The Write Stuff 2026: New Book!

I’ve been reading and writing since I was four years old—not just “writing my name” and “reading road signs,” but reading and writing stories. I was the kid who pulled the books off the shelf as soon as he could learn to walk, and I started working my way through the ever-expanding home library when I was learning to ride a bike.

My favorite part of those little black squiggles-on-paper was always how different each writer sounded. Some wrote like my Sunday School Teachers talked. Some wrote like my grandmother in the Amazon jungle wrote her letters. Some of them sounded like the the narrators in my favorite kid’s movies. Some sounded a lot like newscasters. I could hear their voices in my head, as surely as I could hear accents when people spoke.

I started studying the human voice before I knew that “voice” is more than just “the sound the mouth makes.” Over the past several decades I’ve managed to scrape out a living by using what I know for writing, ghost-writing, acting, directing, editing, and entertaining those of you who are good enough to be reading this now.

An artist’s voice is the hardest thing to define and the most important skill to master (outside basic storytelling). The way you speak and write sets expectations in the minds of your readers (or interlocutors) that create the foundation of trust that makes the story go down smooth. It’s extremely difficult to teach, because almost all of it is unconscious, and the only places in our culture that attempt to do so regularly are the disciplines of homiletics (preaching), speechmaking, and salesmanship—and then, only for specific, targeted purposes.

So, for many years, I’ve been sitting on the notes for a book about this subject for other writers. When I got a call from Kristine Kathryn Rusch asking me if I had any new and exciting resources for writers, I knew it was time to turn the notes into a book.

The result is The Pitch-Perfect Author: Voice Mastery for Writers. In it I tackle everything from controlling the rhythms of your writing and the speed of your reader, to using phonetics to induce sensory experience, to rhyme and accent and social class coding, writing characters of different intelligence levels from you, and how to audit a book for voice problems (and then fix them).