Every writer begins as a collage. We borrow our favourite authors’ rhythms, our editors’ tics, the internet’s favourite sentence shapes — and then wonder why the result sounds like everyone and no one. Here’s the secret I learned in year nine of doing this: voice isn’t invented. It’s uncovered, by stripping away everything that isn’t you.
1. Write the email version first
Before you draft the essay, explain the idea as if writing to a clever friend. No introductions, no throat-clearing — just “you won’t believe what I realised today.” That paragraph, messy and alive, usually contains your truest sentences. Build outward from it, not away from it.
2. Circle your accidents
Read your last three pieces and circle every phrase that surprises you — the odd metaphor, the blunt aside, the joke you almost deleted. Those accidents are your voice leaking through the imitation. Next draft, stop apologising for them and give them more room.
“Style is what happens when you stop performing good writing and start telling the truth faster.”
3. Read it aloud to a room
Even an empty room works. Your ear catches what your eye forgives: the stiff transitions, the borrowed grandeur, the sentence you’d never actually say. If you stumble reading it, your reader will stumble reading it. Rewrite until it sounds like talking — just talking with unusually good timing.
None of this is quick. Uncovering a voice takes a few dozen pieces and a willingness to sound ordinary before you sound like yourself. But the writers you admire most aren’t performing. They’re just further along in the stripping-away. Start today, and the collage starts to clear.
Clara Bennett
Essayist & brand storyteller behind Pennant & Prose. 120+ stories published, 55K+ monthly readers.