Ever dreamed of being a journalist but unsure where to start in an age where anyone can publish, algorithms shape visibility, and AI can generate copy in seconds? The question now isn't just how to break in, but what journalism is, and what makes writing feel vital and true.
In a new series, Roe McDermott explores the human elements AI can’t replicate: voice, craft, instinct, and the slow process of discovering what you think - qualities that still make writing matter.
In this instalment, Roe examines the pitfalls of chasing a single "true" voice.
There's a persistent piece of writing advice that gets passed around with the confidence of a universal truth: find your One True Voice. As if somewhere inside you there is a single, pristine, fully formed "true voice" waiting to be excavated, polished, and then deployed consistently across every sentence you ever publish.
This idea is not just misleading; it’s actively unhelpful.
The fantasy of the One True Voice suggests that consistency equals authenticity, and that variation is a kind of betrayal – of yourself, of your readers, of your "brand." It encourages writers to flatten themselves, to pick a register and stay there, even when the subject matter, genre, audience, or purpose demands something else. It treats voice as a fixed identity rather than a practice. But in reality, most good writers don’t have a voice; they have many.
Writer Sonya Huber understands this acutely. A writer and teacher, Huber was all too aware of the adage that all writers are trying to discover their One True Voice. But when Huber became afflicted with chronic pain, her own writing voice changed significantly. Before her condition, she used flowery language, metaphors, she took time getting to her conclusion, there was a dangerous, exploratory pace to her work. But in pain, Huber knew the time she had the metal and physical energy to write was finite, precious, and therefore not to be wasted. She became more succinct, sharper, laser-focused. As Huber writes in her excellent essay collection Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System, "My non-pain voice searched for metaphors to entrain you. She aims to fascinate with far-reaching, pretty, star-system lava curlicues, hiding behind constructions that might allow you to forget for a second that you are even looking at a woman at all. Pain Woman takes your car keys are drives away."
Watch: Sonia Huber in conversation
(Huber has now written an excellent book that’s all about embracing the different voices writers already possess and can tap into, entitled Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto, which I highly recommend.)
For you, think about how you speak in your own life. You don’t talk to your best friend the same way you talk to your boss; you don’t speak the same way when you’re excited and hopeful than when you’re exhausted and despairing. You’re still you in all of those contexts – your values, instincts, humour, and emotional range don’t vanish – but you adapt. You emphasise different aspects of yourself. You choose different rhythms, different levels of explanation, different kinds of vulnerability or authority. We don’t experience this as inauthentic; we experience it as social intelligence.
Writing works the same way.
The idea that a writer must sound identical across all different writing genres, mediums, outlets, misunderstands what voice actually is. Voice is not a single tone or style. It’s a relationship between the writer, the material, and the reader. Change any one of those variables, and the voice should shift.
I write an advice column, opinion pieces, reviews, and long-form features, and if I used the same voice in all of them, I’d be bad at my job.
In my advice writing, the voice is intimate and direct. It’s a one-to-one conversation, even though I know thousands of people are reading. The structure is shaped around listening, empathy, and clarity. I think of responding to a letter-writer as me responding to my best friend – I care deeply about them, I want them to thrive, but I also love them enough to challenge them to be better and call them out on bad behaviour. In my advice column, the "I" is present, but not dominant – it exists to model care, boundaries, and perspective, not to win an argument. The voice needs to feel trustworthy and human, but also decisive. Advice writing is dialogic by nature: it’s a response, not a declaration, so empathy and connection have to evident within that. However, I’m also me – I’m a feminist with a background in academia, so sometimes I connect the personal question to larger issues of gender relationships or socialisation, because I see intimate relationships as being inextricable form the social structures around us. This fees authentic to me, because it’s how I think and speak. Ask any of my friends – I do this in real life too!
In reality, your voice will change over time, and that's not a failure – it’s evidence that you’re paying attention.
Opinion writing, by contrast, is adversarial in a way advice is not. It’s a public argument. The voice here is sharper, more compressed, more insistent. I’m anticipating resistance and so I’m writing towards disagreement. Structurally, that means tighter logic, clearer stakes, and less meandering. The tone might be angrier, more urgent, more declarative - this isn’t because I’ve become a different person, but because the genre demands a different kind of authority and momentum. I care about the issues I’m writing about in the same way I care about the people who write into my column, but the tone is different because I’m not writing towards a person, but towards an issue. It’s less relational, more assertive.
