Finding Your Voice: Part One

The Pillars of Creative Writing

At our first Writer’s Nest session, we dived into the foundations of creative writing, not as a mysterious gift, but as a discipline with its own history, frameworks, and practical tools.

Why Writing is More Than Self-Expression

Creative writing isn’t just “getting it off your chest.” It’s the deliberate act of using language, form, and structure to make meaning in someone else’s mind. Aristotle wrote about mimesis (imitation) and catharsis (emotional release) over 2,000 years ago. And E.M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, gave us the classic distinction between story and plot:

• Story: “The king died and then the queen died.”

• Plot: “The king died and then the queen died of grief.”

From the beginning, narrative has been about shaping experience, not simply recording it.

The Building Blocks: Character, Voice, and Scene

Character is more than traits on a page, it’s desire, flaw, and choice. James Wood calls it the “illusion of depth.”

Think of Elizabeth Bennet: clever, sharp, but blinded by her own prejudice.

Why do we love “flawed” characters? Can we really enjoy characters who don’t have relatable flaws?

Some of the greatest characters in literary fiction aren’t even the heroes. We have unforgettable villains as protagonists (Lolita, American Psycho) and Heroes who make big mistakes (Project Hail Mary, The Great Gatsby, Harry Potter).

We touched on just a handful of the types of characters and character tropes: The Hero, The Damsel, The Villain, The Sidekick, The Wise-Counsel etc.

Setting - A sub-pillar of character. Stories can be told without characters, but in that case the setting becomes the character. Think of poetry and prose framed around the lifecycle of a plant, or the ebbs and flows or a tide, the migration of penguins across the Antarctic or the voyage of a feather lost in a breeze.

And we broached the way setting can be as alive on the page as the characters whose stories we are telling.

Voice is diction, rhythm, perspective. Wayne Booth reminds us that the author always stands behind the narrator, deciding how trustworthy they appear.

Holden Caulfield’s slang and digressions create intimacy and unreliability at once.

One distinction we drew was between voice and dialogue. Dialogue is what a character says. Voice is how the story is told. Even if no character is speaking, voice is still present in the rhythm of sentences, the tilt of metaphors, the attitude toward detail.

Voice can also be our voice as writers. Just as Austen’s ironic wit or Brontë’s gothic intensity feel unmistakably theirs, our own work will develop its own recognisable patterns, favourite words, the way we build a sentence, the things we can’t help but notice. Over time, this “signature” becomes part of what readers seek out in us.

At the same time, each story deserves its own voice. The sharp lyricism that suits a gothic romance might not serve a clipped, contemporary satire. Think of voice as a costume or mask: your underlying cadence is there, but it adapts to the role. This is why writers often say they “hear” a narrator before they fully know a plot. Voice is both a fingerprint and a performance.

Key takeaway: Voice isn’t decoration, it’s the reader’s entire experience of the story’s mind. Get it right, and you can make even silence feel loud.

Scene is where fiction burns.

John Gardner called scenes “the engines of fiction” because they are what actually move the story forward. Without them, you only have exposition, summary, or reflection, important, but inert on their own. Scene is where character, voice, and pressure collide into action.

Think of Alice Munro. In Runaway, it isn’t a grand twist that changes everything, but a single gesture: Carla laying her hand on the goat’s back. That quiet moment carries enormous weight because it reveals choice, emotion, and consequence all at once. Scene is never “just what happens.” It is the hinge of meaning.

At its heart, Scene is Plot. It embodies both the what (action, event, behaviour) and the why (motivation, subtext, stakes). One without the other collapses: pure action without motive feels empty; motive without action feels static.

Scenes do more than report. They compress time, magnify conflict, and make change visible. A scene doesn’t need to be dramatic in volume, a conversation over a cup of tea can alter the course of a novel if it cracks something open in a character.

Practical ways to think about scene:

• Each scene should contain tension (even small friction counts).

• Each scene should result in a shift (of knowledge, mood, power, or possibility).

