Every young writer is given the same vague piece of advice: find your voice. Writing professors and creative writing tips urge you to go hunt for it like it’s hiding under a rock. What’s it look like? How will you know when you find it? But nobody ever actually defines what it is you’re looking for. That’s because a unique writer’s voice is more nebulous and deeply personal than any other element of style.

For those who wonder how to find your writing voice, stop listening to the frantic advice of mentors and look at what you’ve already created. By turning back to your existing work, you’ll have a much easier time identifying and tapping into the authentic voice that was there all along.

When Your Sentences Sound Like Someone Else’s

One of the surest ways to do yourself dirty as a writer is to mimic the writers you love.

Using models is legitimate, but that applies to structure and plot. How is this thing built? Shakespeare is a fine place to look and wonder: what would a modern version of Hamlet look like? Port the architecture, what happens in act one, what happens in act two, and write over top of it.

That’s entirely different from falling in love with a writer, reading them obsessively, and then writing a piece in their voice rather than yours. The subject matter might be yours. But the sentences are theirs. You’re not doing yourself any favors to trying to write a sentence like Ernest Hemingway or Toni Morrison, two masters of their own personal voices.

Hemingway in particular is extraordinarily easy to parrot: his sentences have become so iconic they read as pastiche even in his own work. But when Hemingway hits, it’s because he does something that disturbs his own pastiche. He is, despite his reputation, one of the most emotionally vulnerable male writers in the American canon, and it’s the tension between soft and hard within his own work that makes his voice his own. Had he been trying to write Thornton Wilder or Dostoevsky, he would have failed—and never found that model sentence that became the signature of himself.

The same trap opens up with any writer you love intensely. Fall into George Saunders, his signature blend of satire and sincerity, his humor that’s simultaneously funny and moving at the same time, and it just begs to be copied. You can revise a piece twenty-two times and never quite scrub the influence out. Trust us, we’ve tried. Other readers might not notice. But you will. You’ll always know: there you were, reading Pastoralia.

Using another writer’s structure as a scaffold is craft. Borrowing their sentences is a different problem entirely.

Your Authentic Writing Voice Was Never Lost

Writer’s voice is the quality of language on the page that is irreducibly yours, the sum of how you think, what you notice, and how you piece together a sentence. It isn’t style, exactly, it isn’t tone, exactly. It’s the thing that makes a reader recognize you’re you before they’ve even checked the byline.

As stated before, the writing world has a great deal to say about finding your writing voice. You either have it or you don’t. It’s the marker of a talented writer. They’ll cultivate it in you for a fee, at a workshop, over six weeks.

While voice is nearly impossible to define, it’s almost instantly recognizable. You know it when you encounter it in the writing you love. You’d recognize it across an author’s entire body of work. It’s what tempts most young writers to emulate their heroes in the first place!

Remember this. Every piece of writing has voice. Every writer already has one. The work isn’t to find it, but to hear it, refine it, then lean into it.

You can wish your work were a certain kind of work all day long, but it’s only ever going to be what it is. You cannot be certain writers you admire. You cannot write in certain ways. You cannot scrub out certain aspects of who you are as an artist and a person. The late & great editor Giancarlo DiTrapano understood this, and his counsel to writers wasn’t to search for a voice but to commit to the one they already possessed. Voice is innate. You can’t duck it.

The instinct to emulate other writers, to suppress or reshape your voice doesn’t come from craft. It comes from fear of how you’ll be perceived.

Why Does Your Own Voice Make Your Cringe?

When you finish a piece of writing, read back that first draft and cringe. Not because it’s bad, but because it sounds so aggressively like you! The discomfort you experience in these moments isn’t a signal that something has gone wrong, but more often that your actual voice made it onto the page. Oops, you actually look like that.

A scenario most writers will recognize—you finish a piece and find yourself wondering what a reader would conclude about the kind of person who wrote it. Too lyrical, perhaps. Too dense. Too strange. Too much. A bad person?

The discomfort that some writers call “post-write clarity” (if you don’t get it, don’t look it up) is less a failure of craft than it is evidence your actual voice made it onto the page. And the fact that it doesn’t sound like the writers you’re reading doesn’t mean it should. Two writers covering identical subject matter never sound alike. That’s precisely what makes literature remarkable: the same territory, explored by different sensibilities, yields entirely different work. Same plantain, different piece, every single time.

(Okay, so that was a reference to one of our own.)

Take that cringe of reading your own voice back not as a sign something’s broken, but a sign that you’re close.

The Plight of Finding Your Writer’s Voice

The methods for actually hearing your voice are, frankly, unpleasant. Watch a recording of yourself speaking. Listen to your own voice played back. Read your work aloud slowly, without rushing through it.

This last practice is most diagnostic. Read at your actual speaking pace, and feel whether the words on the page could fit in your mouth when spoken. More often than not, you’ll hit a sentence and feel it catch—find misalignments between what you intended and what landed on the page that only become apparent when you hear it aloud. The stumble is not a performance error. It’s information. It means the writing needs to conform to you,  not the other way around.

Beyond all of this, there is one thing that resolves every question about voice eventually: keep writing. Do it again. Try it again. Write through the cringe until it starts to make sense.

Four Ways to Start Hearing Your Voice Today

1. Read your work aloud at speaking pace. Not rushing to get through it—you know how kids sound when asked to read aloud in front of the class. At the pace you actually talk. Where you stumble, the writing needs to change, not your mouth.
2. Use models for structure only. Port the architecture of a story you admire, but leave the author’s sentences behind.
3. Notice what bores you when you try to write it. Boredom is your voice pushing back.
4. Write the same scene twice, once imitating a writer you love, once not. You might prefer the former, but would other people?

“A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” – James Joyce

Write this on a notecard and pin it to your wall. Your voice isn’t something a fiction writing coach has to help you uncover. You can do it yourself. But at Hewes House, if you want a second pair of ears to bounce off the sound of your writer’s voice, we love to help writers hear what’s been there all along.