Quick, what’s the difference between Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Andre Norton? And chromosomes don’t count. All are fiction writers, all write in the mid-20th Century, all are acknowledged as masters in their genres. And all have very, very different authorial voices.

This is also true of the Mad Genii. You can’t mistake one of my stories for one of Sarah’s or Daves, or Brian Torgeson, or Karen Mayers. We all have different takes on the world, write different kinds of fiction, and sound different for all that we use the same basic English building blocks. Some have a much more distinctive voice than others, and some of us change things a little depending on the kind of story and character we are telling. Dave uses more dialect. Sarah has more in-world tech jargon (but not always). I tend to get a bit florid in my descriptions, and use more antiquated verbiage. Each style and genre appeals to different readers, as it should.

Nota bene: Authorial voice is different from character voice. Each character will (or should) sound different unless you have a reason for them to blur together. The Artful Dodger has a very different voice than does Mr. Pickwick or Ebenezer Scrooge, even though they are all creations of Charles Dickens. Characters have their own ways of seeing, moving, speaking, and you as the author should respect that. Author voice is the difference between, oh, Dickens, Hemingway, Nora Roberts, and William Faulkner, to look at extreme examples.

Back in the day, and still to an extent, “young” painters and other artists began by copying the style and techniques of the masters. Once the basics of “the fuzzy end of the brush goes into the paint, then paint onto the canvas” were mastered, apprentices and students tried to mimic greater workers, learning how to achieve different effects and lines before then doing their own original work. That helped the painters learn how to release their own voice. Raphael is not Da Vinci is not Giotto is not Van Eyche is not Holbein. You can tell that they are all Renaissance painters, but each has a very different way of showing the world to viewers. All produced beautiful works that are still studied and admired hundreds of years later. That’s what young writers should to, too.

Write. The more you write, the more you learn about your style and process. And read, read lots of styles and genres. Read some how-to-write books, like Dwight Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer, or Orson Scott Card’s books about writing. Look at books about your genre, as well as books in your genre. That can help you sort out some of the mechanics and things you might not have considered trying, or little bits and tropes that you might not have noticed before.

Then what?

Find a writer with a style you like. What about that writer’s work appeals to you, and what do they do well that you struggle with? Both Dave and Sarah have talked about the importance of Georgette Heyer’s skill with dialogue, and how they teased apart what she did, and how she did it. With that knowledge, they applied it to their own writing styles and built their skill. Neither of them reads like Heyer, because they kept their own voices. You might admire Anne Bishop and Andre Norton’s skill at building worlds with minimal description, or Frank Herbert’s “thick” descriptions in Dune. How do they do that? What techniques do the different authors use, or avoid? Likewise, if you have problems with a certain skill, such as dialogue or writing fight scenes or setting pacing, find a writer who does it well, and “take apart” her books and stories. Find out the technique she uses, and see how you could incorporate that into your own writing.

Do not try to sound just like another writer. That is, unless you are in one of the contests where the goal is to parody or mimic a famous writer, in which case go for it. Apply what you learned and observed into your own voice. And don’t worry if over time your voice changes a little. That is true of all of us in life. We grow, learn, study, mellow about some things and become more rigid about others. So too your style may become more fluid, or shift emphasis as you go.