Voice vs. Style vs. Tone vs. Mood

Rosemi Mederos: 00:01

If you have plot bunnies coming out of your plot holes, it's time for a writing break.

Season 10 starts today, and it’s all about voice. A whole season about voice, you might ask? Yes, ma'am, sir, comrade. Voice is the thing lit agents, publishers, and readers fall in love with, so, yeah, it’s important enough for a whole season.

We've got one news story and a bit more about how I decided voice was what we needed to discuss this season. I want you to imagine an evidence board covered in notes and photos and I'm gesticulating wildly in front of it. So, not exactly an Overthinking Couch moment, but more like we're in the backroom of the cafe in a makeshift Overthinking Conference Room.

The Writing Break cafe is open. Let's get something highly caffeinated and sneak off to that backroom to assess the situation.

Way back in: 2014

I replied that anyone who sounded like Hemingway was deliberately trying to sound like Hemingway and didn't need a website to tell them that's who they sounded like. And a big part of what made Hemingway sound like Hemingway was that if he were straightforward about what he wanted to say, it wouldn't have been printed at that time. So, really, these days, there's no reason to sound like Hemingway when you can just say the thing.

The caller took a beat before soldiering on, and it was at this point that I suspected I was speaking with a salesperson and not a tech-savvy bibliophile.

her away. Like I said, it was: 2014

But I tend to go for the jugular before settling into a regular conversation with people, so my not-exactly-rhetorial question was, "Why would an author want to pay to share their unpublished crime novel just to be told it sounds like middle grade?"

And this person has said to me, "What's middle grade?"

So, now I knew it was time to hang up. I explained what middle grade meant, suggested he learn book genres before his next call, and said that I wasn't interested in whatever he thought he had to offer.

Of course, now that: 2026

Anyway, I couldn't imagine a bigger waste of time than trying to sound like another writer or trying to make sure you can pass an AI detector. On the Author’s Guild forum, a writer shared a screenshot of an AI detector flagging one of her paragraphs as AI-written text and, the next time she ran the same program, it said it was not AI-written text. Same paragraph. Heaven help us.

My favorite story so far was told to me by an author who regularly writes marketing copy. She’s been doing it for decades, and she was accused by a new client of submitting AI-written work. So, she copied text from the client’s website, pasted it into the same AI detector the client used on her work, and lo and behold, it was flagged as AI-generated text. The writer was no longer questioned after that, but what a pain in the posterior.

Then you've got ElevenLabs using an artificially intelligent clone of Michael Caine's voice to narrate The Odyssey. Ugh. But maybe it's fitting since characters in The Odyssey often don't recognize Odysseus at first. Groan. Clearly, this use of a cloned voice is just a marketing gimmick that ties in with the recent release of a movie about Homer's epic poem. It's also a strange little omen for our season on voice.

Although Writing Break has received more than one email asking where we got the supposed AI voice we use on the show (it's just me), I have yet to attempt to clone my voice. And here's a question I have about that. If bone conduction makes a person's voice sound different to themselves, can they do the quality check on their own cloned voice? Anyway, no AI voice clone for me, but in preparing for this episode, I tried out four free AI detectors on a few transcripts of past Writing Break episodes. The transcripts are already available online, so I tried not to feel like I was feeding the Virtual Volcano. And maybe I still was, but I was doing it for you, so that makes it OK, right?

Now, for the most part, it decided I was a human, which is good, because I walk into the studio with notes, quotes, and talking points, but not a script. So if what I'm saying off the cuff sounds like a machine, I'd be concerned. But sometimes I read a long quote or try to make a literary explanation clear, so I leave out my odd-but-subtle humor, and some of those sentences were flagged by the artificial artifice of intelligence. By the way, when I added the word "comrade" at the beginning, middle, or end of a flagged sentence, the AI deemed that the sentence was no longer AI. Just something to make note of, comrade.

So, AI detectors are incorrectly flagging human writing as AI-written or even AI-assisted, and students are dumbing down their essays so that their work doesn’t get flagged by some random AI detector. Why does this artificial artifice of intelligence make so many mistakes? Because AI is trained to sound like humans, and humans sound like other humans. Mm-hm. Plus, I think AI is jealous of us.

Anyway, that's where voice comes in. Yes, I try to keep my explanations straightforward sometimes, and AI has decided that clear communication could not possibly be a human thing. Which, I mean, I could see how it would draw that conclusion. But, as you'll see, the problem seems to be that the AI detector was sort of picking up on my voice but not on my style.

Writers often discuss the concept of "finding their voice" and an agent might say, "the voice isn't working," and sometimes you just wonder, what the heck are they talking about? Ironically enough, using "found" to discuss voice in writing is improper diction. We'll review diction as well. But, like, later.

In this episode, I'm going just for the trickiest part, which is understanding the difference between style, tone, voice, and mood.

Style is how a writer, that's you, uses language. Not just in this one book, but in your career. So, your writing style could change from book to book or even just over time, but if you keep at it long enough, you will develop a base writing style. Do you, as a writer, consult the thesaurus as your write or just use the words you already know? Do you write long, descriptive sentences? What's your dialogue like? Do you write a lot of spicy scenes or none at all? Even the way you punctuate across all your writing becomes your writing style. Some people are upset about AI using the em dash because that was their thing. Now, here's how to remember style: Would you ever, as a writer, kill a puppy in any of your books? If no, leave a comment with titles of your books. I'd love to read them. If yes, well, okay. Then that's your style, you puppy killer. So, style is how you use language as a writer, no matter what you're writing.

As for tone, that's the author's attitude toward what they're writing about as they're writing it. Tone changes from scene to scene. A scene about an arrest could be written in a sad tone or a fearful tone. The tone used tells us what the author, not the narrator or the characters, but what the author thinks about the situation. You're writing about characters planning a heist, but no one in on the planning speaks the same language. You, as a writer, think that's a funny situation, so you write it in a humorous tone. Another writer might think it's a frustrating situation, so they write it in an irritated tone, maybe even with some hostility.

Then we come to voice, which is the personality of the narrator. Isn't the narrator the same as the author? No. No it is not. Whether you're writing in first person or third person, the narrator is not the author. Not in fiction, anyway. So, what personality are you, the author, giving to the narrator of a particular book, or, if you're working on a muti-POV manuscript, then what personality are you giving to the narrator of a particular chapter? And that, comrades, is a slippery eel of an idea, but we'll get a handle on it this season.

Mood is the feeling created in the reader as they read. Simple as that.

So, you see, when a reader or lit agent reads one of your books, they might not get a full sense of your writing style, and tone changes from scene to scene, but the narrator's personality, the voice of the book, is the real reason they love your work.

As for your overthinking prompt for the week, take a look at what you're writing and see whether your narrator's personality comes through or not.

We'll talk this season about dialogue as voice, character as voice, voice in nonfiction and memoir, when you should break the rules, how to edit for voice, and more. It'll be fun, I promise. And it'll be even more fun with friends, so be a pal and share this podcast with your writerly hmm . . . comrades.

Until next time, thank you so much for listening, and remember, you deserve this break.