SAE struggles to cope with. SAE has four basic past tenses: I did buy it, I have bought it, I bought it, I had bought it. AAVE has five, but differently structured: I been bought it, I bought it, I done bought it, I did buy it, I do buy it.

What does all this tell us?

It tells us (duh!) that other people may speak differently from us.

It tells us (duh!) that it’s not respectful or, in fact, linguistically accurate, to privilege one set of accents or grammars over another.

And that means that the solution for a novelist is quite easy:

  1. Don’t try to capture nuances of accent in the way you transcribe speech. We don’t write “grahss” if we try to capture how the king of England speaks. We don’t write “eet eez ’orrible” if we try to capture how President Macron expresses himself.
  2. Do use the actual words that your character uses. President Macron is probably more likely than the rest of us to use the word voila even when speaking English. And if he says it, that’s what you write. Likewise, if a Black American character says finna (a contraction of fixing to or going to) then that’s the word you write down. It IS a word; it just isn’t an SAE / RP word. Don’t patronise your characters by editing their speech.
  3. Do use the grammar that your character adopts. So if your character is African-American, she might say ‘I done bought it’, in which case you write, ‘I done bought it.’
  4. For that matter, most of us are perfectly adept at code-shifting, so that same character might speak using AAVE when at home with her mother, but might use SAE when (say) running for President of the United States. And if your character code-shifts, you code-shift right along with her.
  5. The same goes for English spoken as a second language. Let’s say your novel features a top French footballer, who possibly now plays for Real Madrid. Perhaps that footballer says, “I do not chase after the records.” No native English speaker would naturally put the word “the” into that sentence, and nearly all English footballers would say “don’t” rather than “do not.” So you don’t need to do anything as condescending as write “Eet ees ’orrible” in order to hear the Frenchness in the speaker. You just have a careful ear for those non-native uses and let the reader intuit the rest. They definitely will.

I think the only time this is liable to get complicated is in relation to languages that are highly related to English, but aren’t actually English.

A lot of you will have encountered the broad Yorkshire speech of Wuthering Heights. This for example:

‘What are ye for?’ he shouted. ‘T’ maister’s down i’ t’ fowld. Go round by th’ end o’ t’ laith, if ye went to spake to him.’

Would that be better with “the master’s down in the fold”? And well – I don’t know. You can call it both ways. The modern tendency would be to eliminate some of the non-standard spelling, but in Bronte’s day, the fact was that broad Yorkshire dialect (“Tyke”) was pretty much a language to itself, related to English in much the same way as Robert Burns’ Scots is. In which case – honour the language. Give it leg room. That’s what I chose to do with my Orcadian sailor, Caff, and deliberately wrote a version of Orcadian that was damn close to impenetrable to an ordinary reader.

And if you want to do that then, (a) have fun! It’s really entertaining. And (b) get it right. I don’t speak Orcadian, I’m not Scottish, and I’ve never been to the Orkneys. So I did the best that I could with books and online resources … then wrote to the editor of an Orkney newspaper and asked for her help. She was very happy to give that to me, and I was very happy to receive it, and my readers have the joy of having a little bit more Orcadian in their lives: something we all need.”

Kurt Vonnegut Rules for Authors

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In his Friday email, Harry Bingham gives his views on Kurt Vonnegut’s rules.

Harry is founder and CEO of Jericho Writers.

Harry Bingham

“1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

That rule, I think, is bomb-proof. And, in fact, I’d make it a little stricter. I think that even high-end literary fiction has to entertain. It can’t be enough that I have a sense of having done my duty by the Gods of Literature. I need to have had fun – or have been moved – or basically just liked my experience with the book. I think entertainment is core. I’ve never knowingly broken that rule, not even writing non-fiction.

  1. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

I’ve never broken that rule either, but I think it’s probably possible to break it effectively. American Psycho is a yukky book, but it’s a work of proper genius … and its genius isn’t because its protagonist likes home-baking, cat rescue and volunteering at church-run soup kitchens. That said, it’s not even 1% of books that can break that rule effectively. So as a general guide, I’m with you, Kurt.

