: Re: Developing your writer's voice I'm a relatively new writer and sometimes I feel like my writing is too bland and that I'm struggling to develop my writer's voice. Does anyone have any good

Please read this interview with the writer Joan Didion: [Paris Review, Fall/Winter 1978]1 She is one of the greatest prose stylists in the 20th and 21st centuries, and here's one thing she said when asked about her greatest influence:

"I always say Hemingway, because he taught me how sentences worked. When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out his stories to learn how the sentences worked. I taught myself to type at the same time. A few years ago when I was teaching a course at Berkeley I reread A Farewell to Arms and fell right back into those sentences. I mean they're perfect sentences. Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes."

She literally wrote out Hemingway's sentences. In the end, her voice and Hemingway's could not be more different, but she studied what she loved and it contributed greatly to her own development as a writer.

Read a lot. Study the writers you love. Write from the heart. Your writing will grow into its voice over time.

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: In fiction, is the use of old-fashioned verbage or voice (ex. Tolkien, Le Guin) advisable? If my genre lies somewhere in the fantasy-fiction spectrum, is the use of a more "dated" narrative

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: Should I write my novel? I am a guy whose passion has always been fiction writing but in college I decided to go into software engineering because my parents were in a bind and they needed

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: Is copyright available if you put your story on the internet? Say I write a story, or even a book in chapters on a forum, in the form of a Choose Your Own Adventure, is my story or book

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: Use of copyright across nations Say I'm from the USA and I write a book and don't publish it yet. Then I send it to a friend in Russia for proof reading, but instead he publishes my book

: Re: Developing your writer's voice I'm a relatively new writer and sometimes I feel like my writing is too bland and that I'm struggling to develop my writer's voice. Does anyone have any good

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: In fiction, is the use of old-fashioned verbage or voice (ex. Tolkien, Le Guin) advisable? If my genre lies somewhere in the fantasy-fiction spectrum, is the use of a more "dated" narrative

: Should I write my novel? I am a guy whose passion has always been fiction writing but in college I decided to go into software engineering because my parents were in a bind and they needed

: Is copyright available if you put your story on the internet? Say I write a story, or even a book in chapters on a forum, in the form of a Choose Your Own Adventure, is my story or book

: Use of copyright across nations Say I'm from the USA and I write a book and don't publish it yet. Then I send it to a friend in Russia for proof reading, but instead he publishes my book

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