Your voice is the only USP that cannot be stolen

Plots travel. Premises get recycled. What a reader will follow from book to book is the particular way you notice the world — the jokes you cannot help, the details you over-value, the sentences that could only have come from your head. Technique is there to carry the voice, not to replace it.

Voice is not a costume you put on in chapter one. It is the residue of attention. You already notice some things and ignore others: the way a person holds a cup when they are lying, the price of the bus fare, the smell of a school corridor. The page gets a voice when you stop translating those notices into a neutral, respectable prose that could have been written by a committee.

Imitation is a decent apprenticeship and a poor destination. Copy a writer you love for a page, then look at what you changed without meaning to. The changes are the voice. The places you got bored of their rhythm and put in your own are the voice. Protect those, even when a workshop would prefer something smoother.

A unique selling point, in the unromantic language of the trade, is the reason a reader chooses you when a dozen other books are making the same promise. Premises are not that reason. 'A woman returns to the town she left' has been published every season since printing. The reason is the mind doing the returning, and the sentences it is willing to risk.

You do not find a voice by staring at a mirror and asking who you are. You find it by writing a great many pages and refusing to sand off the odd bits that still sound like you when the polishing is done.