  1. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

Every character? I don’t know. If your protagonist has a momentary interaction with a receptionist, say, then does the receptionist need obvious motivation? On the one hand, no: truly minor characters can simply fall off the table of things you have to think about. On the other hand, here’s a snippet where Fiona does in fact interact extremely briefly with a receptionist – at a modern, ultra-secure, psychiatric institution for very violent, very dangerous offenders. (Fiona is the key character in Harry’s thrillers.)

The driver takes us in. Hands us over to a neat, blue-suited receptionist – Alys, to go by her fabric badge. She is almost blushingly young, a late teenager at a guess. She wears a tri-coloured scarf, like a seriously out-of-place air stewardess.

‘Inspector Rogers? Miss Griffiths? Etta is expecting you.’

The ‘Etta’ in question is, I assume Dr. Etta Gulleford, the hospital director, and the woman we’re here to see.

No badges, I think because the metal clips could make a weapon. Instead, plastic cards, like the key-cards they use in hotels.

‘Upstairs. Right on to the end. Julie-Ann will find you there.’

She does a crinkle-eyed smile at us, the sort you’d get at an upmarket spa.

There’s no obvious sense of desire there, of wanting something … but on the other hand, I think there probably IS something. She’s blushingly young. She wears a scarf like an out-of-place stewardess. And she offers Fiona a spa-quality, crinkle-eyed smile.

What does all that amount to? I think it amounts to the Alys very much wanting Fiona not to make a fuss. Not to do something that breaks the spell. And the spell is, effectively, that this place can be considered like a nice, posh, modern spa rather than a quasi-prison full of extremely dangerous men. It’s like Alys is saying – pleading – don’t call this out for what it really is.

So, OK, I’m going to go with Vonnegut on this one. Even extremely minor characters should have some kind of want, even if it’s undeclared, even if it’s trivial.

  1. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

That’s probably mostly true, but it can’t be quite literally true. I think that, in the passage I just quoted, every sentence does do one of those two things. But what about this:

We watch for a while. The gulls. The waves. The rolling print of the wind on the water. Stippling squalls that turn the sea’s smooth watercolour into something jumpy and agitated, like the surface has been rubbed with gorse.

That’s not really advancing any action and it doesn’t really tell us much about Fiona, except I suppose glancingly, in the sense that the way she expresses what she sees would be different from yours or mine. But really, the point about those lines is that they describe something – they reveal the character of a place, not a person. That’s fine with me. I expect Kurt wouldn’t have a fight with me over lines like that. I like description. It’s fine.

  1. Start as close to the end as possible.

Vonnegut thought a lot about short stories and I think this rule applies both to short stories and to scenes. Enter late. It’s really easy to write 200 words of intro before you get to the meat of a scene. It’s often better to start with the meat, then use just 20-30 words a few paragraphs in to explain to the reader how they got to where they now are.

But does this rule make sense for novels? Don’t think so – or at least, I don’t think that it’s especially useful. Most of my Fiona novels start with a corpse discovery. Yes, that’s as close to the end “as possible”, but really: it’s right at the start. So: useful rule for scenes. Silly rule for books.

  1. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

Oh yes. Definitely. No quibbles here.

Here at Jericho Writers, we occasionally get books that tell a story such as: middle aged woman divorces cheating husband, feels a lack of purpose, gets diagnosed with cancer, takes up pottery, makes great ceramics, meets dashing ceramicist, gets the cancer all clear.

And, yeah, OK. I mean: in an actual person’s life, that’s all bad (to start with) then heart-warming (to end with.) But we all know people with stories like that. And – readers don’t care. They want really bad stuff to happen to characters. They’re sadists. So you have to be too. That’s just how it is.

  1. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Yes. I agree with that. (It’s also, by the way, an exceptionally good rule for marketing books too. Sell hard to your ideal reader. Bore the rest. Ignore the rest.)

