There is a particular moment in the life of anyone who has ever sat down to write something—and by “something” I mean anything from an epic novel to a grocery list they suspect might be read by a particularly critical spouse—when they realise the words appearing on the page bear almost no relation to the magnificent thoughts that were rattling around in their skull five minutes earlier. This is, to put it mildly, annoying. It is also, unfortunately, the entire point.

The concept of a “writing voice” is one of those ideas that sounds perfectly reasonable until you try to explain it to someone at a dinner party, at which point it begins to sound like something you made up to avoid answering a more interesting question about property taxes.

Everyone agrees it exists. Nobody can agree on what it is. Writing teachers will tell you that you need to “find” your voice, which implies that it is currently hiding somewhere, possibly behind the sofa, and that if you just reach far enough back into the cushions you will eventually pull it out along with a small fortune in loose change and a pen that no longer works.

This is, of course, nonsense, but it is the kind of nonsense that contains a small, stubborn nugget of truth, which makes it significantly harder to dismiss than the kind of nonsense that is merely nonsense.

The difficulty with developing a writing voice is that the very act of trying to develop one tends to produce the opposite effect. It is a bit like trying to fall asleep. The more aggressively you pursue the goal, the more the goal retreats from you, until you are lying there at three in the morning, furious at your own brain for its continued insistence on being awake, which is not a state of mind that lends itself to restful slumber or, for that matter, to good prose.

What tends to happen in practice is this. A person reads something they admire, and it doesn’t matter what it is, though it is almost always something written by someone who is either dead or significantly more famous than they are, and they think, quite reasonably, “I would like to write like that.” So they sit down and they write like that. And the result is, by any objective measure, a perfectly competent imitation of someone else’s voice. It has all the right rhythms. It deploys all the correct punctuation. It even manages to capture that particular trick with semicolons that the original author did so effortlessly and that you have been practising in the shower for three weeks.

The problem is that it sounds exactly like the person you are imitating, which means it does not sound like you, which means you have not developed a voice so much as you have developed a very convincing mask. And masks, while useful at costume parties and in certain diplomatic situations, are not particularly helpful when you are trying to communicate something genuine to another human being.

So what is one to do?

The answer, which you will not like, is that a writing voice is not something you find or build or construct through a series of deliberate and carefully planned exercises. It is something that emerges, gradually and without your permission, from the accumulated residue of everything you have ever read, everything you have ever thought, every strange little obsession you have ever nursed in private, and every single bad sentence you have ever written and then, in a moment of merciful clarity, deleted.

Your voice is, in other words, the thing that is left over after you have stopped trying to sound like someone else. It is the default setting. It is the noise your brain makes when it is no longer performing for an imagined audience of critics, professors, and that one person from secondary school who once told you that your use of adverbs was “a bit much.”

This does not mean that craft is irrelevant. It means that craft is the scaffolding, not the building. You need to know how sentences work. You need to understand rhythm, structure, the difference between a comma and a semicolon (a difference that is, I am told, a matter of some urgency in certain circles). But the thing that makes a piece of writing sound like it could only have been written by you — the thing that makes a reader feel, after a paragraph or two, that they are in the presence of a specific and irreplaceable human mind — is not technique. It is the particular, unrepeatable way that your brain filters the world.

And the only way to let that filter do its work is to write a great deal, badly, and without apology, until the imitation falls away and something quieter and stranger and more honest takes its place.

It will not happen on a schedule. It will not announce itself. You will almost certainly fail to notice it until someone else points it out, at which point you will feel a complicated mixture of private pride and intense administrative suspicion, as though you’ve been caught leaving the house without your trousers.

Which, as it turns out, is exactly how it is supposed to feel.