One of my co-workers came to see me in my office today. He said he was interested in writing. He was particularly curious, he said, as to how a writer develops a style.

Here’s the answer I gave him. It’s probably not the last word on the matter, but this is how I understand it, based on my own experience.

First, you find an author you’d like to be like. And you try to write like him (or her). This isn’t actually part of the process as such. It’s just where most of us start. You’ve got to start somewhere, so most of us start as imitators. When I was a kid, I tried to write like Poe, I recall.

This derivative writing is the raw material from which you begin to build your identity as a writer. It’s Square One, nothing more, really.

Secondly, you go to classes, or you read books, to learn about the craft. Pretty much every class or book you find in our time will tell you the same thing—“Learn how to cut and prune your copy. You’re almost certain to be using too many words, and using them inefficiently. Learn to substitute active verbs and vivid nouns for adjective/noun combinations. Proclaim a Holy Inquisition on every adjective and adverb. Torture them until they justify their existences, and if they can’t, slay them without mercy. Cut and substitute until you’re absolutely convinced that you’re using precisely the words you need, to say precisely what you mean to say—not “pretty close” or “words to that effect.”

Then put the piece of writing away in a drawer for three months. Or six months—even better.

When you come back to it again, you’ll be amazed at how much fat there still is, and at all the infelicities you discover.

Fix these things.

Then, show them to a perceptive reader and get his or her opinion. Listen with an open mind, and make changes where necessary.

Finally, send the piece out to a publication.

Receive your rejection note. Weep.

Repeat this process as many times as it takes for the results to change.

Now here’s the thing. As you’re learning to prune and cut, to reduce your copy to its bare, Hemingwayesque, anorexic minimum, you will gradually develop a style.

It’s a paradox. The more you try to meet an arbitrary standard prescribed by the transient tastes of our age, the more you will find your own voice. Because artists are formed in the struggle to master a form, to make recalcitrant raw material submit to rules that seem designed to crush your creativity. (This is why most modern art is such crap. The artists try to skip the struggle.)

If all this is too much work, or too painful, go into accounting. You’re not a writer.