But I think it’s not clear enough. Who is that person? In the end, there’s only one person who matters and that’s you. Every line you write, every word choice you make, you’re just asking the question: do I like this? Or that? Which pleases me more?

So your task as a writer is to develop your tastes as far and as finely as possible. You can’t do that in isolation from the broad sweep of contemporary writing. You have to develop your own taste with reference to what others read. But still – write to please just one person. And make it you.

  1. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Uh, Kurt? This is just BS, and he surely knew it.

I mean the cockroaches/pages thing: OK, yes, at that point, I think there is often a kind of solid inevitability in play … but not always. In one of my Fiona books, Fiona ends up clapping handcuffs on the dastardly people who tried to imprison her (in a very weird way.) That part plays out as the reader should by then expect.

But then, a Ukrainian millionaire tries to bribe her … and she (in a Fiona-y way) semi-accepts the offer.

And a girl who went missing needs to be reunited with her father, and Fiona does just that.

Both of those things make sense from what went before, but I don’t think any reader could plausibly have mapped out either scene. So, sorry, Kurt, no way. I think you were having a laugh.”

Setting the Mood

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Jo Schulte has an article on the Writer’s Digest website dated May 28, 2025 about how a writer can establish the mood in a story.

Jo Schulte

Jo Schulte grew up chasing fireflies in Michigan, spent many years navigating London’s publishing industry, and now calls Atlanta home, y’all. When she’s not writing, Jo can be found walking her dog, getting distracted by renovation projects, or enjoying a well-earned brunch (the housecleaning can wait).

Jo says, “Before characters speak or plot threads intertwine, before a reader knows the rules of a world or the stakes at hand, what greets them first—quietly, viscerally—is mood. Mood shapes tone, reinforces theme, and interacts with protagonists as deliberately as any villain or ally. It’s the foggy breath in the late autumn woods, the hum of neon lights in a dystopian alley, the salt tang in the air as a ship crests a storm-spined wave.

Mood isn’t just the flavor of a story—it’s the foundation of setting. Before readers know where they are, they need to know how to feel. That emotional tone becomes the lens through which they understand place. Setting isn’t a neutral canvas; it’s an invitation into a living, breathing world. A map might show where the towns are, but mood shows you how those towns feel. It’s where setting really begins.

If you sit down and start describing trees, you’re going to end up with—guess what?—trees. But if you sit down and ask, “What do I want the reader to feel here?”, your descriptions will carry emotional weight. A clearing in the woods can be peaceful, ominous, ancient, or desolate—it all depends on the tone you choose.

In The Whisperwood Legacy, I wanted a setting that felt like nostalgia gone sour. The story unfolds in an abandoned amusement park in the Appalachian Mountains—a place meant to feel like memory: familiar, even comforting, but wrong in the way a dream curdles when you try to hold onto it. The rides aren’t beautifully decaying; they’re stubbornly refusing to collapse, clinging to the past like a bruise that won’t fade. That feeling—of something rotting just beneath the surface—is the emotional tone that shaped every detail.

Tip: Before writing a scene, ask yourself what emotional undercurrent should hum beneath the surface. Is this a place that soothes, unsettles, tempts, or traps? Jot down two or three feelings the setting should carry—not just what it looks like. Let that guide every detail.

A strong setting doesn’t just look good—it works hard. It should reveal something about the characters, plot, or world. If it’s not doing at least one of those things, it’s just set dressing.

In The Whisperwood Legacy, the park is owned by the protagonist’s family. Every broken ride, every dusty booth, every desilvered mirror ties into the central mystery she’s unravelling. The setting isn’t just eerie; it’s personal. It matters to her, which means it matters to the reader.

Tip: Ask yourself, “Why this place? Why not somewhere else?” If the answer is “because it’s spooky,” dig deeper. Why this spooky place? What emotional or narrative connection does your protagonist have to it? Bonus points if it’s complicated.

A well-developed setting doesn’t just exist—it affects. To build one that resonates, you need more than a visual snapshot. The best settings reach into the body: They hum in your ears, cling to your skin, sit heavy in your lungs. They make readers feel something. That’s where sensory details come in—not as decoration, but as emotional cues.

