Voice Discovery

Voice discovery

The voice should feel like it BELONGS in the world. Le Guin's insight: in fantasy, the language creates the world, not just describes it. A novel about salt-flat priests does not sound like a novel about a tide-bound port city.

Inputs (from <novel-dir>/)

• seed.txt, world.md, characters.md
• voice.md (template — Part 1 guardrails are already filled; you fill Part 2)

Reference: framework/voice-guardrails.md (Tier 1/2/3 banned words and structural slop patterns — these apply to ALL voices, regardless of which register you choose).

Procedure

Step 1 — propose 3-5 candidate registers

Based on the world and characters, list candidate voices the novel could have. Examples (do not just pick from these — invent for the specific novel):

• Mythic and weighty — like stone tablets being read aloud. Long sentences. Latinate vocabulary. Clauses that echo psalms.
• Spare and cold — sentences like knife cuts. Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. Short paragraphs. Heavy white space.
• Warm and breathless — like a traveller telling stories by firelight. Run-on sentences. Colloquial register. Sensory rushes.
• Dry and ironic — flat affect. Dark humour. Subtext does the heavy lifting.
• Childlike-strange — present tense, unreliable register, fairy-tale syntax.
• Reportorial / forensic — emotionally restrained, observational, precise to the level of measurement.

Pick three to five candidates that fit THIS world.

Step 2 — write a trial passage in each register

For each candidate, write a ~150-word scene from the novel. Same scene every time so registers are directly comparable. Pick a scene that touches the world's specifics — magic in use, a key location, a character speaking. Save the trial passages to <novel-dir>/voice_trials.md.

Step 3 — evaluate

For each trial passage, list:

• What it achieves
• What it costs
• What kind of novel it implies
• Which audience it fits
• Whether it inherits any AI-tells from framework/voice-guardrails.md

Pick the register that best serves the story. Justify in 2-3 sentences.

Step 4 — fill voice.md Part 2

Edit <novel-dir>/voice.md. Below the ## Part 2: Voice Identity heading, fill in:

### Tone
<one sentence describing the chosen register and its emotional fingerprint>

### Sentence Rhythm
<tendencies, not rules — when sentences run long, when they fragment>

### Vocabulary Register
<the word-hoard for this world: Anglo-Saxon blunt? Latinate baroque? Mixed? Specific noun domains the prose draws from>

### POV and Tense
<third limited / first / present / past / shifts?>

### Dialogue Conventions
<tags? action beats? how do characters sound different from each other? subtext rules>

### Exemplar Passages
<3-5 paragraphs that ARE the voice. The chosen trial passage plus 2-3 more. These are the tuning fork — every chapter calibrates against them>

### Anti-Exemplars
<3-5 paragraphs showing what this voice is NOT. Specific to this novel — not just generic AI slop. "This is too flowery for our tone." "This is too modern.">

Hard rules

• The exemplars must be SPECIFIC to the novel — they reference characters, locations, magic that exist in world.md / characters.md.
• The anti-exemplars must be SPECIFIC too. "Too flowery" alone is not enough — show a flowery passage that's wrong for THIS novel.
• The voice must avoid the universal Tier 1/2/3 slop in framework/voice-guardrails.md. Even the most baroque voice should not say "delve" or "tapestry."

After writing

Tell the user which register won and why. Suggest running evaluate-foundation to score the planning docs as a whole.