How do I prompt AI for a specific narrative voice?
- Samples beat adjectives: paste your prose rather than describing it.
- Name the constraints: tense, person, sentence length, what to never do.
- Ask for a rewrite of your own paragraph, not a fresh one.
- Reject the first result on principle; the second is usually closer.
- Voice drifts across a long session, so re-anchor with a fresh sample.
Give it three paragraphs of your own writing and ask it to match them, rather than describing your voice in adjectives. Specify tense, person, and any habits that matter, then ask it to rewrite a passage you already wrote rather than generate a new one. Comparison against your prose is what makes the output sound like you.
Chapter i·Why it matters
Writers describe their voice as lyrical or spare or wry, and models produce a generic version of that adjective. Voice lives in sentence rhythm, word choice and what a narrator declines to say, none of which survives being summarised. A sample carries all three at once.
Chapter ii·What to include
- Three paragraphs of your strongest prose, pasted as the reference.
- Tense and person, stated explicitly.
- Two or three habits to preserve: fragments, long sentences, dry understatement.
- A short list of things your narrator would never do.
- A rewrite task rather than a generation task, so there is something to match.
Chapter iii·Example
A writer asks for a paragraph in her lyrical voice and gets purple prose. She pastes three of her own paragraphs, asks for the same passage rewritten to match, and the result is finally recognisable as hers.
In WriteLoom
Three editors, in the order professionals use them
The WriteLoom line editor works on your existing sentences rather than generating new ones, so the voice it preserves is the one already on the page.
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