your writing voice

Here's a quote I want to share with you from the Writer's Idea Book, p. 250:

Some writers have said they found their natural voice when they found the material they most wanted to explore. If you find that your voice rings false, that the voice on the page is not the one you hear in your head, maybe the problem lies in the material. When I was in college, I enjoyed F. Scott Fitzgerald's wonderfully lyriacan voice--its elegance and sharp sense of profundity. I tried desperately to imitate it. Not a bad model to take for a twenty-year-old apprentice. Unfortunately, I also wrote about the same subjects Fitzgerald wrote about in his work, and I didn't know beans about life on the Riviera or in 1930s Hollywood. When I began writing about the world I knew, one that connected with me on a variety of levels, things fell into place.

I find this to be so true!