Writers talk a lot about “finding your voice,” like it’s some lost object waiting under the couch cushions. As if one day you’ll stumble across it fully formed—Ah, there it is! My voice!—and from then on, the words will flow perfectly.
It doesn’t work like that.
Your voice isn’t something you find. It’s something you build.
Once you’ve built it?
You reconnect with it. As often as you can—daily, if possible.
The more you write, the more you’ll recognise when you’re speaking in your own voice—even after stepping away.
Every word you write, every scene you wrestle into shape, every story you finish (or abandon), adds to it. Even the bad writing. Especially the bad writing. That’s where you experiment, fail, adjust, and slowly figure out what feels true to you.
At first, your writing will sound like other writers. That’s normal. We all start by echoing the books we love because those are the rhythms we know. But as you keep going, you’ll make choices—sometimes without even realising it—that aren’t what they would do. They’re what you would do. Bit by bit, those choices accumulate into something distinct.
When I was first starting, I typed out passages from books that I particularly admired. Not because I wanted to be like those writers; I wasn’t trying to copy their style, but because I wanted to write as well as them.
There’s a difference.
Then I took what I’d typed out. I changed things, and I read it back to myself. I changed words first, then sentences.
Then whole paragraphs.
By the end of the process, I’d changed it. I’d made it feel like it was more “me” than anything I’d written before this exercise.
I’d built my voice.
For fantasy writing, anyway.
When I was first drafting my Urban Fantasy, Hunter in the Dark, I was struggling with it. I couldn’t get the voice right. I didn’t know what I wanted, I just knew that what I was writing wasn’t it.
Then I read something. Something completely different, in a different genre—the first Elvis Cole novel, by Robert Crais. There was a snark to it, a self-aware humour that helped me lay a foundation that would eventually become my voice for that book (which will be a series one day, just watch).
Now, I wasn’t copying him. My character, Harley Hunter is a very different character to his Elvis Cole. Still, Harley has some Elvis in his structure. I think that if Harley and Elvis could ever meet? They might even be friends. They’d see something of themselves in each other.
Your voice isn’t a secret waiting to be uncovered. It’s a muscle. You grow it by using it. You feed it the right things so it grows the right way. You shape it, and you help it to be strong.
So don’t wait for it to appear. Don’t stop because “you haven’t found it yet.”
Write. Finish things. Start new ones. Build your voice word by word.
One day, you’ll look back at your old work and realise—it was there all along. Not all of it, not at first, but the roots were there, growing quietly with every sentence.
Because it’s yours.
It always was.
You just had to build it enough to recognise it.