Tonight we had a discussion about VOICE, and considering all attendees to our writing group today were female, whether a female can effectively tell a story in a male voice.

Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EH_Voice_Box.jpg

Jessie brought in a story she’s working on for the upcoming Catchfire Press Competition due at the end of October. It is written in first person deep point of view, but the challenge is that the main character is male. We discussed whether the story had a effective male voice, and how Jessie could strengthen the male voice without coming across as stereotypical.

The main character is a father taking his 3 year old daughter to a swimming lesson. Three aspects we discussed about the story, that could be changed to make it sound more masculine were:

• We changed ‘I avoid looking at the swim coach’ to ‘I’m not going to look at the swim coach’.
• We…