I learned to read in pre-K. And I have never stopped. Not because I had to, not because it was assigned, but because from the very beginning, books felt like the closest thing to living someone else's life while still being yourself.

Long before I ever shared a single word of my own writing with the world, I was a reader. A devoted, obsessive, cover-to-cover reader. And I am convinced that everything I know about writing, every instinct, every rhythm, every choice, was shaped first by what I read.

"You cannot pour from an empty page. Reading is how you fill it."

Reading Is Not Passive: It's Research

A lot of writers treat reading and writing as separate activities. Read for pleasure, write for work. But the writers who grow the fastest understand that every book they read is a masterclass in craft, if they're paying attention.

When I read a book that moves me, I don't just experience it. I study it. I ask: why does this work? What did the author do in that scene that made me feel that? How did they build this world without making me feel like I was reading a textbook? How does their sentence rhythm change when the tension rises?

That kind of reading, intentional, curious, and analytical, is one of the most powerful tools a writer has. And it costs nothing but time and attention.

What I Look For When I Study an Author's Style

Over the years, I've read authors across every genre, and each one has taught me something different. Here's what I pay attention to when I'm studying a writer's style:

• Sentence rhythm: Do they use short, punchy sentences or long, flowing ones? Where do they vary the length and why?
• World building technique: How do they introduce setting without slowing the story? Do they layer it in gradually or establish it upfront?
• Character voice: Can you tell who's speaking without a dialogue tag? Does each character think and speak differently?
• How they handle time: When do they slow down and go scene by scene? When do they summarize and skip ahead?
• What they leave out: Great writers are as intentional about what they don't say as what they do.

How Reading Shaped My World Building

I write sci-fi. And world building in sci-fi is everything, the rules, the atmosphere, the internal logic of a reality that doesn't exist yet. I didn't learn how to do that from a craft book. I learned it by reading authors who did it brilliantly and asking myself, over and over: how did they make me believe in this?

Reading widely across genres helped me even more. Because the best world building techniques don't only live in sci-fi. Historical fiction writers build worlds too. Literary fiction writers build interior worlds. Fantasy writers build systems. Every genre has something to teach, and I've borrowed from all of them.

What to Read and How to Read It

My honest advice: read everything. Read in your genre so you know your space. Read outside your genre so you don't sound like everyone else in it. Read the classics to understand where the rules came from. Read debut authors to see what's working right now.

And when a book stops you, when a sentence makes you put it down and stare at the ceiling, go back and read that passage again. Not for the feeling this time. For the construction. Figure out exactly what the writer did to make you feel that way. That moment of reverse engineering is worth more than any writing workshop.

• Read in your genre, to know your landscape
• Read outside your genre to borrow techniques others in your lane haven't found yet
• Reread books you love. You'll catch things you missed the first time
• Read authors whose style is nothing like yours. They'll show you what's possible
• Take notes on what works, even a sentence in the margins counts

The Reader You Were Made You the Writer You Are

I am the writer I am because of every book I have ever read. The authors I've loved shaped my ear for language before I ever wrote a word worth sharing. Their worlds taught me how to build mine. Their characters taught me what real people on a page look and sound and feel like.

If you want to write better, read more. Read intentionally. Read like a writer, which means reading like someone who is always, quietly, taking notes.

The page you write tomorrow is built from everything you've read before.

Every writer has a voice. Most writers just haven't found it yet, or more accurately, haven't stopped trying to sound like someone else long enough to hear it.

We live in a world saturated with content. There are writing influencers, bestselling templates, viral formulas, and endless advice about what sells and what doesn't. And somewhere in all of that noise, a lot of writers lose the one thing that makes their work irreplaceable: themselves.

"Your voice isn't something you develop. It's something you uncover. It was always there, buried under imitation, fear, and the need for approval."

What Voice Actually Is

Voice is not your vocabulary. It's not your sentence length or whether you use Oxford commas. Voice is the unmistakable fingerprint of how you see the world: the rhythm of your thoughts, the things you notice that others walk past, the way you move between ideas.

When someone reads your work and thinks, "That sounds exactly like them," that's voice. It's the thing that makes your writing yours even when the words are about something universal.

