Stop telling young writers to find their voice.

Instead, use this exercise to let them channel other voices.

Years ago, the family moved to Santa Fe so I could start a new job at Outside Magazine. In a spirit of crazy optimism, my wife and I decided to homeschool them for a year. Classes began at an ungodly seven a.m. so I could get to work on time.

For George, who was entering sixth grade, we used a ready-made remote curriculum designed for the children of overseas diplomats. Educating Dorothy Junior, a ninth grader, was more complicated. I assigned myself the teaching of American history and English literature—including composition.

I took this photo a couple years before we moved. We had bought a little shack on a lake, and the kids spent most of their time there reading. Smartphones hadn’t been invented yet, thank goodness.

To prepare for my short career as a writing teacher, I perused instruction guides, all of which emphasized the importance of helping young authors find their “voice.” While it seemed a good idea to encourage my ninth-grade daughter to explore her own character, I balked at the voice part. Which voice are we talking about?

When I was Dorothy’s age, I hung out in the library and read books pretty much at random. Being an aspiring writer, I kept a journal called Lunch (“you are what you eat”). My style mimicked the writers I loved. I was Isaac Asimov for months before discovering Ernest Hemingway; then came Faulkner, and my verbless Hemingwayesque sentences ballooned to the size of paragraphs.

Even today, my reading flavors my writing. I just finished Zadie Smith’s delightful Fraud, a novel set in the Victorian era, and my journal now bears a whiff of gentle Jane Austinesque irony. Every time Peter Heller publishes another novel, I find myself trying to imitate his painterly evocations of landscape.

In that spirit, when it came to teaching writing to my daughter, I decided to steal an exercise from the seventeenth century. Teachers back then weren’t interested in developing their charges’ unique voices. There was only one voice, and it was in Latin: the works of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Renaissance-era professors so revered the ancient Roman’s “pure” Latin that they would mark down any student paper that used a word not contained in Cicero.

No, I did not make Dorothy Junior memorize Cicero. Instead, I assigned her the Ciceronian exercise of channeling an author’s voice. It went like this:

1. I asked Dorothy to name her favorite writer. She was going through an innocent Goth period back then, so naturally she named Edgar Allen Poe. Then she picked her favorite Poe story; I think it was his gruesome “The Cask of Amontillado.”

2. I told her to read the story carefully, and maybe reread it. Then:

3. “Type the story. As you do, pretend you’re Poe.”

4.  Next, she had to type the story again, only this time without looking at the book—writing the thing from memory.

5. We compared the two versions—the one she copied next to the one she wrote down blind. What had she missed? Had she rewritten some parts? Which did she like better?

The exercise worked beautifully, except for the fact that Dorothy had an unusual capacity for memorization. The two versions weren’t that terribly different. But where they were, she occasionally preferred her phrases to Poe’s, and we had fun arguing about them. To this day she’s a fine writer. Even better, she’s a passionate reader. The Poe episode may have done little to help her find her voice. But I like to think it helped her gain appreciation of others’ voices.

Isn’t that why you and I read?

I’ve done that exercise a few times myself, most recently copying some of the more poetic passages from George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo. But then, I’ve long been channeling other people’s voices for a living. I spent thirty years as an editor, rewriting entire magazine stories in the styles of the authors.

In fact, the most fun I’ve ever had as a writer was in ghostwriting books for an aerospace engineer and a twelve-year-old girl. I felt like Prospero, “endowing their purposes with words that make them known.” Someday I may write a book about ghostwriters, from the ancient logographers (speechwriters) through Shakespeare and up to today’s men and women behind the literary curtain. I’ll call it Prospero’s Ghost. You can learn a lot about writing—and reading—by taking on the voices of others.

In fact, if I taught writing today, I would have students ghostwrite a story, taking on the voice of an author they love. While I hear legitimate concerns about AI, we should be more worried about the failure of our brightest kids to read for pleasure. You can’t be a good writer without first becoming a devoted reader.

Personally, I started with Marvel Comics, imitating the tart word-ballooned prose of Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandoes. Then my mother blessed me with an incomparable gift: a membership card to the Luddington Library in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. The voices I carried out of that holy place still echo in my grateful brain.

Even as an adult, Dorothy Jr. is still into channeling. Masks, especially literary ones, can be good for us.