We often talk about five senses, but there are more: temperature, balance, pressure, the sense of being watched. The goal isn’t to check off every sense—it’s to choose the ones that amplify the mood. A sticky floor can make a room feel oppressive. The sharp scent of antiseptic can make a hallway feel sterile and cruel. These choices turn static space into living atmosphere.

Tip: When developing a setting, ask which sensory detail best serves the emotional tone. Instead of listing what’s there, consider what your character notices and feels. A creaking stair might do more than a paragraph of visual description, particularly if it’s the only sound in a house that should be empty.

Setting isn’t static. As your character changes, their relationship to the world around them should shift too. This emotional arc is one of the most powerful tools in storytelling.

At the beginning of The Whisperwood Legacy, the park is a decaying monument stuffed with history. Then it becomes a puzzle. By the end, it’s something else entirely. That change in how the protagonist sees her surroundings reflects her internal transformation.

Tip: Identify two or three key locations in your story. How does your protagonist feel about each one at the start? How does that evolve? Let the setting mirror or contradict their emotional arc.

The most memorable settings aren’t pristine or sweeping—they’re specific. They’re strange. They have a sense of lived-in oddity that makes them feel multidimensional. The best details are the ones that make a reader pause and think, wait, what?

In Whisperwood, I could have just created a park with aesthetic attractions, but instead every facet of the park is connected not just to fairy tales, but deeply personal histories. For example,  the house on the park grounds isn’t just a home with vibes, it’s a clapboard mansion where the basement is off limits, the bedrooms are decorated and referred to by colors, and all the landlines have been ripped off the walls. These aren’t generic moody images—they’re eerie because they’re specific, and because that specificity matters to someone. Everything has history. Everything has a story.

Tip: Add one weird, memorable detail to every major setting. Make your world feel like it has secrets and history.

Ultimately, setting isn’t just where the story happens—it’s why the story feels the way it does. It anchors emotion, drives atmosphere, and creates the lens through which everything else is experienced. When you start with mood, you’re not just sketching a backdrop; you’re inviting the reader into a world with its own weather, weight, and wonder.

So set the scene like you mean it. Choose a mood that distorts the light into the temperature of your choosing. Build a place that does more than exist—make it ache, thrill, hum, lure, swoon, or unsettle. Turn a setting into its own story.”

Agatha Christie a Writing Teacher?

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This article by Benji Wilson was in the April 30th issue of the Telegraph.

Benji Wilson

Benji Wilson is a journalist based in London. He is a feature writer and interviewer for The Sunday Times, TV critic for The Telegraph and a columnist and critic for Private Eye. He is also the London correspondent for Emmy magazine as well as writing for USA Today and the Sydney Morning Herald. is the world’s best-selling author, so if you wanted to learn how to write a crime novel she’s the first person you’d ask.

Benji says, “Agatha Christie is the world’s best-selling author, so if you wanted to learn how to write a crime novel she’s the first person you’d ask. Unfortunately, she died in 1976. But in the age of AI, with a plot twist that would assuredly have had Christie herself itching to incorporate it in a book, death need not be the end. A new BBC Maestro course of online video lessons, made in conjunction with Christie’s estate, brings the queen of crime back to life.

“First and foremost, for me, this project is about looking at her process as a writer and paying homage to that,” says James Prichard, Christie’s great-grandson and the Chairman and CEO of Agatha Christie Limited. “One of the things I am proudest of that has happened over the last however many years is how seriously Agatha Christie is taken, which I don’t think was always the case. She is now held in the regard and esteem that she should be as a writer.”

It’s that esteem that will encourage wannabe Christies – in this case, myself – to pay their £120 for a Maestro subscription (which gets you a year’s access to all manner of courses from Stephen Bartlett to JoJo Moyes to Jo Malone). The new Agatha series is a short lecture course given by a recreation of the writer herself, with Christie’s face and voice somehow grafted on to a (brilliant) performance from the actor Vivien Keene. Delivered across 11 videos, all of less than 20 minutes, you sit and are spoken to – nothing interactive here – as Agatha takes you through plotting, structure, detectives and satisfying resolutions.

