Do You Sound Like AI? Author Voice, Boring Writing & Pseudonyms

Part 2 of the Author Voice series from my presentation Perfect Your Process Summit — I answer your biggest voice fears including sounding like AI, boring writing, query letter voice, pseudonyms, and whether you can say no to your editor.

◂ Watch Part 1: Narrator vs Character vs Author Voice

Resources Mentioned

FREE 3 Hollywood Secrets to Author Voice Workbook

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Sophia Chang (00:00)
The other big batch of questions that I got from my presentation that I want to address is this fear that I sound boring. There are a couple of things that are happening.

And it could be one or a mix of these. So just go through them and try. So the first one is, are you feeling self-conscious? I find that voice sometimes gets subsumed when we start worrying about who is going to read this, who's going to like it, are the gatekeepers going to be okay with this voice? Is this too much?

Or I don't know if an agent is going to like this. I don't know if a reader is going to be able to relate to this. That could be why you are holding yourself back.

And then what comes out is going to feel more stilted. We had a great conversation about AI at the end of the presentation and people were like, I'm afraid I sound like AI. One question was, I'm afraid I sound like AI because I speak very properly. And my response was that could be your voice. If you are the kind of person who speaks very prim and proper, that's a great voice to have, right? Like you could be like a Jane Austen type where you're making commentary.

You know, with this prim and proper voice, but you're actually like being very incisive — that's fun too. So that would be the first thing I would ask. And then the second thing I would ask is, do you find yourself trying to mimic someone else? Are you thinking, I've read all these books and I feel like I should sound more like this writer, or I feel like I should sound more writerly in general?

Then you are probably also getting away from your natural voice and trying to sound more like an author. So I would ask yourself those two things. If that solves it, then fantastic. If there's something else that's holding you back, feel free to hit reply and we'll get you sorted because your voice is in there.

Okay, so those were the two things. I'm afraid I sound like AI. I feel like my voice is boring.

The major stuff is like, do I even need to think about all three? And I would say, no, don't think about all three. Just get your novel done. Just finish it. Just finish it.

Okay.

My voice has bad habits like excessive minimizing words. So what's really cool about this question is that you can actually use tics like bad habits, things that your grammar school teacher told you don't do, or even things that you see on the internet now that's like don't do, that's bad writing. You could actually turn that into a character.

Or you can even make that your specific style. There are really no rules per se. There are things that make it easier for a reader, but there are no hard and fast rules that say you have to do this. My favorite thing to do, for instance, in dialogue is to purposefully write the way people speak. It's not grammatically correct.

So if you have excessive minimizing words — this person didn't write an example, but I'm guessing a minimizing word is something like "kind of," or "in my honest opinion" — I hate that one. I hate when this generation diminishes their authority. But that would make a great character, a character who can't speak without apologizing for everything, or without saying, I mean, kind of, sort of, and hedges everything. That says a lot about character and that's why voice is so important. It reveals who you are as a writer and your point of view and it reveals your characters. So I would say use it, be aware of your tics and use them intentionally.

Okay, this is a great question that I got in the chat. How to get voice across in a query letter? They're so short! Query letter writing is a whole different beast than novel writing.

That is probably the first thing that one of my friends who got agented before me told me. She was helping me with my query and she's just like, these are two totally different skills. And some writers are fantastic at both of them naturally and some need to learn that extra skill of marketing.

It is not like novel writing because you are selling something and you need to have very specific conventions that you're trying to hit. There are lots of query letter posts out there on Substack, on the internet. You can pull up a million. But I will say this. It is not the same.

However, however, there's one little overlap, and this is also if you haven't finished my workbook yet, I would get to it. Author voice — so out of the three, character, narrator, author — the author voice is the one that is going to help you the most for your query letter, as well as your website, because it is branding. Your author voice is part of your brand.

I'm very much like — I guess there's a little bit of snark, there's a lot of vulnerability. I'm really big on self-deprecation mixed with a little bit of egomania. I don't know. You guys can tell me how I come across, but it's a really distinct voice. And so that does come across in my website.

You guys can use my website sophiachang.com as an example of how in a really short amount of space, I still try to get my brand across, my author voice across. Right up top, I have what they call the hero paragraph, which is just, I'm a speculative writer who talks about third culture kids. Really quickly, I just say who I am.

