Growing up in a multigenerational household means inheriting more than hand‑me‑down furniture—you inherit stories. In my case, an aunt just eighteen years older filled the house with vampires, werewolves, and the witchy wolf lore of rural Michigan. One story always stuck:
If you’re lost in the woods and hear someone call your name, never respond to the first call. Unnatural things only call once.
I thought of that rule again while watching Sand Sea, where “black‑haired snakes” learn to mimic human voices. In earlier adaptations, they could only echo names. In this one, they’ve evolved—they can mimic entire sentences.
That evolution, from crude imitation to perfect replication, felt eerily familiar. Technology does it. Memories do it. Trauma does it. Even our own writing does it sometimes: a voice close enough to sound true, but not quite ours.
The Prompt: When the Devil Calls Your Name
That tension is your starting point. Write a piece—story, poem, essay, script fragment, comic, song, or hybrid—about a voice that sounds like it belongs to someone familiar… but doesn’t.
Some writers may want to explore a childhood rule about answering voices in the dark, or the mechanics of mimicry itself—an animal, an echo, an AI, a spell, a hallucination that almost convinces. Others might go toward grief: a voice that returns after loss, recognizable in every way except the one that matters. Or flip it entirely—what if the mimic is incompetent? The world’s worst supernatural impostor, who can copy words but not warmth, cadence, presence.
And then there’s the darkest version: a character who discovers their own voice has been replicated so perfectly that the people closest to them can no longer tell the difference. What do you do when the imitation becomes the record?
Where does the boundary lie between a voice you trust and a voice you only want to trust?
Write into that uncertainty.
Crafting the Almost-Right Voice: Techniques for Writers and Artists
The uncanny power of mimicry lies in its near-perfection. A voice that’s completely wrong doesn’t fool anyone—it’s the voice that’s almost right that unsettles us. Here are some techniques to help you explore that unsettling space in your work.
1. Map the Markers of Authenticity
Before you can create a convincing mimic, you need to understand what makes a voice feel real. Real voices carry:
Idiolect: The unique speech patterns of an individual—favorite phrases, habitual pauses, the way they start sentences but leave them unfinished, regional vocabulary, generational slang.
Vocal texture: Breath sounds, the scrape of a morning voice, the way laughter breaks into words, hesitation markers (“um,” “like,” “you know”), the physical effort of speaking while crying or running.
Relational dynamics: How someone’s voice changes depending on who they’re talking to. Your protagonist might speak differently to their mother than to their boss or their lover.
Contextual memory: A voice carries history. The way your grandmother said your name when you were in trouble versus when you scraped your knee. A mimic might get the words right but miss the weight they carry.
Exercise: Choose a person you know well. Write down five specific things about how they speak that no one else does quite the same way. Now write a scene where someone, or something, tries to copy that voice and gets four of them right, but misses one crucial element.
2. Use the “Wrong Note” Technique
Musicians know that a single wrong note in a familiar melody is more jarring than random noise. Apply this to voice mimicry in your writing.
If you’re writing a character encountering a voice that seems wrong, don’t make everything suspicious at once. Instead, have 90% of it feel absolutely correct—the timing, the warmth, the vocabulary—and then slip in one detail that doesn’t quite land. Maybe the AI replicating your protagonist’s mother’s voice gets the birthday song right but doesn’t know the made-up verse she always added at the end. Maybe the echo in the forest uses the right name but not the nickname that only one person ever used.
The reader (like your character) should feel uncertain rather than immediately alarmed. That’s where the real horror lives.
3. Explore the Uncanny Valley of Sound
The “uncanny valley” describes how almost-human things can disturb us more than clearly artificial ones. This applies to voices too.
Consider what happens when mimicry approaches perfection:
- A deepfake of a loved one’s voice that has the pitch and cadence right, but breathes in the wrong places
- A grief hallucination that sounds exactly like your dead spouse except it doesn’t have their stutter
- An AI voice assistant that knows your preferences but has never actually been frustrated with you
- A shapeshifter who can copy your face and voice perfectly, but has never experienced your chronic pain and doesn’t wince when they should
Exercise: Write two versions of the same dialogue. In the first, the speaker is genuine. In the second, they’re being mimicked by something that’s studied them carefully but has never been them. The words can be identical—change only the stage directions, the physical tells, the breath and pauses.
