Workshop feedback uses both words and they seem to be used interchangeably, sometimes in the same sentence about the same paragraph. I have been told to develop my voice and to vary my style without being told how they differ.
Is there a working distinction, or are they the same thing under two names?
Accepted Answer
The distinction most editors use: style is the set of choices, voice is what remains recognisable across them.
Style is sentence length, vocabulary, punctuation, how much you use subordinate clauses. These are decisions, and they can change to suit the piece. A writer can write one book in long flowing sentences and the next in short flat ones.
Voice is the thing that makes both recognisably by the same person: the attitude toward the material, what gets noticed, what is treated as funny or serious, what is left out.
Which is why "develop your voice" cannot be done directly by adjusting sentences. Voice comes from having a point of view and being specific about it. Style is where you are allowed to experiment.
Worth being suspicious of "find your voice" as advice though, because it suggests voice is a possession you locate and then own.
In practice it is more like a by-product. Writers who sound most themselves usually got there by writing a lot and steadily cutting the parts that were imitation, rather than by searching for something.
Treating it as a thing to find tends to produce mannerism: a writer picking a set of tics and performing them consistently, which reads as a costume rather than a voice.
A test that helps: a character can have a voice inside your style. If every character in a piece sounds like the narrator, the style is doing all the work and nothing else is.
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