This same friend even said that my books page, which is not even full sentences, it's just a list of tropes, is full of voice. And she has sent it to other people on TikTok as an example. I was very flattered. I'm not on TikTok. But even something as short as just listing your tropes and vibes — you can still have voice. And that comes from word choice. Right? I love strong words. I am very hyperbolic. I love exaggerating. That's my style. That's my voice. That's not going to work for somebody else. Right? That works for me. Straight shooter.

When I give presentations, very much, tell you the harsh reality. I tell you the harsh truth of publishing and I call it masochism. You can see that even in something as small as the title of my podcasts. Hollywood was easier than traditional publishing. Very strong statement. I'm going to tell it to you straight, right? That's my voice. And so you have to be kind of aware of how your voice is. So that's the best examples I can give you of how author voice will translate into the query, but nothing else because it's just very different.

Voice when using a pseudonym — this was a really interesting question. Am I the same person? And I love it because this...

Yeah, there's more than one person who asked this. Maybe it was a pseudonym.

I am planning on using a pseudonym for a different genre that I'm writing, but my voice is still very similar because one is going to be more of like a romance women's fiction line and the other is my general speculative fantasy. When I'm writing historical, obviously I'm going to be using a ye olde voice.

But when I'm doing contemporary, you're going to see a lot of overlap between the two. It's just they're going to be very similar. However, if you are writing genres that are so different — religious fiction, clean religious women's fiction versus like smut — I don't know, is anyone writing those too? Probably. Those are going to be really different, super different voices, you know, and especially if you're doing nonfiction and fiction, also very different voices.

So I would say it really depends on how much you are trying to distinguish between your two lines and your two pseudonyms.

All right. This is a protecting your voice question. Can I tell my editor no? You can tell your editor anything. So if you are self-publishing and this is an editor that you hired, then you are always the final say.

You are always the final say. The editor is just giving you a professional opinion. If this is traditional publishing and the editor is paying you, it's a little bit of a different story. There's a little more negotiation there going on. And so sometimes that's going to have a little bit of back and forth. And in that sense, okay, the editor is really trying to think of the best interest of selling the book.

But if it's an editor that you hired, then absolutely — I have made the mistake of hiring an editor. And this is for the book that actually got me Reese's Book Club and the agent. And I listened to her so much because I was so nervous. I was like, my gosh, I'm submitting this to so many big places. And I just really let her influence me so much that I lost a lot of my voice. And I went back and I actually restored some things to the way I had them.

And that will happen a lot to people who are really good at self-editing. And I work as an editor. I've been working as an editor professionally for decades now. And so I actually have a tendency to over-edit. And I have to sometimes go back to a previous draft. I literally just did that. I'm on my seventh novel right now. And I still did this. I had to go back to a previous draft because...

I went too far and I read it over and I'm like, who is this? Like this sounds like AI. There's nothing to it. I tried to be very concise. I was cutting things and I cut out my voice. And so I went back and I'm like, I need to slow down. I need to go back to my roots. So I went back a draft and it's a lot better now. So absolutely say no to the editor, even if the editor is yourself. Sometimes you're just editing to edit.

This is more of a comment, less of a question, and this was really good. Somebody said, voice versus brand versus perception. People interpret me through their own lens anyway, and I can't control that. And that is true. You can only control how you write and how aware of voice you are, but it doesn't matter. People are still going to view you through their own lens anyway. So that's why I always, always stress.

You have to stick to your own voice, even when it feels scary or when it feels too much, because no matter how much you try to fit into what you think is gonna be the best, most palatable or most sellable, people are still gonna be like, I hate this.

This is a real story. Again, these are all real horror stories I'm telling you from trad publishing. One of my friends got a one star because somebody was just like, I hate this cover. Like, why did this author choose this cover? And she was like, I didn't. This is what the artist drew. I thought it was great. And I don't really have a say because my editors were like, going to press.

You can't control how it's gonna get received. Just like, I can't even control how this is gonna get received. So you just gotta be yourself, be your voice.