The difference to all the other BBC Maestro courses is that Christie’s writing advice is only sort-of delivered by Christie. But the message does come from the horse’s mouth, so to speak – it was one of the stipulations of the Christie estate that every one of the words that Keene speaks should have come from Christie’s pen.

“It had to be her lessons; it couldn’t be some made up thing,” says Prichard. “So we had a team of academics under Dr Mark Aldridge [an acknowledged Christie expert] to see to that.”

In order to fit with the BBC Maestro credo – ‘Let the greatest be your teacher’ – “It had to look and sound like her,” says Prichard. “And what they have done is extraordinary. The final thing was that it had to be of value to both aspiring writers and fans. And I think it does that. All I can say is I was speaking to my father on Friday and both of us agreed that we’d learned a hell of a lot from her that we didn’t know.”

If AI-gatha’s Maestro course could teach her own relatives a thing or two – Prichard said that he learned from the course that Christie’s books work because “they’re actually about people, and people never really change” — then surely it could help me? I was lucky enough to get an early view of the Christie course and can report that watching Agatha, or ‘Agatha,’ dole out aperçus on story structure, cast creation, plot twists, red herrings, and the art of suspense, was most of all… unnerving. A half-smiling Christie-bot stares barrel-straight down the camera with schoolmarm-ish supremacy. She seemed to sense my self-doubt, my daft plot ideas, my general unease.

There is also some mild unease at having AI involved at all. To authors, AI is perceived as a threat more than a boon.

“I’d be lying if I said there weren’t worries [about using AI],” says James Prichard. “But I believe and I hope that this is using AI in both a helpful and ethical way. The AI model of Agatha doesn’t work without the performance of Vivien Keene. This was not written by AI. It is a leading academic unearthing everything that she said about writing. And I believe that what we are delivering here in terms of her message is better presented and will reach more people as a result of being presented, if I can use inverted commas, ‘by her.’”

What kind of tutor is AI-gatha? The course shows that Christie plainly studied her craft and while she opens up saying, “I don’t feel I have any particular method when it comes to writing,” which is disappointing, she does in fact adhere to a broad methodology founded in meticulous planning.

“And I take it seriously,” she says, looking serious.

The importance of saying something – not preaching but there being some form of moral backbone to your story — is emphasised throughout. Readers like to see justice served, she says.

“I write to entertain but there is a dash of the old morality play in my work – hunting down the guilty to protect the innocent.”

But where to even start? That’s my problem. Agatha recommends – glory be! – idleness (but not sloth) as a fallow field where ideas can take seed. She encourages eavesdropping on conversations on buses as a source of characters and dialogue, and so I head to that virtual bus that is the Internet.”

Benji finds that Telegraph readers are keen on air fryers and he concocts a short, very silly story about people being murdered by exploding air fryers.

Conveying a Character’s Emotions

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Harry Bingham, of Jericho Writers, sent out an excellent, comprehensive email a week ago last Friday about how to describe the emotions of a character without TELLING.

He said, “Today I want to give a more comprehensive, more fully ordered list of options.

Honestly, I doubt if many of you will want to pin those options to the wall and pick from them, menu-style, as you write. But having these things in your awareness is at least likely to loosen your attachment to the clench-n-quake school of writing.

Let’s say that we have our character – Talia, 33, single. She’s the keeper of Egyptian antiquities at a major London museum, and the antiquities keep going missing. She’s also rather fond of Daniel, 35, a shaggy-haired archaeologist. Our scene? Hmm. Talia and a colleague (Asha, 44) are working late. They hear strange noises from the vault. They go to investigate and find some recent finds, Egyptian statuary, have been unaccountably moved. In the course of the scene, Asha tells Talia that she fancies Daniel … and thinks he fancies her back.

In the course of the scene, Talia feels curious about the noises in the vault, feels surprise and fear when she finds the statues have been moved. And feels jealousy and uncertainty when Asha speaks of her feelings for Daniel.

