Finding Your Voice by Copying Others (Yes, Really)

When I was starting out, a teacher told me to retype a page of a writer I admired, every day, for a month. Her name was Mrs. Delacroix, she taught a night class in creative writing at a community college outside Sacramento, and she had the patience of a woman who had heard every excuse twenty-year-olds could invent. I asked her if she was serious. She said she had never been more serious about anything.

It felt like cheating. It was the best lesson I ever had. I still think about that month more than any workshop, craft book or writing program I have encountered since. This post is about why the exercise works, how to do it well and what happens when you finally turn it around and make it your own.

The assignment

The rules were simple. Choose a writer whose sentences make you jealous. Every day, retype one page of their work, word for word, punctuation and all. Do not skim. Do not copy and paste. Type it, letter by letter, as if you were writing it yourself for the first time.

I chose a short story collection by a writer from Montana whose prose I loved for its plainness. Short sentences, ordinary words, enormous feeling underneath. I thought I understood how she did it. After three days of retyping her stories, I realized I had understood nothing at all.

Typing her words, I noticed things I had read past a dozen times. How often she started a sentence with “And.” How she never used a fancy word when a plain one would do. How she let a paragraph end on a small, physical detail, a cup set down or a door closed, instead of explaining the emotion. None of this was visible when I read her. All of it was obvious when my fingers had to make every choice she made.

Why it works

Typing someone’s sentences slows you down enough to feel how they’re built. Reading is fast. Our eyes jump ahead, our brains fill in gaps, and we absorb the overall effect of a sentence without seeing the parts. Typing forces you to process every word, every comma, every paragraph break. You stop being a reader and start being a builder, following someone else’s blueprint.

There is an old tradition behind this. Painters have long learned by copying the masters in museums, standing in front of a canvas with an easel and trying to reproduce every brushstroke. Musicians learn by playing other people’s songs before they write their own. Writers, for some reason, often feel they should skip that step and be original from the very first page. I think that is a mistake.

You find your voice by trying on a hundred others first.

Nora

Your voice is not something you are born with, fully formed, waiting to be uncovered. It is something you assemble over time, from everything you have read, admired and absorbed. Copying, done deliberately, simply speeds up that process. You get to choose which influences you take in, instead of absorbing them by accident.

What I noticed, week by week

I kept notes during that month, and rereading them now, the progression is clear.

• Week one: boredom and frustration. It felt like homework. I kept wanting to change words.
• Week two: small discoveries. I started noticing patterns in her rhythm and punctuation.
• Week three: my own writing started to change. My sentences got shorter and plainer without my trying.
• Week four: I could almost predict what she would write next. I had internalized her music.

By the end of the month, I had retyped about thirty pages. That is not a lot of text. But I knew those thirty pages better than I knew almost anything I had written myself.

The change in my own writing surprised me most. I had not tried to sound like her. I had only tried to copy her accurately. But the habits seeped in anyway, the way an accent does when you spend a summer somewhere new. My sentences lost some of their nervous decoration. I stopped explaining my jokes. I trusted a plain noun to carry weight. Those habits are still with me, many years and many writers later.

Then make it yours

After a week, write a page about your own life in their rhythm. Something new shows up. This is the second half of the exercise, and it is where the magic happens.

Mrs. Delacroix had us do this on Fridays. We took everything we had absorbed from our chosen writer and applied it to our own material. I wrote about my grandmother’s kitchen in the plain, short-sentence style I had been typing all week. The result was not quite her and not quite me. It was something in between, and it was better than anything I had written before.

Over the following years, I repeated the exercise with different writers. A Southern novelist whose sentences went on for half a page. A poet who wrote essays in tiny fragments. A journalist from Chicago with a gift for the perfect closing line. Each one left something behind. My voice today is a mixture of all of them, plus whatever is uniquely mine, and I can no longer tell exactly where one ends and the next begins.

How to try it

If you want to try this yourself, here is how I would set it up. You need very little: a book you love and fifteen to twenty minutes a day.

1. Choose carefully. Pick a writer whose sentences you admire, not just whose stories you enjoy. The style is what you are studying.
2. Type, don’t handwrite. Handwriting works too, but typing is closer to how you will actually write. Either is fine; pick one and stay consistent.
3. One page a day. Not more. The point is attention, not volume.
4. Keep it private. This is practice, not publication. Never share the copied text as your own work, ever.
5. Write on Fridays. Once a week, write an original page about your own life in the style you have been studying.
6. Switch writers each month. Variety keeps you from becoming an imitation of one person.

That fourth point is important enough to repeat. Copying as a private exercise is one of the oldest ways to learn. Presenting someone else’s words as your own is plagiarism, and it is never okay. The exercise is about studying, not borrowing.

Key takeaway: retype a page a day from a writer you admire, then write your own page in their rhythm. Repeat with different writers until your own voice emerges from the mix.

What Mrs. Delacroix knew

I ran into Mrs. Delacroix years later, at a bookstore reading in Sacramento where I was the one at the podium. She came up afterward and told me she had recognized the Montana writer in my second chapter. I was mortified. She laughed and said that was exactly the point. “Everyone starts as somebody else,” she said. “The good ones just keep going until they’re themselves.”

I think about that often. There is a kind of pressure in writing culture to be completely original, immediately. But nobody starts that way. We all begin by imitating, whether we admit it or not. The writers who grow the most are the ones who imitate on purpose, widely and thoughtfully, and then let all those borrowed voices slowly blend into one.

So pick a book from your shelf tonight. Open it to a page that makes you jealous. Start typing. It will feel like cheating. Give it a month, and see who shows up on the page when you are done.