Every genre has its own unique signatures readers come to expect, known as voice and tone. These elements make it possible to identify the genre within a few pages and often reflect the personality, mood, and spirit of your characters and your themes. Nailing your novel, memoir, or short story’s voice and tone will ensure you meet readers’ expectations while increasing your chance of publication. This workshop will explore such things as how voice emerges from character and personality; sentence structure and other voice mechanisms; how emotion creates voice; specific word choices; and much more.

Jordan Rosenfeld is author of the forthcoming novel Fallout (Running Wild Press, 2024), as well as the novels Women in Red and Forged in Grace and six books on writing craft, most recently How to Write a Page-Turner. Her freelance articles and essays have appeared in hundreds of national publications such as The New York Times, Scientific American, and Writer’s Digest. She is a freelance manuscript editor and writing teacher. Find her at Jordanrosenfeld.net.