We need to find ways to express Talia’s feelings in the story.

Here’s one way:

Direct statements of emotion

Talia felt a surge of jealousy, that almost amounted to anger.

Bingo. Why not? That’s what she feels, so why not say it? No reason at all. Some writers will panic that they’re telling not showing, and they’ve read somewhere that they shouldn’t do that (at all, ever), so they’ll avoid these direct statements. But why? They work. They’re useful. They help the reader.

More complicated but still direct statements

Somewhere, she felt a shadow-self detach from her real one, a shadow self that wanted to claw Asha’s face, pull her hair, draw blood, cause pain.

That’s still saying “Talia felt X”, we’ve just inserted a more complicated statement into the hole marked X, but it still works. And that dab of exotic imagery gives the whole thing a novelly feel, so we’re good, right? Even though technically, we’re still telling not showing.

Physical statements: inner report

Talia felt her belly drop away, the seaside roller-coaster experience, except that here she was no child. There was no sand, no squinting sunshine, no erupting laughter.

Now as you know, I don’t love text that overuses physical statements as a way to describe emotion, but that’s because overuse of anything is bad, and because the statements tend to be very thin (mouth contorting, chest shuddering, etc). If you don’t overuse the statements and enrich the ones you do make, there’s not an issue.

Notice that here, we have Talia noticing something about her physical state – it’s not an external observation. But both things are fine.

Physical statements: external observation

Colour rushed into Talia’s face. She turned her head abruptly to prevent the other woman seeing but Asha was, in any case, more interested in the case of funerary amulets.

Here, we’re only talking about physical changes that are apparent on the outside, and that snippet is fine too. It doesn’t go very deep and, for my money, it feels like a snippet that would best go after a more direct statement. “Talia felt a surge of jealousy, anger almost. Colour rushed into her face, and she turned her head …”

Dialogue

“Daniel?” said Talia. “But he’s so much younger. I really doubt that he’d …”

Dialogue conveys emotion. It can also provide text and subtext in one. So here, the overt meaning is Talia’s doubt that a mid-thirties Daniel could fancy a mid-forties Asha… but the clear sub-text is a catty jealousy on Talia’s part. And readers love decoding those subtexts, so the more you offer them, the better.

Direct statement of inner thought

“Daniel?” said Talia. “But he’s so much younger. I really doubt that he’d …”

Doubt what? That he’d fancy the glamorous, shaggy-haired Asha, with her white shirts and big breasts and pealing laughter?

The second bit here is a direct statement of Talia’s actual thought. We could also have written:

Doubt what, she wondered. That he’d fancy …

That inserts a “she wondered” into things, but as you see, we can have a direct statement of her thoughts with or without that “she wondered”. Either way, it works.

Memory

Talia remembered seeing the two of them, at conference in Egypt. Holding little white coffee cups on a sunny balcony and bawling with laughter at something, she didn’t know what. Asha’s unfettered, unapologetic booming laughter and all the sunlit roofs of Cairo.

That doesn’t quite go directly to emotions, but it half-does and we could take it nearer with a little nudging. And, for sure, if you want a rounded set of tools to build out your emotional language, then memory will play a part.

Action

When Asha spoke, Talia had been holding a small pot in elaborately worked clay. It would once have held a sacred oil with which to anoint a new bride. Talia felt Asha looking sharply at her, at her hands, and when she looked, she saw the pot was split in two, that she’d broken it, now, after two thousand three hundred years.

OK, is that a bit on the nose? Breaking a marriage pot. Well, maybe, but it’s better than quaking, clenching and contorting all the time.

Use of the setting

They were in the vault now, marital relics stored in the shelves behind them, funerary relics and coinage on the shelves in front. Leaking through the walls from the offices next door, there was the wail of Sawhali music, the mourning of a simsimiyya.

