One of my favourite stories about an author finding his voice is Hunter S. Thompson. Now, take his sordid addictions, suicide, and altogether racy persona out of the equation (if one actually can), Thompson could write. Certainly one of my idols. I've heard many times how he used to take F. Scott Fitzgerald's work and write it out on a typewriter word for word, just to feel the rhythm, the cadence of that old great's work. Spend any time with Gatsby and you can see why: every sentence of that thing is honed to perfection. Despite being a pretty sparse text, it's deservedly revered as a work of genius. And it's interesting to note that Thompson was writing amid a time and life of vice and emulating someone who did the same.
In the film Finding Forrester--a staple in my writing classes--William provides a writers-blocked Jamal with a sample of his own work. He advises Jamal to write the words until he finds his own. This proves the antidote to the disease.
It's a delicate thing, finding the voice. More than once I've seen a great young writer stumble across, say, The Catcher in the Rye and nearly everything they produce for a while after sounds like it's being narrated by Holden Caulfield. It's much worse case with kids mired in the bleak cliches of graphic novels or the putrid prose of Suzanne Collins.
The balance is in inspiration rather than imitation. The biggest influence of the voice of my fiction is Yann Martel. I don't try to write like him. I don't try to make the tragic slightly humorous in an observant way, and I don't pepper it with study of every realm of the existential. But what that man may be the best of his generation at is the twist in a sentence. He writes the most quotable work since, well, since Hunter S. Thompson. Language rich in observation, in parallel structure, in taking the familiar--the potential cliche--in wording and turning it back on itself. So many of his lines stand free on their own merits, not only when contributing to an overall narrative.
My voice doesn't resemble his. It's like how you retain your Canadian accent while travelling abroad: you hear the lilting of the local tongue in your head, but what comes out of you is still all your own.