• If nothing shifts, it may not be a scene (it may be backstory or summary).

• Scenes, stacked together, are the plot. Plot is not separate scaffolding; it emerges from scenes that accumulate pressure and consequence.

Key takeaway: When you think about plot, don’t imagine it as an outline hovering above the text. Plot is the lived experience of characters under pressure, revealed one scene at a time.

The Keystone of Writing: Revision

If Character, Voice, and Scene are the pillars of fiction, then Revision is the framework that holds them steady. It’s in revision that raw material becomes story, that the structure reveals itself, and that the unnecessary weight is stripped away.

The line “kill your darlings” is one of those famous workshop mantras with a slightly messy history. It’s most often attributed to William Faulkner, who supposedly told writers to “kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart.” But the earliest recorded version comes from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, a Cambridge lecturer, in On the Art of Writing (1916): “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.” Later, Faulkner, Hemingway, and others repeated the advice in different forms, which is why it’s so often misattributed.

What matters isn’t who said it, but what it means: revision asks you to be less protective, more honest, more in service to the story than to yourself. “Kill your darlings” doesn’t mean writing without passion or stripping away everything you love. It means recognising when a line, scene, or character exists for you rather than for the story. Revision is both ruthless and generous — ruthless in cutting what drags, generous in giving your best ideas the space to shine.

Here’s the myth to kill: writers don’t sit down and produce brilliance in one go.

• Hemingway rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms 39 times.

• Toni Morrison re-typed entire manuscripts to rediscover rhythm.

• Stephen King cuts 10% from every draft.

• Raymond Carver’s stories were often slashed to half their length by editor Gordon Lish.

Revision is where the real writing happens.

Good revision doesn’t mean writing without passion or discarding everything you love. It means recognising when a line, scene, or character exists for your ego rather than the story. Revision asks: does this serve the whole? If not, either make it serve, or scrap it.

Final Wrap

Creative writing rests on four pillars: character, voice, scene, and revision. But none of which can be forged without first making a start.

Next month at The Writer’s Nest:

We’ll test ourselves with our spin on a First Line Friday challenge: four paragraphs spun from a single first line.

Then we’ll ask: How do you decide where to start, and what makes an opening unforgettable?

Join the Facebook group to get involved.

A Call to Write

You don’t have to be published. You don’t even have to be confident. Just curious enough to show up.

There’s a moment in every writer’s life, often just before the first real page, where you ask yourself: am I allowed to do this? Do I even have time?

You might be writing in the margins of parenting, of shift work, of long commutes. You might have journals full of sentences but no one to read them. Or maybe you’ve never shared your writing aloud. Never called yourself a writer out loud.

This is your call.

The Writers’ Nest is a monthly workshop for emerging, aspiring, and quietly determined writers. It’s not a course. It’s not a critique group. It’s a space; steady, safe, generative, to sit with other writers, learn something about the craft, try something new, and remember that this work we do, alone, doesn’t have to be lonely.

We meet in person.
One night a month.
One prompt, one technique, one shared moment of time carved out just for this.
All you need is a page and something to say.

You don’t need to be experienced. You don’t need a pen name, a degree, or a writing CV. You just need to come.

The first Writers’ Nest workshop will be held on Thursday September 25th at Ms Peacock in Eynesbury.
It’s free. You just need to sign up on the Facebook page so we know you’ll be there.

“Sometimes just being witnessed is enough to keep the page turning.”

We’d love to have you.

→ Join the Nest [insert link to Facebook group or sign-up form]

The Writers’ Nest

Welcome to The Writers’ Nest, the blog of Eynesbury Press and Monthly Workshop Companion.

This is where we unravel ideas from our monthly workshops, trace the stitches between practice and process, and sit a while with the messy, luminous work of writing. Some entries will reflect on the themes we explore together. Others will offer gentle provocations, craft notes, or glimpses behind the curtain of our retreats and publishing projects.

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