Today’s guest post is by writer and editor Lisa Cooper Ellison. Join us on Sept. 23 for the online class Find & Sharpen Your Memoir’s Voice.

“I’ve fallen in love with Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir.”

As a writing coach, I regularly hear statements like this. In the early days of their infatuation, these writers flirt with their literary hero’s voice so much, it can be hard to distinguish where the professional ends and the acolyte begins.

I once knew a guy who wanted to be the next Hunter S. Thompson. His sentences galloped with Thompson’s trademark rhythm. They included the same irritable grandiosity and sense of disillusionment. He dressed and smoked like Hunter S. Thompson. He even spoke and read in Thompson’s idiosyncratic style.

Despite being in his early twenties, he had the chops to pull off this imitation. He’d already won numerous awards, and he’s since gone on to do great things in the literary world likely because of his careful study and emulation of a writer he admired.

At the time, I thought he was one cool dude, and I still admire his writing. But I also wonder what happened when he entered his first MFA class. Did any professor say, “You’ve got a great writing voice, but is it truly yours?”

There’s nothing wrong with mimicry and imitation when learning an art form. In fact, copying the greats was—and still is—an effective way to master a craft like writing, and especially what makes a great writing voice distinctive. I regularly encourage memoirists to do this while revising their stories.

But in the age of AI, the threat has shifted. Instead of trying to sound like your literary hero, AI’s ubiquitous use is flattening voices so that you sound like everyone else. And it’s subtly reshaping our work whether we use it or not. (Em dash culling, anyone?) That means protecting what’s both uniquely yours and uniquely human is more important than ever before.

What is your writing voice?

Before we explore some voice sharpening strategies, let’s unpack the term voice. A standout writing voice is a mixture of your natural style and sentence-level decisions that bring who you are to life. It includes specific elements like tone, rhythm, syntax, and word choice. The wielding of those elements is what differentiates the poetic flair and subtle snark of Mary Karr’s work from the understated lyricism of Kiese Laymon’s or the simplicity of Tara Westover’s.

Most new writers think voice is something great writers are born with. But those who’ve been at this for a while know that voice is partly instinctive natural talent but mostly hard work completed over a career.

Studying the craft elements of voice alongside great line editing techniques as you emulate the greats will help you master the mechanics of voice. But it’s important to identify what’s singular about your work before copying anyone or engaging with AI revision tools so you can protect and nurture what’s truly yours. That way you can edit toward making your work reveal more of who you are.

Here are a few ways to do this:

First, write with abandon

It sounds simple, but many writers try to perfect their sentences before amassing a set of words that reveal their turns of phrase, sentence rhythm, and worldview. Write something with passion and emotion. If you’re not sure how to do this, follow Marie Forleo’s advice and write it rude. This emotionally fueled writing about your experiences is something AI can’t replicate, because only you know how your circumstances felt.

Run a subtraction test

Once you’ve amassed some material, write a scene while channeling one of your literary heroes. Afterward, strip out every metaphor, turn of phrase, or rhythmic pattern you know is uniquely theirs. Not sure what that might be? Choose a passage from your memoir in progress and rewrite the passage in the style of a few paragraphs from your favorite book. What did you have to change so your writing sounded like theirs? Sitting with other writers’ sentences heightens your awareness of your own.

Create a personal vocabulary list

Select ten household items from the internet and name them. Do you see a truck or a pickup? A trash can or waste bin? A chair, davenport, or rumpus machine? That vocabulary is part of your worldview. Now select a passage from your work in progress and highlight additional words and phrases that fit with this worldview. Guard that list as if your writing life depended on it.

Play with AI

I know that simply writing these words might get me canceled, but bear with me. Like it or not, some writers use AI to generate their writing. At times, this is due to convenience, but in other cases, they believe AI knows how to write better than they do. This is happening across all age groups and all genres, and it’s causing some editors to rewrite their contracts.

I’m not here to judge. I simply want you to build some AI competence and ownership of your work. One way to do this is by training your ear and instincts using the following T.U.N.E. process with two example articles, which allows you to tune your ear as if it were an instrument.

• Take it in: The two examples below will give you a chance to rewrite the articles in AI speak. As you make the changes, read them out loud and notice how each sounds and feels in your body. Your ear will catch things your eyes might miss. If you’re using your own work, notice what feels flat and what feels true.
• Unpack the attributes: Whether you’re examining a work in progress or playing with the AI articles, ask yourself what’s unique to each version. For example, do you use certain turns of phrase or words that reveal your personality or worldview? With each change you make in the two articles, what happens to the rhythm? What about the syntax? Are the words and phrases specific or generic?
• Name what’s yours: In either case, what sounds human to your ear and why? If something sounds beautiful and poetic, is it also meaningful? You don’t have to get it right. What matters is that you’re upping your awareness of how meaning and feeling are constructed.
• Extend one edge: Channel your inner editor by revising your work or one of the articles so that it sounds more like you. Lean into the elements that are characteristic of your style. Include a metaphor. Elevate the diction. Change the tone.

And now for the articles I keep talking about.

• “See the hidden rules behind AI. Then use them to rewrite this article” allows you to use prompts to edit a human-produced article as if it had been written by ChatGPT. Playing around with it, then reading the different versions out loud, helped me see and feel the flattening of the work.
• The second article, “Try to beat this AI writing detector,” was published on August 25, 2026, in response to Substack’s collaboration with Pangram. This one allows you to pick between two phrases so you can see what Pangram considers AI slop versus human generated work. If you play with this one, don’t just make the changes, go through the full T.U.N.E. process so you can experience each revision’s mouthfeel.

Then journal about your observations. What did you notice? What felt similar to your work?

I’m not suggesting you change your style—I’m team em dash all the way. But as you’re revising your work, if you notice something that falls flat in an AI-ish way or seems more generic, see if you can amplify the voice by increasing the specificity so it fully represents your worldview.

I’ve met many memoirists who proudly claim they’re working on their story. Often that means their version of events or their truth. But what might happen to your story if you claimed not just your version of what happened but your panache?

The more you know about your natural writing style, the more you’ll benefit from the hard work it takes to build a gritty, lyric, or confessional writing voice that belongs to just one person: you.