Prose craft
Writer's voice
The distinctive features of a written work in terms of spoken utterance: the characteristics its narrator or speaker displays, assessed by tone, style or personality.
Writer's voice (also writing or authorial voice) is the critics' term for the "distinctive features of a written work in terms of spoken utterance": "the specific group of characteristics displayed by the narrator or poetic 'speaker'," assessed by tone, style or personality. The voice may belong to the narrator or to "the actual author behind" that narrator, and it is distinct from a character's voice and from grammatical voice. It shows in small choices: qualifying words, emphasizing words and personal pronouns, where "perhaps" signals doubt and "clearly" confidence, and sentence patterns used in a characteristic way. A writer's voice "is always adapting over time," with more experienced writers developing more distinctive features.
Voice is what readers recognize before they can name it, and it holds a long project together. It is built sentence by sentence: free indirect discourse colors narration with a character's diction, and ornament that carries no attitude or perception is the road to purple prose.