There’s a moment early in almost every serious writer’s development when they fall in love with another writer’s work so completely that it rewires how they think about sentences.
For me, it was Raymond Carver.
I was reading him religiously — story after story, the spare declarative sentences, the working-class interiors, the way he could make you feel something enormous by barely saying anything at all. And when I sat down to write, my stuff came out reading like Carver. Not copying him exactly. But clearly under his influence in a way I couldn’t fully control.
At the time, I thought this was a problem. I thought it meant I didn’t have my own voice.
It wasn’t a problem. It was exactly how voice development works.
Why Writers Absorb the Voices They Love
When you fall in love with a writer — really fall in love, the kind where you’re reading them at midnight and underlining sentences and going back three pages just to read a paragraph again — something happens neurologically. Their rhythms, their syntax, their way of seeing the world starts to get hardwired into your brain.
This is why John Gardner, who was Raymond Carver’s teacher at Chico State, gave him this famous piece of advice: Read all the Hemingway you can until you can’t read any more Hemingway. Then read all the Faulkner you can to wash out all the Hemingway.
Gardner wasn’t being flip. He understood that imitation isn’t a shortcut or a cheat — it’s the actual mechanism by which writers develop. You absorb a master’s sensibility so deeply that it becomes part of your own toolkit. Then you absorb another one. And another.
If you go back and read Carver’s earliest unpublished stories, before he became the Carver we know, you can see him doing Hemingway. You can see him doing Faulkner. You can watch him working through these influences the way a musician works through scales — not to sound like those composers forever, but to internalize what they knew.
When Your Writing Voice Starts to Emerge
Here’s the thing about imitation as a developmental stage: it stops working as camouflage once you’ve loved enough writers.
After Carver, I fell hard for Junot Díaz. Then Dennis Johnson. Then Richard Ford. Each of them got hardwired in too. And as those new writers layered in alongside Carver, something interesting happened — people stopped being able to say exactly what I was doing. Nobody could look at my work and say he’s doing Carver or he’s doing Díaz with confidence, because by then I was doing all of them, filtered through my own subject matter, my own characters, my own way of seeing.
That’s when you know your voice has started to emerge. Not when you sound like nobody — that’s not the goal, and it’s not really possible anyway. But when you sound like a combination that’s hard to untangle. When the fingerprints of your influences have blended into something that reads as distinctly yours.
What to Do If You Haven’t Found Your Writing Voice Yet
If you’re a writer who feels like your work sounds like whoever you just finished reading, you’re not behind. You’re in the middle of the process.
The instinct to feel embarrassed about this — to think I’m just imitating, I don’t have my own voice yet — is almost universal among developing writers. But it misreads what’s actually happening. The imitation phase isn’t the failure to develop a voice. It is the development of a voice, in its early stages.
A few things that help:
Read widely and on purpose. Don’t just read in your genre. Read writers with radically different sensibilities — spare and maximalist, Southern Gothic and urban realism, comic and tragic. The more diverse the writers you love, the richer and harder-to-categorize your eventual voice will be.
Love writers. Yes, fall in love with another writer’s work. Fully. Completely. With your heart.
Let yourself imitate openly for a while. If you’re in love with a writer right now, try writing a scene consciously in their style. Not to plagiarize — to learn. Pay attention to their sentence length, their verb choices, what they put in and what they leave out. Then set it aside and write your own scene. You’ll find some of what you absorbed shows up, transformed.
Literally pick a paragraph or a page from your favorite writer’s work and retype it yourself right off the page. See what he or she does differently than you would’ve done. This can be super illuminating.
Trust that your subject matter is already yours. Even when you’re imitating a style, your characters are your characters. Your obsessions are your obsessions. Your way of noticing the world is yours. Style is learnable. Sensibility — what you care about, what you find funny or heartbreaking or worth writing about — that’s already in you and already distinctly yours.
Don’t compare your drafts to published books. This one will wreck you every time. A published novel has been through years of revision. Your draft is clay. The comparison isn’t just unfair — it’s categorically wrong. You’re not measuring the same thing.
Why Writing Voice Isn’t About Originality
Writers sometimes talk about finding their voice as if it means discovering something that was always there, fully formed, waiting to be uncovered. But voice is less like excavation and more like accretion. It builds up over time, layer by layer, from everything you’ve loved and absorbed and worked through.
The writers you fall in love with don’t contaminate your voice. They build it.
Carver is still in me. So is Denis Johnson. So are Junot Díaz, Flannery O’Connor, Ernest Hemingway, Russel Banks, Don DeLillo and… who else? If I don’t tell you, can you guess?
I can hear them when I read my own work closely enough. But the words are all mine now, folded into something that took years of writing and reading and failing and revising to become.
That’s available to you too. You just have to keep going.
Seth Harwood is a writing coach and the author of ten novels, including the Jack Palms crime series. He works with fiction writers on craft-level revision and voice development through private coaching and online courses at WritewithSeth.com.
If you haven’t read any of his fiction, you can find it here: store.sethharwood.com.