4. Build Folklore Around Voice
Every culture has stories about voices that shouldn’t be trusted. Your world can too.
Even if you’re writing contemporary realism, consider: What rules did your character grow up with about voices? Maybe their grandmother warned them never to answer if someone calls from outside after dark. Maybe their father taught them to count to three before responding to their name in an empty house. Maybe it’s a family superstition, or maybe (in your world) it’s a survival tactic that actually works.
These folkloric rules serve multiple purposes:
- They immediately establish stakes (breaking the rule has consequences)
- They create dramatic irony (the reader knows the rule; does the character remember it?)
- They ground supernatural horror in cultural specificity
- They give you a framework for how mimicry works in your world
For visual artists and comic creators: Consider how to show the difference between authentic and mimicked voices visually. Different lettering styles? Color shifts in speech bubbles? Visual static or distortion around false words? The webcomic Stand Still. Stay Silent uses different fonts for different languages and magical speech—what visual language could indicate a voice that only sounds human?
5. Mine the Emotional Landscape
The most resonant mimicry stories aren’t really about the mechanics of imitation—they’re about trust, grief, memory, and identity.
Ask yourself:
- Why does your character want to believe the voice? Grief can make us overlook inconsistencies. Loneliness can lower our guard. Desperation can make us accept imperfect copies.
- What does the character lose if the voice isn’t real? This is your emotional stake. If your protagonist’s dead partner’s voice calls to them from the woods, what dies a second time if they accept it’s not really them?
- What do they lose if it IS real and they don’t answer? The opposite fear—what if you’re so afraid of being tricked that you ignore an actual cry for help?
The best mimicry stories trap characters (and readers) between these two terrors.
6. Subvert the Expected
Not every false voice has to be sinister. Not every mimic has to be competent. Consider:
The compassionate mimic: What if something is trying to comfort your character by sounding like someone they’ve lost, and it means well but doesn’t understand it’s causing harm?
The incompetent mimic: Comedy-horror can be powerful. A creature that can perfectly copy words but has no understanding of human emotion, context, or social cues. It knows what “I love you” sounds like but not when to say it.
The consensual mimic: What if your character asks something to sound like their lost loved one, and has to live with the moral implications of that choice?
The mimic that evolves: What if the false voice starts crude but learns, improving each time your character interacts with it? How long before they can’t tell the difference? How long before they don’t want to?
7. Sound and Silence in Your Prose
If you’re writing fiction, pay attention to how you render voice on the page.
Use white space strategically: Pauses, hesitations, and silences are part of how we recognize voices. A mimic that never pauses, never searches for words, never takes a breath might technically sound right but feel wrong in its relentlessness.
Trust your dialogue tags (or lack thereof): Sometimes the most effective way to show a voice is wrong is to describe the character’s reaction to it rather than the voice itself. “She sounded exactly like Mom. That was the problem.”
Play with syntax: The way we structure sentences is deeply personal. A mimic might use someone’s vocabulary but arrange it in an order they’d never choose. Your character’s mother might always front-load bad news (“Listen, honey, I need to tell you something”), while the thing pretending to be her buries the lead.
8. The Question of Recognition
At the heart of every false-voice story is a moment of recognition—or the failure to recognize. This moment is your climax, whether it happens early or late.
What gives the mimic away?
- A factual error (it doesn’t know something the real person would)
- An emotional miss (it responds inappropriately to a weighted subject)
- A physical impossibility (the voice is coming from somewhere the real person couldn’t be)
- An instinctive wrongness (something your character feels but can’t articulate)
Or—most devastatingly—what if nothing gives it away, and your character only realizes the truth because of something external? They see the real person somewhere else. They find a body. Someone else tells them. The horror isn’t in recognizing the fake—it’s in realizing they couldn’t.
Final Thoughts
The reason false-voice stories resonate isn’t because we’re afraid of mimics, AI, or shapeshifters. It’s because we’re afraid of losing the ability to recognize what matters to us. We’re afraid of our judgment failing. We’re afraid that grief or loneliness or hope might make us accept a beautiful lie.
When you write these stories, you’re not just crafting a monster or a twist. You’re exploring one of our deepest vulnerabilities: the gap between what we hear and what we trust, between the voice calling our name and our certainty about who—or what—is calling.
Write into that gap. That’s where the best stories live.
Now go write. And if you hear someone call your name while you’re working? Well. You know the rule.
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