Finding Your Voice in Southern Fiction

“Don’t try to be ‘a writer.’ Just try to sound like yourself — but sharper.”

In Southern literature, voice is more than style — it’s soul. It’s the sound of front porch truths and backwoods reckonings, of silence passed down between generations. Whether you're writing from a cabin in the Appalachians or an apartment in Atlanta, if you’re chasing Southern literary fiction, you're chasing voice.

But how do you find yours?

“The best voice is the one that comes natural — but most folks have to write their way into it.”
— Flannery O’Connor

MFA programs will tell you to read widely and write obsessively — and they’re not wrong. But if you're rooted in the South, your voice may already be inside you, shaped by the rhythms of place: the slow build of a storm, the long pause before someone tells you the truth, the way a memory haunts the back of a sentence.

At Porchlight, we’ve read enough to know: the best Southern writers aren’t imitating Faulkner or O’Connor — they’re channeling something older. Something in the dirt and the drawl. Your job isn’t to replicate it. Your job is to listen to where your version of it lives.

Lessons from the Field

MFA instructors across the South — from Sewanee to UNC-Wilmington — talk about voice as the meeting place of experience and rhythm.

“A writer’s voice is what they choose to leave unsaid.”
— Allan Gurganus, Duke University

In workshops, writers often confuse voice with dialect, but they aren’t the same. Voice is not whether you drop a ‘g’ off “walking.” It’s whether your character walks through the page like they belong there. It’s whether the narrator holds back or leans in. Whether your sentences linger or bite.

The Southern Review once published an essay that argued the Southern voice is, “a blues line interrupted by gospel.” We’d add: it’s also part confession, part warning.

Porchlight Tips for Finding Your Voice

• Write how your people talk — but edit like a stranger is listening.
• Read aloud. If it doesn’t sound like you, it probably isn’t.
• Steal rhythm, not sentences. Let your favorites influence the music, not the melody.
• Write scenes set in your hometown — even if you left it long ago.
• Revise for truth, not just polish. Voice is often buried under the parts we’re scared to keep.

“If you want to write about the South, you have to accept that ghosts ride shotgun.”
— Jesmyn Ward

Voice isn’t found in your first draft. It’s revealed through repetition, rejection, and the refusal to fake it. Southern fiction demands a kind of honesty — not just in what you say, but how you say it.

So sit down, stay awhile, and listen. Not just to other writers, but to yourself.

Because the South doesn’t need another storyteller trying to sound like Faulkner.
It needs you, at your clearest and most unguarded.