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THE SOUND OF STORY

Developing Voice and Tone in Writing

FORTHCOMING JANUARY 2026 FROM SIBYLLINE PRESS. In The Sound of Story, author and writing teacher Jordan Rosenfeld demystifies voice and its close companion, tone, offering writers the tools to develop and refine their own. Through contemporary examples, this book explores how syntax, point of view, and emotion (to name a few) shape voice on the page. Whether you’re crafting fiction or nonfiction, this book will help you shape and refine voice to create compelling, authentic narratives. The Sound of Story empowers writers to wield voice and tone with purpose, increasing their chances of publication, yes, but delivering the optimum story for readers.

HOW TO WRITE A PAGE TURNER

Craft a Story Your Readers Can't Put Down

To avoid writing that’s formulaic, predictable, and slow, How to Write a Page Turner will help you sew the threads of tension tight for an unforgettable story. You’ll learn how to recognize and build essential elements of tension, create tension in your characters, and add tension to exposition to craft a story your readers can’t put down.

WRITING THE INTIMATE CHARACTER

Create Unique, Compelling Characters Through Mastery of Point of View

What makes a good story so compelling? Characters. Unforgettable, vivid, chatty, bold, wild, foolish, singular characters that are so authentic, so true and real, that you feel as if you’re living in their world—or, even better, inside of them. Strong point of view creates a powerful, sensory experience that draws readers into your characters’ inner landscape and confidently directs your audience to the story you’re trying to tell. When the masterful use of point of view is applied to a story, it won’t just tell readers about an experience; it will allow them to live it through a character. Writing the Intimate Character eschews the dull, didactic explanations of point of view so commonly found in other writing texts. Instead you’ll discover a point-of-view system based on character cues: specific behaviors, sensory perceptions, dialogue, and visual imagery.

WRITING DEEP SCENES

Plotting Your Story Through Action, Emotion, & Theme

Writing Deep Scenes combines the expertise of Martha Alderson (author of The Plot Whisperer series) and Jordan Rosenfeld (Make a Scene) and teaches you how to write strong, layered, and engaging scenes–the key to memorable, page-turning plots. It’s filled with practical tools for building layers and nuance into your scenes, employing the right scene types at the right junctures in the story, and developing a profound understanding of how plot and scene intertwine.

A WRITER’S GUIDE TO PERSISTENCE

How to Create Lasting and Productive Writing Practice

A Writer’s Guide to Persistence is a toolkit to support you through the unique challenges of the literary art so that you can create a sustainable, long-term writing practice without being swayed by the constant changes, negative criticism, and doubts that come with the territory. This book aims to help you feel comforted, supported, and less alone, and also offers practical tricks to free you from unproductive habits. It aims to get you back on your feet after a variety of crises and common writer calamities so that you can do the important writing you are meant to do and nourish your writer’s spirit.

MAKE A SCENE – REVISED AND EXPANDED

Writing a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time

Scenes are the building blocks for any work of fiction–the DNA sequence that makes a novel un-put-downable and unforgettable. When writers are able to craft effective, engaging scenes, they can develop a complete, cohesive story–and a mesmerizing experience for readers. Make a Scene Revised and Expanded Edition takes you step-by-step through the elements of strong scene construction and demonstrates how the essential aspects of a compelling story–including character, plot and dramatic tension–function within the framework of individual scenes to give momentum to the whole narrative.

WRITE FREE

Attracting the Creative Life (with Rebecca Lawton)

Equal parts writer’s workshop and spiritual journey, this open-hearted guide will show you how to attain and sustain the creative life you desire. Based on a time-tested principle and using methods pioneered by the authors, Write Free provides a wealth of inspiration, advice, and activities. Exploring how we attract the conditions and events in our lives, Write Free is an invaluable aid for writers, creative souls, and others who want to envision and achieve the inspired life of their dreams.

Kleptomaniac

March 2019

"1984. My breath catches in my throat as my fingers curl around the smooth porcelain bowl, small as a quarter, its pattern surprisingly intricate. The miniature slides on the sweat of my skin and threatens to drop between palm and pocket; I’m an amateur magician not ready for an audience. As I bike home its illicit weight bangs, impossibly heavy, like a hardback book against my thigh. My hands shake as I set it on the oak table in my steadily-filling dollhouse. The bowl completes a China set on which my tiny family can eat a perfect dinner of mini steak and lobster, so unlike the chipped, mismatched Corningware on which my single father will slap down our usual meal of hot dogs, corn and noodles."

Women May Feel Pain More Intensely Than Men, So Why Are They Undertreated?

March 2019

"Women’s pain has long been treated as psychosomatic. The very fact of having a uterus was once deemed explanation enough for a panoply of mental health issues — the root for “hysteria” is the Greek hystera, or womb. Historically, women’s pain was “cured with herbs, sex, or sexual abstinence” and “punished and purified with fire for its association with sorcery,” write the authors of “Women and Hysteria in the History of Mental Health,” published in 2012. "Even today, pain in or around a woman’s reproductive organs is often written off as hormonal and not urgent, though having female reproductive organs is not required for a woman’s pain to be overlooked. Those who have undergone hysterectomies, as well as transgender women, gender fluid, and nonbinary folx who may be perceived as female also report feeling that they’re taken less seriously than their male or masculine-presenting counterparts. Indeed, a 2001 study in the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics found that women are medicated for pain less frequently than men, admitted to hospitals less than often than men, and “treated less aggressively in their initial encounters with the health-care system until they prove they are as sick as male patients.”

The Science Behind Why We Love to be Scared

October, 2017

"Life is so uncertain, and uncertainty always brings some measure of fear," he says. He believes that people may be drawn to horror and fear-inducing events as a way of trying to gain mastery over that which scares us in our own lives: "When going to a haunted house or movie, our brains have a sense that this is a controlled environment, so even though there's a lot of uncertainty, if we faced those fears, it can be empowering."

Facing Down Environmental Grief

July, 2016

"We need to galvanize our grief into action, to stop the ecocide taking place. We’re destroying our natural world of our wild cousins.” She concludes, “I keep going back to: Take baby steps that will help you keep moving forward. That's it. Just like Dory says in Finding Nemo, ‘Just keep swimming.’”

Scientists Are Trying to Solve the Mystery of Awe

May, 2016

At least once in your life you've probably experienced awe: as you gaze up at a massive mountain range, down into the depths of an infant's eyes, or even cringing back from lightning cracking open the sky. You may feel humbled, shaken, changed, or struck by the vastness of the universe, and your own tiny part in it. If you are religious, you may credit such experiences to the divine; if you are not, you may identify it as what psychologists call “self-transcendence” in which you temporarily blur at the edges and feel connected to something with greater magnitude than yourself.

Surrogate Daughter

2016

"Children give love the way the sun gives light—without reserve, daily, radiant. Unless it’s beaten or broken or shamed out of them. Children see the world with awe and love. Sometimes in the midst of a grumpy rushing morning, my six-year-old son will stop and notice a simple thing—a puddle looks like a frog or the cloud like an anvil, and my heart will tumble downhill at how much beauty I fail to see. I saw it once, too, though; I remember the dust motes streaming through slivers of light in my godparents’ New York apartment when I was about his age. Only, I didn’t think of it as dust, but particles of separate universes escaped from the books they stacked nearly to the ceilings, a tower where Rapunzel would never have been bored, with reading material for ages and Chinese food delivered at any hour..."