There’s a question I’ve been carrying with me to every interview lately, the kind that keeps tugging at my elbow mid-conversation: How does a writer go from mimicking the voices they admire to producing something unmistakably their own? It’s one thing to study craftâsentence structure, pacing, dialogue tagsâbut voice is slipperier. Voice is the fingerprint. Voice is what makes you close a book and think, Only this author could have written that sentence.
Over the past few months, I’ve sat down with four debut novelists who recently published their first books. Our conversations meandered through rejection letters, abandoned drafts, and the quiet, stubborn belief that kept them at their desks. What emerged was not a formulaâvoice refuses formulasâbut a series of honest, sometimes messy accounts of how these writers located the sound that was always theirs.
The Imitation Phase
Every writer I spoke with admitted to a period of imitation. Maren Liddicoat, whose novel The Salt of Small Houses came out this spring, told me she wrote her first three hundred pages channeling Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy simultaneously. “It was a disaster,” she said, laughing. “You had Morrison’s lyricism crashing into McCarthy’s spareness, and the result was this weird, overwrought prose that didn’t belong to anyone.”
Jon Puod, author of the debut Still Water, Running, described a similar arc. “I wrote a whole novel in what I thought was Raymond Carver’s voice. Minimalist. Lots of white space on the page. My MFA advisor handed it back and said, ‘This reads like someone doing an impression.’ That stung, but it was accurate.”
What struck me about these admissions was the absence of shame. None of these writers treated imitation as a failure; they saw it as a necessary apprenticeship. You learn tones by trying them on, the way a musician learns scales before improvising. The problem arrives when you stay in someone else’s register because you’re afraid of what your own might sound like.
The Breaking Point
For each writer, there was a moment of ruptureâa draft that fell apart, a rejection that landed differently, a morning when the words simply refused to come out in anyone’s accent but their own.
Freya Akhtar published Hollow Theories last fall, a novel about a family navigating grief in rural Scotland. She told me about the draft she threw away entirely. “I was two hundred pages in, and the voice felt like a costume. I could write competent sentences, but they had no pulse. I remember sitting at my kitchen table, genuinely wondering if I had a voice at all or if I was just a very good mimic.”
The breakthrough came when she stopped writing for an audience. “I started writing scenes I assumed no one would ever read. Bad scenes. Embarrassing scenes. And something shifted. The sentences got clunkier, actuallyâless polishedâbut they had a rhythm I recognized. It was mine.”
Jon’s breaking point came through a different route. After his MFA advisor’s blunt feedback, he spent six months not writing fiction at all. Instead, he filled notebooks with observationsâoverheard conversations, descriptions of the light at different hours, small grievances he’d been carrying. “I was basically writing without trying to write well,” he said. “And that’s when my ear opened up. I started hearing the way I actually construct a thought, not the way I thought a Writer should construct one.”
Permission to Be Specific
A pattern surfaced across all four interviews: voice arrives through specificity. Not the broad strokes of a genre or a movement, but the granular details that only you would notice.
Karen Espinoza‘s novel Orchard and After traces three generations of Filipino-American women in Central California. When I asked her when she first felt like she’d located her voice, she pointed to a single paragraphâa description of her grandmother hanging laundry in January fog. “I could feel my grandmother’s hands in the sentence,” Karen said. “Not hands in general. Her hands. The way she’d snap the sheets before pinning them. That’s when I understood that voice isn’t abstract. It lives in the details you can’t stop thinking about.”
Maren echoed this sentiment. “My voice lives in the specifics of rural Minnesotaâthe way snow crusts over in March, the way my uncle said ‘well now’ before every sentence. When I stopped trying to write universal truths and started writing what I actually knew, the prose began to breathe.”
