In 1959, a twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson sat at his kitchen table in New York and typed out The Great Gatsby. The whole thing. Word by word, page by page, on his own typewriter. Then he did it again with A Farewell to Arms.
He wasn't plagiarizing. He wasn't studying. He was doing something stranger than both. He wanted to know what it felt like inside his own hands to write a sentence the way Fitzgerald wrote a sentence. He wanted the rhythm in his fingers, the way a pianist learns a Chopin etude not to perform it forever but to understand what that kind of movement feels like from the inside. Thompson would later become one of the most distinctive voices in American writing, a writer you could identify from a single paragraph. But in 1959 he was just a guy at a table, typing somebody else's words and hoping something would stick.
Joan Didion did nearly the same thing. She's talked about typing out Hemingway sentences when she was starting out, feeling her way into his short declarative rhythms, learning where he put the weight in a line. She didn't end up writing like Hemingway. She ended up writing like Didion. But something about that early imitation trained her ear.
There's a lesson here about how to find your writing voice, and it's the opposite of what most writing advice suggests.
Every writer's voice starts as a mixtape
The advice you'll hear most often is "find your authentic voice," as though your voice is a lost set of keys and you just need to check the right coat pocket. But nobody's voice arrives fully formed. What actually happens is messier and more interesting.
You read someone who lights you up. You start unconsciously borrowing their cadence, their sentence length, the way they build a paragraph. Then you read someone else and borrow from them too. And slowly, over months or years, those borrowed pieces start colliding in ways that are genuinely yours, because nobody else borrowed from exactly that combination in exactly that order while living exactly your life.
Austin Kleon wrote a whole book about this called Steal Like an Artist, and the central idea is that originality is a myth worth letting go of. Every creative person is a collector. Your taste, the specific things you love and can't stop rereading, is already more original than you think. The work is letting all those influences crash into each other long enough that something new crawls out.
The moment you stop sounding like your influences
There's a Raymond Carver story that complicates all of this in a useful way. For years, Carver was celebrated as the master of American minimalism. Spare, stripped-down prose. Sentences like clean bones. Then after his death, his editor Gordon Lish's papers became available and people realized Lish had cut Carver's manuscripts by fifty, sometimes seventy percent. Entire paragraphs removed. Endings rewritten. The "Carver voice" was, in some real sense, a collaboration Carver himself had complicated feelings about.
I think about this whenever someone asks about finding your writing voice, because it shows how tangled the whole concept actually is. Your voice gets shaped by what you read, but also by who edits you, by what you cut, by what you're afraid to say and then finally say anyway. It accumulates.
At some point, if you keep writing, you notice you've stopped trying to sound like anyone. You're just trying to get the sentence right, and "right" has started to mean something specific to you that it doesn't mean to other people. That's the shift. It's usually quiet when it happens.