: Re: How do I stop my writing sounding like a bad imitation of whatever author I've just been reading? I like to read across a variety of authors, genres, and publication dates. Whenever I sit

@Holmes449

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Your writing may sound like somebody else's. When I began, I actually analyzed the writing of my favorite authors. Not just for the basics of punctuation; but sentence length and structure. Dialogue that I liked, for example how many words in a sentence? How they used adjectives, and how many, how they described rooms, and landscapes, and people, and voices, and sounds, and smells. How many points do they mention?

Sex scenes: How did they manage that? I didn't just read books on writing, I read writing, not for enjoyment or story. I was opening books I had read, but at random and picking a good page of exposition, or dialogue, or looking for a memorable scene to analyze; count words, count adjectives, count sentence length and pacing (how fast fiction-world-time is passing per sentence, basically).

It broke me of some habits; gave me insight into "good writing" vs. bad.

All of that said, I imitate the patterns of their writing, not the words and choices and characters.

I think the way you find your own voice is after you have done some training like that, learning to imitate what you consider good writing by several writers, is to write without reading anybody else. Once I start thinking of a story, I read ZERO fiction until I have finished writing it. None.

My entertainment at that point is writing, not reading, and although I consume fiction in the form of TV or movies; I feel that is different than imitating another writer; their "voice" is not that distinguishable (to me) when acted.

I am a discovery writer, so my delay between story-conception to writing is pretty short, but still it usually takes me a few weeks of thinking before I open a file and start typing. I think if you do that, and are consumed by your own imagination and describing new scenes and characters and dialogue, your own voice emerges. What you learned from other authors are guidelines to good writing; the technicalities of what you like. They are a way to provide some distance and objectivity to your own writing, so you can know if it were written by somebody else you wouldn't be happy with it! That training is like vocal lessons; it doesn't really change your voice, it just exercises and adds some control to it.

Get other authors out of your short-term memory, don't let them back in by reading their writing while you are writing, and what you are left with is your voice.

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