When I first started writing my own stories — a long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away, if you will — I started feeling frustrated. But not for the reasons you might think. As I wrote more, and read back what I’d written, I didn’t understand why my writing didn’t “sound” like a writer had written it. I would read books and find myself wondering how those words sounded “like that.”
What I didn’t know then — and wouldn’t come to understand for a while thereafter — was that my journey as a writer was only just beginning. This is a universal experience; all writers start out putting words to paper that might sound plain or disjointed or generic. Almost as if you’re just spilling your thoughts straight from your brain to the page with no training or formality or structure. Because that’s exactly where you are when you’re first starting out. You haven’t learned how to write “like a writer” because you don’t have the experience or training to comprehend what that even means for you.
Here’s a little secret: Getting your writing to sound natural, compelling, and maybe even graceful? It’s not actually as challenging as you think it is. The key to unlocking this for yourself … is time. Time and a lot of practice.
Read a Little Bit of Everything
Most writers begin their “training” if you will before they even start getting serious about writing. This often happens in the form of reading. I devoured fiction growing up — props to my parents, especially my dad, for reading to me before bed until I learned to read myself to sleep. I read a lot. And I read everything — science fiction, fantasy (Star Wars books were quite formative for me in more ways than one), romance, when I was old and interested enough. Discovering stories written for young adults was a great day for me.
The more you read, the more you expose yourself to a variety of authors, styles, voices, and more. Plus, understanding people, places, and cultures different from your own never hurts, especially when you’re young. Think of reading as your training ground for one day learning to write in your own style. It will, to some degree, find its foundations in the prose of the writers who have come before you.
Imitate the Writers You Admire
Every single one of us starts out writing in the style of someone else. It’s how we learn. When you start training as a vocalist, your voice teachers likely have to train you out of your habit of singing like how you think your favorite musicians sound. Writing works the same way. The more you read, the more you figure out the styles of writing that resonate with you. But before you come to develop your own style, you have to write. And that prose is going to come out in those styles you like. You sort of just have to run with it.
I wrote a lot of weird prose in high school that came off as an unflattering mix of Laurie Halse Anderson and Meg Cabot (no, these two styles do not mesh well together — though individually I still love them both). I wrote like I wanted my own writing to sound, for a long agonizing time. Because I had to write SOMETHING if I was going to learn to write like ME.
And guess what? Eventually, my writing did start to sound like me. It just took a lot of time and work to get there.
Write Until Your Voice Shines Through
Finding your “voice” as a writer — the individual style that sets your writing apart from other authors — is not something you can learn from a book or a course, or even by reading and imitation alone. This final piece of the puzzle is all about writing a lot of original stories — regardless of how “good” or otherwise they might be on first pass — until you start to develop your signature sound, as it were.
Writing, like any art, is in itself a form of self-discovery. The only way to figure out what your prose sounds like, how it flows, how it’s structured, the ways in which it comes naturally to you, is to write. A lot. For a long time. It took me years to develop my own writing voice. And I wrote a LOT of bad prose in those years. I wrote a lot of cringe blog posts. It took a while, but at some point it eventually clicked, and now I don’t even have to think about it. This is just my voice. This is just how I write.
Nothing particularly special or interesting preceded that moment it clicked. It just happened while I was working on something random. It only comes together as you’re sitting there doing the work. So let’s all close this tab now and get back to working. Your writing voice is unique — or it will be, in time — and the world deserves to “hear” it.
Meg Dowell Writes 