At one level, that snippet is only talking about hard physical facts: what’s stored on the shelves, what music they can hear. But look at the language: we have marital and funerary in the same sentence. The next sentence brings us wail and mourning. This is a pretty clear way of saying that Talia’s not exactly joyful about things. Every reader will certainly interpret it that way.

And there are probably more alternatives too, and certainly you can smush these ones up together and get a thousand interesting hybrids as a result.”

Unsolved Mysteries

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Harry Bingham of Jericho Writers made in interesting point about unsolved mysteries in his Friday email of 6 December 2024. He calls it the easiest technique in fiction.

Harry said, “Lots of things in writing are hard. One thing in particular is very, very easy… but it’s astonishingly neglected by a lot of writers.

Here’s an example of getting something wrong, using an extract I’ve invented for the purpose. In my mind, this extract might stand at the start of a novel, but it could be anywhere really.

So:

Dawn woke her – dawn, and the rattle of trade that started to swell with it. Barrels being rolled over cobbles, a cart arriving from the victuallers’ yard, men starting to bray.

It had been a cold night and promised to be a cold morning, too. Her feet found the rag mat next to the bed. She washed hands and face briefly, and without emotion, then lifted her nightgown and began to bind her breasts, with the white winding strip she always used. Round and round, flattening her form.

She continued to get dressed. Blue slops. Bell-bottomed trousers, a shirt, a waistcoat, a blue jacket, loose enough for her shoulders to work. Just for a moment, she looked at her hands. They’d been soft once, and were coarse now, hardened off by the scrambles up rigging, the hard toil on ropes.

Caroline – Charles as she was known to her fellow ratings – had been forced to take work as a man when her father died two years ago, right at the start of this new war against Napoleon. She had tried taking work as a seamstress, but the pay had been poor, and she had a younger sister always sickly to look after. In the end, she had found herself forced to dress as a man and work as a man, here at the great bustling port of Portsmouth…

I hope you can see that this passage is kinda fine… and kinda fine… and then disastrous.

The first paragraph here is fine: it starts to establish the scene.

The second paragraph is intriguing: why the flipping heck is this woman (clearly not a modern one) so keen to flatten her chest?

The third paragraph inks in a bit more of the mystery: OK, so this woman works on ships of some sort in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. So why is she disguising herself as a man?

And then –

The disaster –

The writer makes the horrendous mistake of answering that question. The story was just beginning to make fine headway. We wanted to grip our reader and thrust them forwards into the story. Our first three paragraphs set up a fine story motor, which was already starting to chug away. Then by completely solving the mystery, we destroyed almost every shred of momentum we had.

By the end of that extract, we still have an interest in seeing what happens to this woman, but we don’t yet know her very well as a character. We can’t at this stage care very much about her. But we did care about that mystery. And the author just ruined it.

The lesson here – and the easiest technique in fiction is – take it slow. If the reader wants to know X, then don’t tell them X.

That’s it! That’s the whole technique.

A much better approach here would have been to simply follow Caroline/Charles’s morning. I’d probably have given her some kind of problem to solve. Perhaps, she owes an innkeeper money that she doesn’t have and needs to slip away unseen. Or she has to collect some belongings from one part of town but has to get back to her ship in order not to miss the tide.

That way, one part of the reader is asking, Will she get back to her ship in time? But that’s just a top layer to the more interesting underlying question of Why is she disguised as a man?

Indeed, we’ll study the whole rushing-about-town episode with extra interest, because while we’re not that fussed about whether she misses the tide or not, we are interested in that second question – and we read about these ordinary story incidents as a way to uncover clues about the bigger issue.

The key fact here is that readers love solving mysteries. They like reading a text to find clues and hints and suggestions that lead them to an answer. I think for most readers that process has an extra impetus if the mystery is embedded in something very personal to a key character.

So the technique you need to adopt is:

  1. Create a mystery. Then,
  2. Don’t solve it.

The easiest technique in fiction.

A Last Minute Win

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Beth Kander has an article on Writers Digest website dated 12 December 2024, about how she entered a writing contest at the last minute an won more than the contest!

