One of my favorite new series in recent years was PEN15 on Hulu. It’s co-creators and stars play versions of themselves at age 13. They’re best friends and outcasts at the beginning of seventh grade, in the year 2000. Amazingly, they’re surrounded by actors who are actually around 13, and somehow pull it off. It’s an R-rated look at the transition from girl to woman that I find hysterically funny, with tons of heart.

What makes it so great, I think, is the level of detailed realness. You get the sense that Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, along with co-creator Sam Zvibleman, remember every painfully awkward and cringe-worthy thing they ever said, did or experienced at that age. Because what’s depicted, while exaggerated for comedy, often feels like it’s pulled from real life with a level of authenticity that is rare and impressive.

And that is what people mean when they talk about a writer’s “voice.” It’s something highly valued by managers, agents and producers, as well screenwriting contests and virtually every other place where literary material is evaluated.

“Original Voice” may be the most frequently mentioned attribute of a script that really jumps out at such people as worth pursuing. If it feels like only that writer could’ve written it, and it seems to spring from something deeply personal within them, and maybe even reveals things that most of us spend our whole lives trying to hide, that’s a huge bonus.

I know it’s hard to do that, especially when you’re also trying to make sure your ideas are high-concept, have sufficient stakes, and are entertaining enough, etc. We can’t all just write about our own remembered life experiences and expect to succeed. We generally want to write within a recognizable genre, and use imagination to go outside ourselves to inhabit characters very different from us, going through things we never did.

And yet…

Can those people, settings, situations and actions be infused with a level of reality that is so specific, and seemingly inspired by lived life (and not just other stories) that readers feel like they’ve never seen it before in that form, and yet somehow it all feels believable?

So much of what goes wrong with scripts is that things just don’t feel, well, real enough. Characters and actions seem contrived, or vague. It’s like they’re just there to service a writer’s story decisions, instead of documenting aspects of the human condition that this writer knows, in such authentic detail, that it strikes the reader as powerful and impactful. It’s one of the most common notes I have on scripts, and central to the chapter on believability in my book The Idea.

Think about some of the greatest TV writing. Shows like The Wire and The Sopranos come to mind. Isn’t a lot of what makes them special the fact that you feel like you’re watching real people, almost like a documentary, with strong emotional truth, regardless of how foreign (to you) their lives are? Isn’t it that they transport you to a world of such specificity that you feel fascinated and kind of hypnotized, watching these people live their lives?

We all have subjects, settings and situations that we know well enough that we could bring them to life in this way, if we really made it our goal. And doing so greatly ups the chances that readers will want to meet us and work with us. They will want us to bring that authentic original voice to their projects — even if it seems like our work and theirs is very different. Buyers tend to prize authenticity so highly that they will assume you will bring it to whatever you do.

Is it easy to write this way? Maybe for some, who are lucky enough to have a workable story concept in which they can insert a lot of memories from their own life that will be just what the project needs. And if you’re willing to really mine those memories in a fearless way, and bring them to life in compelling scenes, then congratulations.

The rest of the time, or for the rest of us, I think the job is to find a way to get deep inside whoever and whatever we’re writing about and seek out that “realness” — no matter how foreign to us the overall story situations are — so that readers will connect. It’s the details that somehow make writing universally appealing — which come from actual life experience and understanding of human nature.

Are there some genres, some kinds of stories, where this maybe matters a bit less than others? Of course. But for a writer trying to break in, in addition to showing that you can capably write within those story types, you’re also trying to show that you have a specific voice, and can make scenes and characters come to life in this way. How you do it will be unique to you — what you focus on, remember, and feel something about.

For more on this topic, I suggest checking out my favorite book about writing, Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write.