Finding Your Unique Voice as a Writer: Why It Matters (and How to Find It)

If you’ve ever worried your writing sounds like everyone else’s, you’re not alone. One of the most common questions new (and even experienced) authors ask is: 

“How do I find my voice as a writer?”

At What’s Your Story – Author Services, we believe your writing voice is not something you manufacture—it’s something you uncover. It’s already within you, waiting to be brought to life with intention and practice. 

In this post, we’ll break down what your writing voice is, why it matters, and how to start identifying and refining it—so you can tell the story only you can tell. 

🎙 What Is Your Writing Voice? 

Your writing voice is the distinct personality, tone, and rhythm that comes through in your words. It’s the invisible fingerprint that makes your writing recognizable—whether you’re drafting a novel, a memoir, or a blog post. 

Think of it this way: 

• Tone is how you say something (casual, formal, funny, poetic). 
• Style is what kind of language you use (simple, complex, lyrical). 
• Voice is the combination of all the above—and more.

Your voice reflects your worldview, your experiences, and your natural way of expressing yourself. 

 “Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words.” – Truman Capote 

💡 Why Your Voice Matters More Than You Think 

Plot can be learned. Grammar can be edited. But your voice is what makes your writing you. 

Why bother to develop your author’s voice?: 

• It builds connection—Readers don’t just fall in love with stories—they fall in love with the way you tell them. 
• It sets you apart—With thousands of books published each day, a unique voice helps you stand out in a crowded market. 
• It makes writing easier—When you write in your natural voice, you stop overthinking and start flowing.

🔍 How to Start Finding Your Unique Voice 

If you’re not sure what your voice is yet, that’s okay. It takes time—and sometimes a lot of writing—to discover it. But here are some ways to start: 

1. Write Like You Talk–But Better! 

Start with freewriting or journaling in your natural speaking tone. This strips away the pressure to “sound literary” or like an influencer you admire. It helps your real rhythm come through. You can always revise later—but begin honestly. 

2. Notice Your Word Habits 

We all have phrases, metaphors, or sentence structures we gravitate toward. Don’t fight them—study them. These quirks are often clues to your authentic voice. 

3. Read Your Work Aloud 

Reading out loud helps you *hear* what flows and what feels forced. If it sounds stiff or robotic, it might not be your true voice. 

4. Stop Trying to Sound Like Other Writers

It’s great to learn from your favorites, but don’t mimic them. Your goal isn’t to become the next “insert famous author”—it’s to become you on the page. 

5. Write More (and Then Some More)

Voice is developed over time, not discovered in a single session. The more you write and work on your manuscript, the more naturally your voice will emerge. 

📚 Want to See What a Strong Voice Looks Like?

As you’re exploring your own voice, it helps to see how varied and vivid great voices can be. Here are a five authors whose voices leap off the page—each one unique, authentic, and unforgettable:

Zora Neale Hurston – Lyrical and culturally rich  

Their Eyes Were Watching God pulses with rhythm, emotion, and a deep connection to African American storytelling traditions.

Here is an excerpt:

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment.

The people all saw her come because it was sundown. The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.

Seeing the woman as she was made them remember the envy they had stored up from other times. So they chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish. They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty. A mood come alive. Words walking without masters; walking altogether like harmony in a song.

‘What she doin’ coming back here in dem overhalls? Can’t she find no dress to put on?— Where’s dat blue satin dress she left here in?— Where all dat money her husband took and died and left her?— What dat ole forty year ole ’oman doin’ wid her hair swingin’ down her back lak some young gal?— Where she left dat young lad of a boy she went off here wid?— Thought she was going to marry?— Where he left her? What he done wid all her money?— Betcha he off wid some gal so young she ain’t even got no hairs – why she don’t stay in her class?—’

When she got to where they were she turned her face on the bander log and spoke. They scrambled a noisy ‘good evenin’’ and left their mouths setting open and their ears full of hope. Her speech was pleasant enough, but she kept walking straight on to her gate. The porch couldn’t talk for looking. The men noticed her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets; the great rope of black hair swinging to her waist and unraveling in the wind like a plume; then her pugnacious breasts trying to bore holes in her shirt. They, the men, were saving with the mind what they lost with the eye. The women took the faded shirt and muddy overalls and laid them away for remembrance. It was a weapon against her strength and if it turned out of no significance, still it was a hope that she might fall to their level some day.

But nobody moved, nobody spoke, nobody even thought to swallow spit until after her gate slammed behind her.

David Sedaris– Witty and observational  

In essays in his book, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Sedaris uses self-deprecating humor and sharp insight to turn the mundane into the memorable.

Here’s an excerpt:

Anyone who watches even the slightest amount of TV is familiar with the scene: An agent knocks on the door of some seemingly ordinary home or office. The door opens, and the person holding the knob is asked to identify himself. The agent then says, “I’m going to ask you to come with me.”

They’re always remarkably calm, these agents. If asked “Why do I need to go anywhere with you?” they’ll straighten their shirt cuffs or idly brush stray hairs from the sleeves of their sport coats and say, “Oh, I think we both know why.”

The suspect then chooses between doing things the hard way and doing things the easy way, and the scene ends with either gunfire or the gentlemanly application of handcuffs. Occasionally it’s a case of mistaken identity, but most often the suspect knows exactly why he’s being taken. It seems he’s been expecting this to happen. The anticipation has ruled his life, and now, finally, the wait is over. You’re sometimes led to believe that this person is actually relieved, but I’ve never bought it. Though it probably has its moments, the average day spent in hiding is bound to beat the average day spent in prison. When it comes time to decide who gets the bottom bunk, I think anyone would agree that there’s a lot to be said for doing things the hard way.

