People love to talk about “finding your voice.” They say it like you misplaced it under the couch and you just need to look harder. Cute story. The real story looked messier. I wrote until my habits outnumbered my excuses. I repeated myself until the repetitions started to feel intentional. And I stopped trying to sound like someone who drinks tea in a clean office with three plants and a candle that smells like ambition.
My voice showed up angry. It showed up caffeinated. It showed up after midnight when the house went quiet and my brain refused to act normal. I did not “find” it. I tracked it through the mud and dragged it inside. It dripped on the floor and I let it.
Workshops taught me to sanitize. They taught me to polish until the page lay flat and dead. Readers did not show up for that corpse. Readers showed up the day I stopped faking poise. They arrived when I cut the lyrical filler and let the rant breathe. They arrived when I wrote the paragraph I would never read out loud at a nice table.
Here is what killed my voice faster than anything: pretending to be tasteful. Tasteful is for home decor. Tasteful is for press releases. The page needs blood. I do not mean trauma confessions for clicks. I mean conviction. I mean the line that only I would write because only I would risk it. If I could swap the paragraph into someone else’s blog and nothing would break, that paragraph dies.
People ask how to be original. Wrong question. Ask how to be specific. Write the thing your aunt will side-eye. Write the scene your ex will recognize. Write the petty detail no one else would pick. That is voice. Not the pretty sentence, but the sentence that would make your family group chat explode if they ever found it.
Limits helped more than freedom. I banned half the lazy phrases I used to reach for. No storm metaphors. No eyes doing yoga across the room. No slo-mo “time stopped” nonsense. When I strip those out, I have to name what actually happened. My jaw locked. My grip on the mug went tight. The clock ticked and I counted it. Now the page holds a real moment, not a thrift-store version of one.
Deadlines help too. I do not write better with infinite time. I write better when the clock presses my spine. When I know I have to deliver, I stop rehearsing and start cutting. I once deleted six hundred words I loved because they did not move the chapter. I sulked. Then the scene clicked and I forgot the pretty junk I clung to five minutes earlier. That is craft in practice. Knife work.
Voice is not a diary of opinions. It is rhythm. It is word choice. It is what you refuse to say and what you refuse to cut. It is the way you escalate a paragraph. It is your favorite kind of ugly. I like short sentences that punch. I like sardonic asides tucked into clean lines. I like ending with a stamp that reads like a warning. When I lean into that, readers feel the track under their feet. They know they are in my lane, not anyone else’s.
You want a practical step? Write the same idea three ways. First, over-polished on purpose. Second, feral on purpose. Third, the merge. Keep the accuracy of the feral draft and the clarity of the polished one. If a line survives all three versions, it belongs to you.
Another step. Record yourself ranting about the chapter that won’t behave. Transcribe it. Strip the filler words. There you go. That cadence is your foundation. The page should sound like you, not the seminar you sat through.
Last step. Publish the thing that scares you by one notch. Not ten. One. Let the audience push back. Let them DM you with heat. If the piece feels safe to everyone, it probably never left the house.
RAW Empire built a home for that kind of voice. Glitch on purpose. Scratches visible. Barcodes on the bottom like a warning label. This brand is not a workshop gold star. It is a file cabinet full of contraband pages. We are not here to blend. We are here to print what should have stayed in the notes app and dare the internet to keep up.
Stop looking for your voice. Start weaponizing it.