Everyone says: find your voice. Like it’s in the lost and found, under a scarf and someone else’s umbrella. As if you walk up to the desk: “Hi, yes, mine’s the lyrical-yet-accessible one with hints of irony.” No. Voice finds you. Or worse—voice squats inside you like a raccoon that refuses to leave your attic.
Half the time you don’t even know how it got there. You think you’re original? Please. You’re just leaking phrases you absorbed at work, in your kitchen, from that uncle who couldn’t pronounce “casserole” correctly in 1998.
Example: I used to work at a call center. Eight hours a day repeating “Thank you for holding” until it fused with my bloodstream. Guess what? Now all my narrators sound faintly apologetic, like they’re about to transfer you to a manager. I didn’t choose that. That chose me.
Or misheard words. Whole lives shaped by one wrong syllable. When I was ten, I thought “onomatopoeia” meant “a type of Italian bread.” I used it like that for YEARS. Teachers never corrected me. To this day, my sentences are full of weird carb energy.
Neighborhood slang? That sticks too. If you grew up where people said “y’all,” guess what—you’re doomed. Your future novel will say “y’all” at least once, even if it’s set on Mars. Martian cowboy: “Y’all get in the spaceship.” You can’t escape.
Writers pretend they’re crafting style. Nope. It’s accidents plus residue. Like grease on a diner menu. You touch it once, now your fingers taste like it forever.
And environment—oh man. Ever tried writing in a laundromat? Suddenly everything is spin cycles and waiting. Your metaphors come out soggy. Write at a Starbucks? Now your characters are sighing over pumpkin spice trauma. One summer I wrote a whole story in the DMV waiting room. Every character in that piece just sat around. No one moved. Honestly? It was my most realistic story yet.
Even typing quirks sneak in. I had a busted keyboard once—spacebar stuck. Whole draft looked like a ransom note. “Shewenttothestore” “Hedidnotreturn.” My critique group thought it was “avant-garde compression.” Nah, just a sticky Dorito crumb under the key.
This is the stuff no one tells you in workshops. They say “find your authentic voice.” But they don’t admit that half your authenticity is a typo you never fixed. Or the way your grandma used to overuse the word “incident.” (Now you can’t write a fight scene without calling it “the incident.” Thanks, Grandma.)
And you can’t get rid of it. You can try. You can buy books called Unlocking Your Unique Voice, or The Ten-Minute Voice Makeover: Sound Like Hemingway Before Lunch. Waste of money. Your voice is already duct-taped to your spine. You’ll never shake it. The best you can do is lean into it. Pretend you meant it.
Like when I accidentally wrote “their eyes were full of furniture.” Total slip. Meant to say “fury.” Workshop laughed for twenty minutes. I left it in. Now everyone thinks I’m surreal. Nah, just clumsy. But hey—it worked.
So yeah. Style is less about conscious choice, more about linguistic accidents + jobs you hated + phrases your neighbor’s dog barked at you once.
You don’t find voice. It finds you, shoves a soda straw in your ear, and starts sucking. By the time you realize it, too late. You’re branded.
And if you don’t like your voice? Tough. Blame your environment. Or Cincinnati. Always safe to blame Cincinnati.
Bio: Sabyasachi Roy is an academic writer, poet, artist, and photographer. His poetry has appeared in The Broken Spine, Stand, Poetry Salzburg Review, Dicey Brown, The Potomac, and more. He contributes craft essays to Authors Publish and has a cover image in Sanctuary Asia. His oil paintings have been published in The Hooghly Review. You can follow his writing on Substack here.