The agent came for me during a geography lesson. She entered the room and nodded at my fifth-grade teacher, who stood frowning at a map of Europe. What would needle me later was the realization that this had all been prearranged. My capture had been scheduled to go down at exactly 2:30 on a Thursday afternoon. The agent would be wearing a dung-colored blazer over a red knit turtleneck, her heels sensibly low in case the suspect should attempt a quick getaway.

“David,” the teacher said, “this is Miss Samson, and she’d like you to go with her now.”

No one else had been called, so why me? I ran down a list of recent crimes, looking for a conviction that might stick. Setting fire to a reportedly flameproof Halloween costume, stealing a set of barbecue tongs from an unguarded patio, altering the word hit on a list of rules posted on the gymnasium door; never did it occur to me that I might be innocent.

“You might want to take your books with you,” the teacher said. “And your jacket. You probably won’t be back before the bell rings.”

Toni Morrison – Poetic and profound 

From Beloved to Song of Solomon, Morrison’s voice weaves history, metaphor, and soul into every line.

From Beloved:

124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old–as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny band prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the doorsill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once–the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn’t have a number then, because Cincinnati didn’t stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them.

Ernest Hemingway –Spare and powerful 

Known for his minimalist style, Hemingway’s voice is simple on the surface but packed with emotional depth. 

From The Old Man and the Sea:

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.

The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.

“Santiago,” the boy said to him as they climbed the bank from where the skiff was hauled up. “I could go with you again. We’ve made some money.”

The old man had taught the boy to fish and the boy loved him.

“No,” the old man said. “You’re with a lucky boat. Stay with them.”

Elizabeth Gilbert-–Intimate and inspiring  

Eat Pray Love showcases a voice that feels like a best friend—warm, reflective, and deeply personal.

Here is an excerpt:

I wish Giovanni would kiss me.

Oh, but there are so many reasons why this would be a terrible idea. To begin with, Giovanni is ten years younger than I am, and, like most Italian guys in their twenties, he still lives with his mother. These facts alone make him an unlikely romantic partner for me, given that I am a professional American woman in my mid-thirties, who has just come through a failed marriage and a devastating, interminable divorce, followed immediately by a passionate love affair that ended in sickening heartbreak. This loss upon loss has left me feeling sad and brittle and about seven thousand years old. Purely as a matter of principle I wouldn’t inflict my sorry, busted-up old self on the lovely, unsullied Giovanni. Not to mention that I have finally arrived at that age where a woman starts to question whether the wisest way to get over the loss of one beautiful brown-eyed young man is indeed to promptly invite another one into her bed. This is why I have been alone for many months now. This is why, in fact, I have decided to spend this entire year in celibacy.

To which the savvy observer might inquire: ‘Then why did you come to Italy?’

To which I can only reply—especially when looking across the table at handsome Giovanni— ‘Excellent question.’

Roxane Gay—Bold and thought-provoking  

In Bad Feminist, Gay blends cultural critique with personal narrative in a voice that is both fierce and relatable.

Here’s a sample:

My favorite definition of a feminist is one offered by Su, an Australian woman who, when interviewed for Kathy Bail’s 1996 anthology DIY Feminism, described them simply as “women who don’t want to be treated like shit.” This definition is pointed and succinct, but I run into trouble when I try to expand it. I fall short as a feminist. I feel like I am not as committed as I need to be, that I am not living up to feminist ideals because of who and how I choose to be. I feel this tension constantly. As Judith Butler writes in her 1988 essay, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution”: “Performing one’s gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all.” This tension—the idea that there is a right way to be a woman, a right way to be the most essential woman—is ongoing and pervasive.

We see this tension in socially dictated beauty standards—the right way to be a woman is to be thin, to wear make up, to wear the right kind of clothes (not too slutty, not too prude, show a little leg, ladies), and so on. Good women are charming, polite, and unobtrusive. Good women work but are content to earn 77 percent of what men earn. Depending on whom you ask, good women bear children and stay home to raise them without complaint. Good women are modest, chaste, pious, submissive. Women who don’t adhere to these standards are the fallen, the undesirable. They are bad women. 

Butler’s thesis could also apply to feminism. There is an essential feminism, the notion that there are right and wrong ways to be a feminist, and there are consequences for doing feminism wrong. 

Essential feminism suggests anger, humorlessness, militancy, unwavering principles, and a prescribed set of rules for how to be a proper feminist woman, or at least a proper white, heterosexual, feminist woman—hate pornography, unilaterally decry the objectification of women, don’t cater to the male gaze, hate men, hate sex, focus on career, don’t shave. I kid, mostly, with that last one. This is nowhere near an accurate description of feminism, but the movement has been warped by misperception for so long that even people who should know better have bought into this essential image of feminism.

These writers don’t sound alike—and that’s the point. Even if they were writing about the same subjects (and often they do) you would absorb different information and sentiments from the tone, word choice, and style of each of them.

Your Turn–Strengthen Your Voice

At the end of the day, your unique writing voice isn’t just about how you write. It’s the why behind it. You may be writing to inform, persuade, or educate. Each of these “whys” will require different ways of interacting with your reader. Your voice helps you to be successful in your aim. Your voice is the culmination of your thoughts, your perspective, and your heart on the page. 

Ready? Look at your latest work to examine it for voice. Consider it as you start writing today.  Can you see how you can improve your communication?

Now it is your turn to:

• Identify your natural voice and style 
• Build confidence in your expression 
• Align your voice with your story’s purpose 
  

Not sure?
Want help, practice, or an ear? 

Whether you aim to find your or improve it, this is exactly the kind of work we do with our clients in our 1:1 coaching sessions, editing, and through our groups, and masterminds. 

📅 Book a free discovery call today.
Let’s talk about your story—and your voice.