Your voice, the one thing nobody can steal from you

For the first three years I wrote seriously, my voice wasn't mine. It was a collage. Short, clipped sentences when I'd been reading too much Carver the week before, long baroque periods when I'd lost myself inside a nineteenth-century novel. I changed styles the way other people change lipstick shades, chasing whoever had just fascinated me, convinced that if I imitated well enough I'd finally find my way.

The imitation trap

Nobody had warned me that the imitation phase, however necessary, can also become a comfortable trap. Imitating is easier than discovering, because it gives you the illusion of having a method, a formula, something to follow when the page is blank and you don't yet know who you are on paper. The problem is that sooner or later someone — maybe an editor, maybe just an honest reader — points out that your writing sounds like a bad copy of someone else, and that sentence hurts more than any rejection letter you can imagine.

How I found my voice (by accident)

My voice arrived, paradoxically, the moment I stopped actively looking for it. I was writing a story I thought was too personal to publish, too close to my actual way of thinking to read like literature. I wrote it without worrying about how it would sound, just to get it out — the way you write in a diary no one will ever read. That story, the one written without any borrowed stylistic safety nets, was the first one where someone told me: this sounds like you — and I had absolutely no idea what they meant, because I hadn't done anything deliberate to achieve it.

What I understood afterward, thinking it over more calmly, is that voice isn't found by looking outward, reading other authors in the hope of finding your own reflection in their sentences. It's found by looking inward, accepting your own stylistic obsessions even when they look like flaws. I repeat certain words too often. I write sentences that always begin with a conjunction — something a strict writing manual would mark in red. For years I tried to correct myself. Now I consider it part of how I sound, and it's far more interesting to have an imperfect but recognizable voice than a correct one identical to a thousand others.

Where your voice is already hiding

If you're still looking for yours, I'll tell you honestly: stop asking yourself how you should write. Start noticing how you write when nobody's watching, when you're not trying to impress anyone. It's there — in those pages you thought were imperfect — that your voice is probably already hiding.

Marghi