I fed 53 of my published works to Claude. Blog posts, essays, travel journals, poems, short fiction. Ten years of writing, roughly 26,000 words. I asked it to build a complete profile of my voice. Not what I write about, but how I write. The rhythms, the habits, the blind spots.
What came back was a 6,000-word document I now call my Writer DNA. And any writer can make one in about twenty minutes.
How to Build Yours
1. Gather your writing.
Pull together at least ten pieces. Blog posts, essays, newsletters, stories, journal entries, whatever. More is better. If they span different years, even better. Paste them into one long document or upload them as files.
2. Open Claude and paste this prompt:
I'm going to share [X] pieces of my published writing spanning [X years]. I want you to create a comprehensive voice profile, a "Writer DNA" document. Be extremely specific. Don't tell me I have a "conversational tone." Tell me exactly how my sentences open, how my paragraphs are structured, what words I gravitate toward, what my metaphor systems are, how I handle punctuation, what I never do.
Specifically, I want:
- Sentence-level patterns (length, rhythm, openings, closings, use of fragments)
- Paragraph architecture (length, how I build scenes, how ideas connect)
- Punctuation signature (what I overuse, what I avoid)
- Lexical fingerprint (words I return to, words I never use)
- Emotional register and range
- How I enter subjects, build them, and close them
- Anti-patterns (things that would immediately sound NOT like me)
- 8-10 "acid test" sentences from my work that are unmistakably mine, with explanations
- Operational rules for writing in my voice
Be brutally specific. Quote my actual sentences. I'd rather have an uncomfortably precise portrait than a flattering generic one.
Then paste in your writing after the prompt.
3. Push back on the first draft.
Claude will hedge. It'll say things like "the author occasionally employs sensory language." That's useless. Reply: "Be more specific. Which sensory language? How often? Show me examples from my actual text." Do this two or three times. Each round gets sharper.
4. Use it.
Put the finished DNA into a Claude project as a reference file. Now when you ask Claude to help draft something, it writes in your neighborhood instead of its default voice. You can also use it to edit yourself, checking your own work against the patterns it identified.
What Mine Looked Like
Here's a snippet of what Claude found in my writing:
Words I gravitate toward: "pretty" (my most characteristic word, used across all ten years), "dazzling," "lovely," "curious," "madness," "dissolve." I use "pretty" sincerely and constantly. Pretty girl. Pretty day. Pretty memory. I had no idea.
Dominant metaphor system: Food. Emotions are flavors. "The anxiety is vinegary." "The determination is hearty and light; similar to roasted red peppers." I've apparently been building this system for a decade without realizing it.
Anti-patterns: Starting with "In today's world." Using "furthermore" or "moreover." Explaining my own metaphors. Inspirational conclusions. Therapy-speak. The word "journey."
How my voice evolved: Claude broke my writing into four eras and tracked how my paragraphs got shorter, my openings got more immediate, and my endings got quieter over time. The 2015 blogger and the 2025 essayist share DNA, but they're different animals.
Spotify Wrapped for Your Writing
That's really what this is. Spotify tells you that you listened to 847 minutes of Frank Ocean and your top genre was "melancholy indie." You already knew you liked Frank Ocean. But seeing the data laid out, the patterns you couldn't see from inside, changes how you understand your own taste.
The Writer DNA does the same thing. You already know how you write. You just can't describe it with the precision a machine can after reading all of it at once. And once you can describe it, you can protect it, refine it, and hand it to tools that would otherwise flatten it into something generic.