Why Most Writers Struggle to Find It

The honest answer is: we're trained out of it. From the time we learn to write in school, we're taught to follow rules, mimic formats, and meet expectations. Original expression gets edited down. Unusual perspectives get corrected. Over time, many writers learn to write for approval rather than truth.

Then we start reading writers we admire, and without realizing it, we begin to absorb their patterns. We write in their cadence. We reach for their kind of metaphors. We think we're learning from them, and we are, but at some point, imitation has to give way to original expression.

How to Start Uncovering Yours

The most effective thing I've ever done to find my voice is deceptively simple: I wrote without an audience. Not for publication, not for feedback, not even for myself to reread. I wrote like no one would ever see it.

When the fear of judgment disappears, something shifts. The careful, measured sentences loosen. The things you actually think, not the polished version but the raw one, start to appear on the page. That rawness, refined over time, becomes voice.

• Write for 10 minutes every day with no editing allowed, not even a word
• Read your work aloud, because your voice becomes obvious when you hear what sounds natural versus forced
• Notice what topics you return to without meaning to. Those are your obsessions, and obsessions are the engine of voice
• Stop following writers you're trying to sound like for a while, to create space for your own patterns to emerge

The Permission You're Waiting For

Here's the truth no one tells you: you don't need to earn the right to write the way you write. You don't need a large enough platform, a published book, or someone else's validation to trust your own voice.

The world doesn't need another version of a writer who already exists. It needs you, with your specific way of seeing, your specific way of saying, your specific reason for writing in the first place. Stop waiting for permission to sound like yourself. That permission was always yours.

I want to say something that will save you months, possibly years, of unnecessary suffering: your first draft is not supposed to be good. It is supposed to exist. That's it. That is the entire job.

I've watched so many writers get completely stuck at the first draft stage because they're trying to write a finished book on the first pass. They write a sentence, hate it, rewrite it, hate it again, and eventually stop writing altogether. They don't have a writing problem. They have a perfectionism problem.

"A bad first draft you finish is worth infinitely more than a perfect first chapter you never move past."

What a First Draft Is Actually For

A first draft is a discovery process. You are not performing. You are excavating. You're finding out what the story is, what you actually think about your topic, where the real emotion lives. None of that can happen if you're simultaneously trying to make it beautiful.

Writing and editing are two different cognitive processes. When you write, you need to move forward, generate, create. When you edit, you need to slow down, evaluate, cut. Trying to do both at the same time is like trying to drive with one foot on the gas and one on the brake. You go nowhere fast.

Give Yourself Permission to Write Badly

This sounds simple. It is not. Giving yourself permission to write badly requires you to accept that your worth as a writer is not in the quality of your first attempt. It's in your willingness to keep going.

The writers you admire? Their first drafts were a mess too. The difference is they finished them anyway, then did the work of revision. The finished, polished book you read was not the first version. It never is.

A Practical Approach

When I'm writing a first draft, I have one rule: keep moving forward. I don't go back. If I write something clunky, I leave a note like [fix this] or [find better word here] and I keep going. The forward momentum matters more than the quality of any individual sentence at this stage.

• Set a word count goal, not a quality goal
• Use placeholders like [describe room here] instead of getting stuck on details
• Turn off spell check while drafting if it breaks your flow
• Remind yourself: no one ever has to see this version

The first draft is a private conversation between you and the story. Let it be messy. Let it be honest. Let it be bad. You can make it good later. You can only make it better if it exists first.

The query letter is one of the most feared documents in a writer's life. It's a single page that's supposed to capture an entire book, sell your voice, and convince a literary agent to invest months of their life in your work. No pressure.

The good news is that most query letters fail for the same handful of reasons, and once you understand those reasons, writing a strong one becomes far more achievable than it seems.

"A query letter is not a summary. It's an invitation. You're not explaining the book. You're making someone need to read it."

What Agents Are Actually Looking For

Agents read hundreds of queries a week. They're not looking for a reason to say yes. They're moving quickly and the default is no. Your job is to make them slow down with specificity, voice, and clarity. Not a long synopsis. Not your life story. A clear, compelling answer to this question: what is this book about and why does it matter?

