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.
In looking at the very basic fundamentals of how to tell good stories, we started with a big picture look at the key building blocks of storytelling which we’ll endeavour to dig into throughout the following workshops.
The Building Blocks: Character, Voice, and Scene
CHARACTER
Character is more than traits on a page, it’s desire, flaw, and choice. James Wood calls it the “illusion of depth.”
In fiction, character is the vessel through which story becomes human. In big-picture terms, character is both mirror and engine. A mirror because characters reflect what it means to be alive, our hunger for meaning, our moral waverings, our need for connection. An engine because their internal movement (what they want versus what they fear) drives the external plot. Without character, events are just occurrences; with character, they become consequence.
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. As well as more complex character writing such as unreliable narrators, and deeply flawed heroes versus the kind-hearted villain.
Setting - A sub-pillar of character. Stories can be told without characters, think of poetry and prose framed around the lifecycle of a plant, or the ebbs and flows of a tide, the migration of penguins across the Antarctic or the voyage of a feather lost in a breeze.
When setting comes alive, it stops being backdrop and starts being presence. It breathes, remembers, intrudes. Done well, a setting doesn’t just contain a story, it expresses it, shaping mood, memory, and meaning as surely as any human character.
At its most powerful, setting becomes character because it carries intention and consequence. A rusted farmhouse or a decaying city isn’t just visually rich; it holds psychology. It changes the way people move, speak, dream. It has scars, secrets, and seasons.
In this sense, setting interacts with the protagonist in three key ways:
Reflective: it mirrors their internal state. The cold apartment or storm-torn street echoes grief, alienation, tension.
Reactive: it resists them. The desert tests endurance; the city isolates; the house remembers.
Transformative: it changes alongside them, or refuses to, and in that refusal defines the cost of their change.
Writers like Emily Brontë, Toni Morrison, and Tim Winton understand this instinctively: the moor, the town, the coastline, they’re alive with consciousness. They judge, they witness. In their presence, human characters seem smaller, more fragile, but also more real.
When a reader can feel where a story happens as viscerally as who it happens to, the two fuse; setting and character become inseparable aspects of the same soul.
Voice
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.
Two Layers:
Authorial Voice: The writer’s unique sensibility, style, and worldview—what makes their work recognisably theirs.
Character/Narrative Voice: The tone, diction, and perspective through which the story world is filtered—what makes it sound like someone is telling it.
What Shapes It: Word choice, syntax, rhythm, attitude, tone, worldview, and the interplay between what’s said and what’s implied.
Why It Matters: Voice determines intimacy and trust. It guides how readers feel the story—comic, tragic, tender, raw—and it’s what makes even simple scenes unforgettable.
Shortcut Definition: Voice = the story’s soul speaking in words.
Scene
Scene (and/or Plot) 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.
A while ago I came across C.S Lakin’s Blog and in particular, her Scene Structure Checklist. I’ve used it ever since as a guidepost to identify when a scene is or isn’t working.
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).
Each scene should include vivid sensory details (Without it, a scene stays flat, information rather than immersion).
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.
All of these elements of creative writing will be explored in depth as the workshops continue.
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.