Beth Kander

Beth Kander is a novelist and playwright with tangled roots in the Midwest and Deep South. The granddaughter of immigrants, her writing explores how worlds old and new intertwine—or collide. Her work has been described as “riveting,” “emotional,” “expertly crafted,” and “habit-forming.” Expect twists, turns, and secrets, with surprising heart and humor. Beth has too many degrees and drinks too much coffee. Her favorite characters are her dashing husband and their two lovely kids.

She says, “This book definitely has a non-traditional origin. I was knee deep in another project when a friend texted to let me know that the pop culture site Hey Alma was having a Hanukkah movie pitch competition. Eager to procrastinate on my existing project, I checked the pitch competition deadline—and found out it was the very next day. Long story short (literally), I threw together a pitch for I Made It Out Of Clay, a quirky romcom-with-a-golem concept, submitted it at the 11th hour, and ultimately won the competition.

Industry folks started reaching out to me to inquire about film rights. My literary agent, Alli, passed along some great advice from a film agent colleague: “Write the book first, not the movie.” So, I set aside my other book projects and prioritized writing this novel. The story immediately provided myriad unconventional opportunities to explore big topics: grief and family dynamics and identity and adult friendships and turning 40 … I got to write about these heavy things while laughing and making monsters. What a gift.

I won the pitch competition in December 2022. I was so inspired, I drafted the novel in two blurry months. My agent took it out on sub in February 2023. It sold at auction in March 2023, and publication was set for December 2024. So all told, a two-year-process from idea to publication. That’s fast—often, the writing alone can take longer than that! I’m grateful that although the acquisition happened fast, I had a great editor and plenty of time to revise the book, several times over. I loved spending the time really developing the story and connecting with each character.

I’ve learned so much in the process of publishing this book that it’s honestly hard to even know where to begin, and there have been plenty of surprises along the way. But if I had to pull out the biggest lesson, it’s this: You just never know.

You can spend years working on a story you really believe in, only to have it languish and eventually fade away. You can have an overnight idea that becomes the story everyone’s eager to read. You can’t trust trends or tricks. You just have to keep trying. I think a lot about this two-panel meme, where the first panel is labeled “what people think success looks like” and shows an arrow moving steadily forward and up, and the second panel is labeled “what success actually looks like” and it shows a tangled mess that a forward-facing arrow finally re-emerges from… which feels relevant to the publishing process. But I’ve been over-the-top lucky to work with my agent, Alli, to navigate every detour along the way. And working on I Made It Out Of Clay with my editor, April, and the team at Mira/HarperCollins, has been a delight. Sometimes, gracefully and gratefully, the puzzle pieces slide into place.

You just never know.

This was the fastest writing process I’ve ever undertaken. To go from a paragraph-long idea to a 90,000-word novel in two months is… well, not something I’d necessarily recommend, honestly. Thank God for coffee.

But what I realized is that I didn’t speed-write this book in a vacuum; it wasn’t an anomaly, or a fluke. It was a culmination. All those years, all those other stories; that was my training for this manuscript-marathon. I doubt I’ll keep that pace up with many subsequent projects, but I’m definitely holding fast to the lesson that even the projects that don’t pan out help shape the ones that will fly.

There’s so much I hope that readers will get out of this book—catharsis, cackling-laughter, genuine enjoyment, a sense of release. There’s some strange stuff in the story (an actual monster!) but it’s really rooted in characters that I hope are relatable in all their imperfections and deep desires for something better. Most of all, I hope this book gives readers permission to laugh in the midst of sorrow or acknowledge sadness even as they dance for joy; to let complicated, conflicting emotions exist alongside each other on the page and in our lives. The publication of this book intersected with a profound loss in my own life, and I’ve become so grateful for anyone and anything that acknowledges that we can feel many things at once. If readers come away with that affirmation, I’ll be thrilled.

Write the book you want to rewrite—because most of writing is revising! Don’t agonize over every word in a first draft; that will only slow you down. Just write the story. Get it onto the page. Drafting is the stage where you capture the idea. Revising is where you figure out how to really tell the story well.”