This aligns with what many writing teachers have observed about the relationship between specificity and authenticity. As the novelist and educator Francine Prose has argued, close attention to detail is what transforms generic prose into something alive on the page. (Reading Like a Writer)
The Role of Reading Widely
Here’s something that surprised me: every single writer I interviewed said that reading outside their genreânot just within itâhelped them find their voice. Freya reads poetry obsessively. Jon absorbs oral histories. Karen loves science fiction despite writing literary fiction. Maren returns to cookbooks and farming almanacs.
“There’s something about encountering syntax that doesn’t belong to your genre,” Freya explained. “It shakes you loose. Poetry taught me that a sentence doesn’t have to move in a straight line. That I could let silence do some of the work.”
Jon put it more directly: “If you only read the kind of thing you’re trying to write, you’ll just reproduce it. You have to feed yourself strange food.”
What About Confidence?
I asked each writer whether finding your voice means you finally feel confident. The answer, uniformly, was no.
“I don’t think confidence has much to do with it,” Maren said. “I still second-guess every sentence. But now I second-guess my own sentences, which is different from wondering what Morrison would do. The doubt belongs to me now, and that oddly makes it easier to live with.”
Karen described confidence as a moving target. “Some days I feel like I’ve found something real. Other days I feel like a fraud who got lucky once. What’s changed is that I trust the work itself more than I trust my feelings about the work. The sentences either work or they don’t. My job is to show up and write them.”
This resonated with something the writer Ann Patchett has discussedâthat writing is an act of faith not in yourself, but in the process. You keep coming back to the desk because the desk has proven reliable, even when your confidence hasn’t. (Patchett’s essays on process)
Advice for Writers Still Searching
Near the end of each conversation, I asked what they would say to a writer who feels stuck in imitation or hasn’t yet found their register. Their answers were generous and varied:
Maren: “Write the scene you’re afraid someone will read. The one that makes you uncomfortable. That’s where your voice is hiding.”
Jon: “Stop trying to sound like a writer. Try to sound like yourself explaining something to a friend. You can always revise up from there.”
Freya: “Read your work out loud. Your ear will catch what your eye misses. If it sounds like you’re wearing someone else’s coat, take it off.”
Karen: “Give yourself permission to write badly. Voice isn’t a gift you receive; it’s a thing you excavate, and you have to move a lot of dirt to get to it.”
FAQ: Finding Your Voice as a First-Time Novelist
Is it normal to模仿 other writers when you’re starting out?
Absolutely. Every professional writer I interviewed described a period of imitation early in their development. Think of it as an apprenticeshipâyou learn the mechanics of prose by studying and attempting to reproduce what the masters have done. The goal isn’t to stay there, but to pass through it on your way to something that belongs to you.
How do you know when you’ve found your voice?
The writers I spoke with described it as a feeling of recognition rather than arrival. You read a sentence back and think, “Yes, that sounds like me”ânot the version of you that’s trying to impress, but the version of you that tells the truth. It’s often clunkier than your imitation voice, less polished, but it has a rhythm you can’t mistake for anyone else’s.
Can you lose your voice once you’ve found it?
Several of the novelists I interviewed said voice can feel elusive between projects. Each new book requires you to locate its particular register, which may differ from the last. What stays consistent is your relationship to detail, your instinct for what matters, your rhythmic tendencies. The specific sound may shift, but the sourceâyouâremains.
Does finding your voice mean you stop revising?
Not at all. Voice is where you begin; revision is where you refine. Maren told me she rewrote her novel three times after finding her voice, each pass sharpening and deepening what was already there. Voice gives you a foundation to build on; it doesn’t mean the building assembles itself.
Finding your voice is not a single moment of revelation. It’s a slow, often frustrating process of writing your way toward yourselfâpast the writers you admire, past the drafts that sound like someone else, past the days when the words won’t come at all. What the novelists I spoke with taught me is that the voice you’re looking for has been there all along, waiting for you to stop performing and start listening.
I’m grateful to Maren, Jon, Freya, and Karen for their honesty and their time. Their novels are worth your attentionânot because the voices are perfect, but because the voices are theirs.