You cannot please everybody. Exactly. And it hurts because we're very sensitive. And so when people don't like what we do, it feels like a reflection on us because I put so much of my heart and soul into what I write, so when that gets rejected it feels very personal. It's like, wow, you didn't like what I had to say.

It's no different than people unsubscribing. You know, I'll send an email and people will unsubscribe. And they may not even be saying anything negative. They might be unsubscribing because they get too many emails. And that's it. Or this just isn't what they wanted. They're like, I wanted you to talk about writing and now you're talking about weightlifting? Ew, gross. Right? I don't like this. And that's okay, but it hurts because it's like, my God, I just shared a piece of myself and somebody doesn't like it. They disliked it so much they left. You know, that feels so bad. It's like throwing a party and seeing a guest walk out the door and you're like — I have canapes! So what are you gonna do?

All right, this is not voice related, but somebody asked me this question and I really wanna answer it. What is your take on short story collections? Thank you so much for asking, and for responding to my survey.

I am really not the right person to respond to this because I haven't read a short story collection since like 2006, I think. Might've been the last one I read and it was quite good.

I think the last short story I read was actually Ted Chiang's short story that the movie Arrival was based on. Arrival is one of my favorite, favorite movies of all time and one of my books has a very Arrival-like circular time jumpy kind of thing similar to it.

It's just such a different skill set than novel writing that once you start writing a novel, you can't go back.

I will say though, from a marketing standpoint, because I do coach writers who market — I will tell them, if that's your jam and you can write a short story, you are ahead of the game. You're ahead of me because number one, you can get published much more quickly. You can get published in a magazine. That becomes a clip. That becomes a credit that you list when you're querying your novel. That looks fantastic. That's something you put on your website. That's more publicity for you.

And I have heard of writers getting book deals or agents because they wrote essays or short stories. And like I said, the Ted Chiang one — he wrote that short story, it became a whole freaking movie with Amy Adams. Hello, A-list. So, you know, if you can do it, do it. And also if you are good at editing, you can make an anthology yourself.

And you can put out a call on Substack. You can put out a call for people to submit to your short story collection. Now you have an editor credit. So as a marketing tool, I can only see positives.

Somebody actually asked about the life of an artist and I'm like, how many years do you have? But I do hear that a lot of people actually don't like to hear about the behind the scenes in the life and I don't know how true that is. So I would love for you guys to tell me if you do want to know about the life slash lifestyle of a writer, creative solopreneur, or whether you guys care more about the craft.

When I did put out the survey — and granted, this is like a minuscule percentage of the people who signed up to my newsletter — but the ones who did respond, and I asked, do you prefer to hear about craft advice and about publishing as an industry? Or do you prefer to hear about, you know, stories from my life and the behind the scenes kind of stuff? The overwhelming majority said they wanted to hear more of the craft advice, the industry advice and not as many wanted my wacky stories.

I think the people who want the wacky stories are people who know me in real life and they're just like, you're ridiculous. I want to hear more about your ridiculous life. Because my life is really crazy. I've had a really ridiculous life. And so really sad. Nobody wants to hear about it, but it's too late. You guys didn't want to hear about it. So I'm not gonna talk about it.

I got to give the people what they want. I'm here for you. I hope you guys enjoyed this unhinged Q&A about voice and the distinction between the three different kinds of voice and how to apply that. I am going to be presenting at another summit this summer, hopefully two, and I'm gonna go further with this whole voice thing because it seems like a lot of people have a lot of questions.

Let me know if you'd rather hear about character voice or narrator voice or author voice, which has a lot more to do with branding. See, look, you guys gave me feedback and I answered all of your questions. I promised you I would. There are a couple of other questions that fell outside of the realm of this particular topic that I'll answer in another one. Thank you guys so much for coming. I'm like emotional because I'm a very overly sensitive person that people actually showed up. So I'll see you next time.

Sophia Chang (16:27)
Thank you so much for tuning in. If you ask a question, as you can see, I will answer it. So subscribe below and I can't wait to answer more of your craft questions.

Sophia Chang is a Reese's Book Club LitUp fellow, disabled dancer, and extroverted writer. She hosts The Sophia Chang Show podcast where her honest traditional publishing stories will make you scream in your sleep. SUBSCRIBE to find out why deadlifts will save your writing life.