Voice and Authority in Sex and the City
Mini Masterclass — July 2025
Mini Masterclass is a bite-sized monthly column by Erin Karbuczky for writers hungry to deepen their craft, shift perspective, and try something new. Each installment offers an actionable lesson—grounded in real examples and fresh thinking—from the worlds of fiction, memoir, poetry, pop culture, and beyond.
I couldn’t help but wonder… What can the iconic HBO show Sex and the City tell us about writing?
Sex and the City, thanks in part to the sequel series And Just Like That, seems to be having a cultural renaissance now that a new generation is old enough to watch, and who can blame ‘em?
Carrie, her cohort, and New York City are fascinating for many reasons, but with about a decade’s distance from my last rewatch, I turned on the show recently and was struck immediately by not just the flirty, feminine aesthetic of the show, but the voice, the authority, and the archetypes that Carrie and Co represent and subvert.
I loved watching the show as a young adult, seeing aspiration in the nightly cocktails, the shoe closet, and navigating a confusing yet exciting world of dating. However, watching the show at my current age with a writer’s eye and ear really changed how I viewed it.
Here’s what writers of all kinds can learn from Sex and the City (which I’ll be abbreviating to SATC going forward)!
Aesthetic
Aesthetics communicates to the viewer (or reader) where the characters are coming from (their backgrounds and desires) and involves texture, location, fashion, color palette, and more. SATC is a show based in New York City, and the city acts not as a backdrop but as a character. The energy the city pulses throughout the show - food from all different cultures, coveted real estate, a vivid nightlife, and a varied group of side characters that contains people from all different communities— communicates this to the viewer without a word. Even the aspirational jobs of the characters show that they live in a cultural Mecca - a writer, a gallerist, a public relations exec, and a lawyer.
The fashion is very in-your-face, tailored to each woman's character, personality, and career. Carrie is a writer, and one of her jobs over the course of the series is as a columnist for Vogue Magazine. She cares deeply about fashion as a way to express herself. She wears a variety of fabrics and silhouettes to showcase her moods and whims. Archival fashion is prominently displayed, and her longest love affair is with Manolo Blahniks. Carrie even went broke because she spent her money on shoes and magazines. While that wouldn't work in life, it gives a full picture of her character. She is idealistic, short-sighted, frivolous, flighty, impulsive, and romantic. Her affinity for high fashion shows that Carrie believes that everything will work out in the end, in love and in life.
Charlotte is a different kind of romantic. She longs for a traditional life as a traditional wife, and her beautiful but modest outfits and makeup convey that. Unlike Carrie, she is a saver - she feels deeply about her future and is always in pursuit of the life she desires. But don’t be distracted by her pearls and just-a-hint of blush - Charlotte is feminine, but strong; she has boundaries and she’s not afraid to use them. Charlotte conveys that while she longs for a specific life, maybe a life that wasn’t in fashion at the time of the series’ run, it doesn’t mean she’s weak or weak-willed. She is no passenger.
Miranda, a down-to-earth pessimist, dresses in power suits, pants, and bulky sweaters, and wears her wild red hair clipped short. She is pure attitude, no-nonsense, and is never afraid to tell it like it is, even when she might hurt someone’s feelings. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t care - deep down, Miranda can be insecure, as seen when she chokes on her food and it makes her realize she’s not just alone, but maybe lonely. Behind her hard exterior is a woman who does want to be loved, as long as it’s on her own terms.
And Samantha, sex-positive PR maven, is often shown wearing tailored clothes that show off her body and playful pieces that show her spirit. For example, while Charlotte tends to dress in classic clothes, so does Samantha! But in contradiction to Charlotte’s 1950s housewife dresses, Samantha dresses in a more 60s countercultural way that shows she considers herself a more “evolved” woman, one who is loyal to one and only: herself.
Of course, we’re talking about a TV show, so we are talking in visuals here - but that doesn’t mean it cannot be applied to your own work.
♡︎ As you read on, think about the archetypes your characters represent (even varied, complicated, and multidimensional characters can root themselves in archetypes, and should!), and how you can represent your characters and setting.
If you’re a person who is interested in fashion, dress each character in their own aesthetic to convey and affirm who they are. A character who wears the same boots every day, and a character who must match heels to every outfi,t play off each other. But it doesn’t have to stop at clothes.
