This rule applies to whether you're building brands or writing novels because people don't trust a Sybil. Our brains crave the comfort reliability and consistency breeds. We're confused when we see someone act one way and that way changes on the daily. They're performative instead of real.

In marketing, our “voice” is the personality we embody when we show up for our audiences, community, partners, and employees. It's our vibe and flavor, the words we use and how we use them. We can dial up and down facets of our personality depending on the environment. Sound familiar? It's called life.

We build trust when — interaction after interaction, channel after channel — we come across as the same “person.” In marketing, a verbal identity helps everyone who communicates on behalf of a brand to express themselves consistently so their audiences have the same powerful experience regardless of where they encounter the brand.

But I'm not here to rehash a fifteen-minute tutorial I wrote eighteen months ago, rather I want to show you how to apply methodical tools and tactics to cultivate your prose or writing voice.

I didn't find my voice until I was thirty-seven and I've been writing since I was six — you do the pitiful math. Because like everything else in my life, I chose to go at writing the hard way instead of seeing the symbiotic nature of what I was doing for a living (building brands and telling stories) and how I could employ the tools I learned and built for myself in my writing life.

For years, I kept the warring factions in my brain disparate because I never thought fiction and marketing could play harmoniously in the same sandbox until it occurred to me that both, at their core, are about telling stories. My on-duty life centered on telling stories about products and companies while my evenings were spent telling stories about the…