> I do have a very specific voice, but I would try so hard to emulate what I saw working for other people that I ended up with a voice that was an amalgamation of ten different writers (none of whom were me). I wonder if that isn't a phase that many of us go through with screenwriting? In fact, I don't think what you've described (the challenge in assimilating conflicting advice, the desire to learn by emulating other writers, the clunky and unnatural voice that emerges temporarily in the process) is limited to screenwriters--poets and fiction writers I know describe the same phenomenon, too. I find when I'm studying something new there are phases where the information is in my head, but I haven't internalized it into my gut, and it all comes out in a jumble: writing, languages, improv, even physical skills--like taking a dance class where my hands can work or my feet but not both at the same time. For me, that usually means that I'm doing a good job of filling up my head, and it's a matter of time before all of that information percolates from the abstraction layer into the instinctive layer. And if I push through, it happens. (Maybe not with the dance classes...but with most other things.) From what you've written, it sounds like the concept of voice as you're discussing it in The Quest is underpinned by confidence: you can find your own voice when you trust your own voice. And working through that awkward, gangly stage is both how you develop your own voice and how you grow to feel confident in your that newly-developed voice.