People ask how I developed my writing voice. I don’t have a good answer. I didn’t study craft. I didn’t read books about writing. I just wrote a lot, and eventually it started sounding like me.
The closest I can get to explaining it: I’m not writing to anyone. I’m having a conversation with the screen.
The medium as the other person
When I sit down to write, I’m not thinking about readers. I’m not thinking about audience. I’m talking to the thing in front of me—the text field, the markdown file, whatever. It shows me what I just said, and that prompts the next thing.
It’s dialogue, not monologue. The screen doesn’t talk back in words, but it talks back in shape. I see the sentence I just wrote and I respond to it. Too long? No, too formal. And that’s not what I meant. Delete delete delete try again.
The conversation is between me and the medium. The reader will eventually be eavesdropping.
How autism fits in
I’m autistic. One thing that means, for me: I say what I mean. Not because I’m blunt or rude—I just don’t have the instinct to soften things with filler. And no, that does not mean you can magically just develop a filter over time; it’s not a muscle, it’s a wiring problem. The social layer that makes most people hedge and qualify and cushion their statements doesn’t fire automatically for me.
In conversation, this can be a problem. In writing, it’s an advantage. The directness that makes small talk exhausting makes prose cleaner. I’m not performing politeness for an imaginary reader because I’m not fucking performing. I’m just saying the thing, whatever that thing may be.
There’s also the pattern recognition. Autism gives me a sensitivity to when something is off—when a sentence doesn’t match the rhythm of the ones around it, when a word is slightly wrong, when the structure is fighting itself. I feel it before I can explain it. Editing is mostly just fixing the things that feel broken.
How ADHD fits in
ADHD means my brain won’t stay on one track. Sentences start somewhere and end up somewhere else. Tangents happen. Asides happen. Have you seen my use of em dashes and parentheticals? They annoy me, but I also feel like I’m cheating on the medium if I don’t talk to it like I would anyone else. Squirrel. The thing I was going to say gets interrupted by the thing I just thought of.
In speech, this is a mess. In writing, it becomes voice.
Yes, again, the asides—the dashes, the parentheticals, the sudden pivots—aren’t stylistic choices. They’re just how my brain moves. Don’t ask me to edit them out because that’ll work just as well as me developing the filter thing. Editing it out would make the writing flatter. They’re not bugs.
ADHD also means I can’t outline. I’ve tried. The outline becomes its own project, and then I never write the actual thing. So I start with a sentence and see where it goes. The structure emerges from the conversation I have with the medium, or it doesn’t emerge at all.
What I’m not doing
I’m not thinking about the reader’s journey. Frankly, I can’t (see: autism and alexithymia), so I don’t put any energy into trying. That’s liberating in a way—not to care what other people think. But when I’m writing I’m not crafting an arc. I’m not following the advice in writing guides about hooks and transitions and calls to action. Words, sure. Structure? Mostly, I think that’s learnable though. The rest?
I’m just talking to the screen until it feels done.
Sometimes it takes twenty minutes. Sometimes it takes three months of opening the file, adding a sentence, closing it, and forgetting about it. There’s no process. There’s just the conversation, which happens when it happens.
The voice that came out
Direct. Profane when it lands, profane when it doesn’t. Self-deprecating but not pathetic—it’s how I talk to myself, and I laugh at myself, not hate myself. Short paragraphs because my attention won’t hold for long ones and I don’t even know if I have enough of an opinion for a longer one, and if I do that’s probably alarming. Em dashes everywhere because my brain interrupts itself.
It’s not a style I chose. It’s just what happens when I talk to the screen and stop pretending I’m talking to anyone else.
The weird part is that people respond to it. They say it feels honest, or real, or like I’m talking directly to them, or that I’m articulate. But I’m not. I’m talking to a text field. They’re just overhearing a conversation that was never meant for them, but my ego thinks they may want to hear.
Maybe that’s why it works. Nobody likes being performed at. But everyone likes eavesdropping.