Does one character immerse themselves in philosophy and feminist theory, while another hasn’t read a book since Flowers for Algernon in middle school? Play around with the aesthetics and talismans that call out to each character. You might be surprised by how much you can convey.
Archetypes Breeds Authority
We talked about authority in a previous article about Dangerous Writing. For the uninitiated, authority refers to your characters’ expertises in life, and how their perspective is shaped by that expertise. Here’s an example I made up for you: You’re writing a novel through the perspective of a young girl who is interested in birds. She reads about birds, watches nature shows, and goes birdwatching on the weekends. Her knowledge about birds seeps into her daily life, and when she thinks of those she loves, she thinks of them in bird terms. Her mother is graceful like a swan, her father is awkward and angry like a goose. Her teacher reminds her of a tropical bird of some sorts, a neighbor of a raven. And she superimposes traits of each bird onto everyone she meets, and generally views the world through this lens. This is her authority.
In SATC, authority is determined by archetypes.
Samantha and Charlotte are the whore and the virgin, respectively. Miranda is a cynic. Carrie is an idealist and also incredibly insecure. These individual perspectives inform not just what they wear as discussed above, but what they say. Almost every last sentence.
There are memes going around in which the ladies discuss current events and happenings, and all of them sound plausible because it’s easy to replicate how they would speak about it, as the show uses their archetypes and authority at every possible moment.
Carrie: Big doesn’t love me anymore. He says my jealousy is destroying me from the inside out like a tapeworm, or one of those defective coach bags accidentally made with unhatched silkworms.
Charlotte: True love is out there, Carrie, but you have to love yourself, first.
Samantha: I just tried this new vibrator that simulates a fivesome. It has three tongues. Love yourself, indeed.
Miranda: Can we please talk about something else? If I have one more conversation about Big this week I’m going to walk off a bridge.
Carrie’s voiceover: And I couldn’t help but wonder, did I need a personality transplant, or a new coach bag?
Every line they say is rooted in their respective archetypes and with a firm understanding by the writers of who the characters represent and their point of view in the world.
♡︎ Prompt: Take your core characters from your WIP, and try to assign archetypes and authority to them. Write a couple paragraphs of dialogue and descriptions and see what comes up for you that you want to keep. Think about the threads of story here that can be sewn throughout the project as a whole now that you have a new grip on the characters and their place in the world, even if writing a memoir.
Voice
The voice of Sex and the City is undeniable - unless you’ve never heard of the show, you can picture Carrie now, writing on her laptop, musing in a voiceover. Carrie’s voice went viral on TikTok last year as part of the “thought daughter” trend. “I started to wonder. I couldn’t help but wonder. And I wondered…” It’s a literal voice, but it’s also like the voice of a novel or memoir, setting the tone. In this case, the tone is: musing, thoughtful, open to possibility.
Sex and the City is snaky and unfolding, and nothing is off limits. There are surreal moments, overblown moments, and moments of unreliable narrator incoming - because truly, it’s Carrie’s perspective on her friendships, love, and the world that leads the show. It’s when she starts to wonder that we, the audience, get invited in and become one with the story.
♡︎ Prompt: Is your narrative style voicey? What perspectives are your characters coming from? What is the emotional pulse that drives the character, that will ripple into their thoughts, dialogue, relationships, and clothes?
Now, think about the ways in which you can subvert the archetypes or boxes you’ve placed around your characters. What can make them act out of character? Does a cynical character, like Miranda, recognize a need for vulnerability when it matters most? Does a Charlotte blow off a date with a perfect catch to be there for a girlfriend? Dig deep into your own characters’ psyches and decide, who are they, and who is the them that bursts through at a crucial moment and surprises maybe even themselves?
Happy Writing!
Further Reading
While I was writing this article, I came across THIS article on Carrie and Creativity, and I thought it was brilliant and a perfect complement to mine. So if you appreciate my work here, or you’re just a fan of the show, you’ll definitely want to go there next.
If you missed it, here’s another article I wrote called Using Theme and Conflict to Supercharge Romantic Pairings. These articles will work in tandem to help you work out your plot bunnies and spend more time on what you love most: writing.
Really enlightening! I loved the second prompt about authority.
Loved this! I wore my Write or Die baseball cap yesterday. What does that say about me?😁