Features writing is something else again. It’s polyphonic. The writer’s voice is present, but it’s deliberately porous. The structure has to make space for other people’s voices to come through – interviewees, scenes, details, contradictions. My job there is not to dominate, but to curate and connect: to decide where to step forward with analysis and where to step back and let the reporting breathe. The voice becomes less about opinion and more about attention.
All of these voices are "me." None of them is more authentic than the others. I have worked to become aware of these different voices and deliberately tap into them over different pieces – and sometimes I bring them together in one piece. In my creative non-fiction, I often utilise narrative braiding, where I have three distinct threads, all utilising a different voice, and then I weave these different threads together to create layers of meaning. For example, an essay I wrote on Ireland’s attitudes to sexual violence had a thread with a research-based voice, where I recounted public coverage of rape trials and cited statistics; it had a thread with a personal story which was of course more intimate and emotive; and I had a thread where I utilised a metaphor about film and literary adaptations of Frankenstein to illustrate the stigmatising nature of shame. This voice used quotations and metaphors. Layering these voices together gave the work movement, meaning but also pointed to all the different ways that sexual violence survivors experience the world – personally, publicly, and through artistic representations and meaning-making. The multiple voices added to the piece, they didn’t detract.
Watch: The Heart and Art of the Personal Essay with Sophie White, Roe McDermott & Emilie Pine
The problem with the One True Voice myth is that it treats adaptability as a weakness, when in fact it’s one of the core skills of good journalism and wring. Being able to adjust tone, structure, and emphasis without losing your underlying values is not selling out; it’s craft. It shows you understand not just what you want to say, but also the relationship you have the reader, and how your work will land with them,
This matters even more in an age of AI. Large language models are very good at reproducing a narrow, consistent tone. They’re less good at strategic variation – at understanding why a piece needs to sound different because the relationship with the reader is different. Human writers can sense when a piece needs warmth instead of force, curiosity instead of certainty, openness instead of polish. That sensitivity comes from having multiple voices available, and knowing when to use them.
Escaping the One True Voice trap also frees writers from a lot of unnecessary anxiety. If you believe there is a single correct way you’re supposed to sound, every piece becomes a test of authenticity. Am I "losing my voice" if I write something more restrained? Am I betraying it if I experiment with form, or humour, or vulnerability? This kind of thinking discourages growth, exploration, play, and punishes risk.
and long-form features, and if I used the same voice in all of them, I'd be bad at my job.'
In reality, your voice will change over time, and that’s not a failure – it’s evidence that you’re paying attention. As you read more, live more, get angrier or softer or more tired or more hopeful, different registers will come to the foreground, and some will recede. That doesn’t mean you’ve become inconsistent; it means your internal conversation has gotten more complex, and that simply give you more tools for your writing.
The work, then, is not to find the voice, but to map your voices: to understand what modes you naturally slip into, what each one is good at, and where its limits are; to know when your analytical voice starts to flatten emotion, or when your empathetic voice avoids conflict, or when your polemical voice oversimplifies. Mastery comes from choice, not from rigidity.
Authenticity isn’t about sounding the same all the time. It’s about coherence beneath variation. Your values, curiosities, and intellectual commitments can remain stable even as your tone and structure shift. That’s not dilution; it’s depth. Learning to notice your different voices and tap into them deliberately – rather than accidentally or apologetically – is one of the most powerful things a writer can do.
Exercise: Mapping Your Voices
1: Collect Samples
Gather three pieces of your own writing in different genres (or imagined genres): for example, an opinion paragraph, a reported piece, and something personal or explanatory.
2: Identify the Shifts
For each piece, note: Who is the reader? What is the relationship you’re assuming with them? Where does authority come from in this piece – expertise, empathy, experience, argument? What’s the dominant tone (gentle, urgent, curious, combative, reflective)?
3: Name the Voices
Give each mode a provisional name – not to box it in, but to make it visible (e.g. the explainer, the advocate, the listener). What is each voice good at? What does it struggle with?
4: Experiment Deliberately
Take one idea and write two short versions of it in different voices. Notice what changes in structure, pacing, and emphasis – and what stays the same.
That throughline is your authenticity. The variation is your strength.
Next: The Art of Argument: Journalism as Persuasion...
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