The secret to any voice grows from a writer’s finding a tractor beam of inner truth about psychological conflicts to shine the way. While an artist consciously constructs a voice, she chooses its elements because they’re natural expressions of character. So above all, a voice has to sound like the person wielding it—the super-most interesting version of that person ever—and grow from her core self.

Pretty much all the great memoirists I’ve met sound on the page like they do in person. If the page is a mask, you rip it off only to find that the writer’s features exactly mold to the mask’s form, with nary a gap between public and private self. These writers’ voices make you feel close to—almost inside—their owners. Who doesn’t halfway consider even a fictional narrator like Huck Finn or Scout a pal?

The voice should permit a range of emotional tones—too wiseass, and it denies pathos; too pathetic, and it’s shrill. It sets and varies distance from both the material and the reader—from cool and diffident to high-strung and close. The writer doesn’t choose these styles so much as he’s born to them, based on who he is and how he experienced the past.

Voice isn’t just a manner of talking. It’s an operative mindset and way of perceiving that naturally stems from feeling oneself alive inside the past. That’s why self-awareness is so key. The writer who’s lived a fairly unexamined life—someone who has a hard time reconsidering a conflict from another point of view—may not excel at fashioning a voice because her defensiveness stands between her and what she has to say. Also, we naturally tend to superimpose our present selves onto who we were before, and that can prevent us from recalling stuff that doesn’t shore up our current identities. Or it can warp understanding to fit more comfortable interpretations. All those places we misshape the past have to be ’fessed to, and such reflections and uncertainties have to find expression in voice.