The Structure That Works

• The hook: one or two sentences that capture the core of the story with urgency and intrigue
• The pitch: three to five sentences covering your protagonist, their goal, the obstacle, and the stakes
• The details: title, genre, word count, and comparable titles
• The bio: brief, relevant, honest. If you have no publishing credits, that's fine. Lead with what you do have.

The Mistakes That Kill Queries

The most common query mistakes: trying to explain too much of the plot, leading with the wrong thing, and being vague where you need to be specific. "A story about love and loss" tells an agent nothing. "A story about a woman who discovers her deceased mother's secret identity the week before her own wedding" tells them everything they need.

Other things that sink queries quickly: starting with rhetorical questions, comparing your book to classics, using words like "unique" and "unlike anything else," and telling agents how much readers will love it. Show them why. Don't tell them to trust you.

A Final Word

The query process is a numbers game wrapped in a craft game. You can write the best query in the world and still get rejected, because agents also consider their current list, the market, and personal connection. Rejection is not a verdict on your book. It's information. Keep refining, keep submitting, and keep writing the next thing. The query is a door. Keep knocking.

Most people think of journaling as a wellness tool, a way to process emotions, reduce stress, or track gratitude. And it is all of those things. But for writers, a journal is something else entirely. It's a training ground, a sketchbook, and a place where your real voice lives before it knows it's being watched.

"The journal is where you write before you know how to write what you really mean. It is the most honest room in the house."

What Journaling Does for Your Writing

When you journal regularly, not for an audience, not to produce something publishable, just to think on the page, you will develop something no craft book can fully teach: fluency. The ability to move your thoughts into words without the friction of self-consciousness slowing you down.

Writers who journal consistently write faster, edit more instinctively, and struggle less with the blank page. Not because journaling teaches technique, but because it builds the habit of reaching for words without waiting for permission.

Using Your Journal as a Creative Tool

• Write from the perspective of your characters, asking what do they want, fear, remember?
• Work through plot problems by writing about them conversationally, not formally
• Capture observations from daily life that might become scenes, details, or dialogue
• Process creative blocks, because writing about why you're stuck often unsticks you
• Store lines, images, and ideas that don't belong anywhere yet but are too good to lose

The Only Rule

Don't edit it. Don't reread it while you're writing it. Don't worry about whether it's good. The journal is not a product. It's a process. The moment you start performing for it, you lose the thing that makes it valuable.

Write badly in your journal. Write honestly. Write the things you'd never say aloud. That's where the real writing lives, and eventually, it finds its way into your work in ways you never planned and couldn't have forced. Give yourself a journal that's just for you. Not for notes. Not for tasks. Just for words, without an audience. It will change how you write everything else.

If you've been writing for any length of time, you've probably encountered this debate. Traditional publishing versus self-publishing. Which is better? Which is more legitimate? Which one should you choose?

Having experience with both, my honest answer is: it depends entirely on what you want, and most people asking the question haven't gotten clear on that part yet.

"There is no wrong path. There is only the path that aligns with your goals, your timeline, and what you are willing to give up or gain."

What Traditional Publishing Actually Gives You

Traditional publishing, going through a literary agent and a publisher, gives you infrastructure, distribution, and institutional validation. Your book gets edited, designed, and placed in bookstores in a way that's very difficult to achieve independently. What it costs you is time and control. The process from query to published book averages two to four years. You give up a significant portion of royalties and may have limited say over your cover, your title, even your content.

What Self-Publishing Actually Gives You

Self-publishing gives you speed, control, and a far higher royalty percentage. You can have a book published within weeks of finishing it. You make every creative decision. What it costs you is infrastructure and automatic credibility. You're responsible for editing, design, marketing, and building your own readership from scratch.

What I've Actually Learned

• If building industry relationships and bookstore presence matters most, pursue traditional publishing
• If speed, creative control, and higher royalties matter most, pursue self-publishing
• If you want to test your readership before going traditional, self-publish first
• If you're writing in a niche or underserved market, self-publishing may serve you better

What I'd tell any writer starting out: don't let the publishing path become a reason not to finish the book. Write the book first. Write it well. Then make an informed decision about what it deserves. The path matters far less than the work itself.