The first time I sat down to write seriously — not just jotting scenes in a notes app, but actually trying to write a book — I deleted everything I wrote within about forty-five minutes. Not because it was terrible. Honestly, I’m not even sure anymore. I deleted it because it didn’t sound like the books I loved. It didn’t sound like the authors I’d spent years reading. It sounded like me, and at the time, that felt like a problem.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that was actually the whole point.
“Your voice isn’t something you develop. It’s something you stop apologizing for.”
The Comparison Trap
Every new writer does this. You find the authors who made you want to write — for me it was Gillian Flynn, Tana French, and a handful of others — and you try to write like them. It feels logical. They’re doing something right. Maybe if you can figure out how they do it, you can do it too.
The problem is that what you’re actually doing is imitating the surface of someone else’s voice, not the thing underneath it. Flynn’s dark interior monologue didn’t come from studying dark interior monologue. It came from years of writing exactly how her brain works, on the page, until that became her style.
What “Voice” Actually Means
Voice isn’t your word choices, though those are part of it. It isn’t your sentence length or your use of italics or whether you prefer short chapters. Voice is the cumulative effect of every small decision you make on the page — the things you notice, the details you choose to include, the emotional weight you give to different moments.
With Gone Without Goodbye, I didn’t find Kacey’s voice by planning it. I found it by writing the same scene about six different ways until one of them felt true. Not polished. Not impressive. Just true — like something Kacey would actually think at a moment like that.
Three Things That Actually Helped Me
- Write without reading it back. For the first draft of any scene, I try not to re-read what I’ve written until I’m done with that session. Reading too early turns your inner critic on too soon.
- Write something embarrassingly personal. Not because it needs to go in the book. But the moments when I felt most like I was writing honestly — almost oversharing — were always the moments that sounded most like me.
- Read your work out loud. This sounds tedious but it’s the fastest way to catch places where you’ve slipped into “writing voice” versus your actual voice. Your ear catches what your eye misses.
The Part Nobody Tells You
Your voice is going to feel wrong at first. Not wrong like a mistake — wrong like wearing something that doesn’t look like anything you’ve seen before. That discomfort isn’t a sign that something’s broken. It’s a sign that you’re writing something genuinely yours, and you don’t have a reference point for it yet.
The best feedback I ever got on an early draft wasn’t “this is good.” It was “I’ve never read anything that sounds quite like this.” At the time I didn’t know whether to take that as a compliment. Now I know it was the best thing anyone could have said.
Keep writing. Stop trying to sound like someone else. The readers who are meant to find your work will find it — but only if it sounds like you.