Finding Your Creative Signature
Why it's not really possible
When I first started writing, over ten years ago, I quickly discovered a common bit of advice: “find your voice.” It seemed like a good idea and, at the time, easy to do, but I ended up searching for it like you do your car keys: frantically, hitting the same wrong places again and again.
While I was searching for this “voice,” I kept changing platforms, genres. I’d write essays on Medium, then poems on Instagram, then fiction on Substack, then essays on Paragraph. Every time I did this, I got better in a technical (craft) sense, but I was no closer to finding that elusive voice. I discovered (slowly) that a voice isn’t a platform, and a creative signature isn’t a genre. These are different things, and yet they often get lumped together in the vague category of “voice.”
In this essay, I hope to shed a little light on these related but distinct concepts: voice, creative signature, brand, and style. It took me years to realize this journey was recursive, that the thing I had been searching for was there from the beginning. As the search for my keys grew desperate, I finally realized they’d been in my pocket the entire time.
Let’s start by untangling “voice” from “creative signature.” I learned about the concept of a creative signature from Virgil Abloh, who defined it as a distinct, consistent, and recognizable code: “a ‘personal DNA’ that can be applied across different mediums to make an object, design, or project unmistakably your own.” The key parts to Abloh’s definition of a creative signature are :
It’s instantly recognizable as “you”
It’s medium agnostic; it shows up across any creative project that you do.
Creative signatures are often seen in hindsight. They are the through-line of your career, the idea or obsession that you keep turning back to again and again, regardless of the specific projects you work on. You see it when you look back at your work and realize, “Oh, there's the path I took.” Gabriel García Márquez believed that you only write one book in your entire life. You spend your whole life circling it, coming back to it again and again, articulating it in new ways and from different angles. As Márquez said, “I think it’s a problem everybody has. Everyone has their own way and means of expressing it.” Your creative signature is a set of recurring moves and preoccupations that make your work unmistakably yours. The tricky part about a creative signature is that it’s hard to see from the inside, and almost impossible to see when you first begin.
What makes this work even harder is that by trying to be original, you actually move further away from your creative signature. Instead of focusing on originality, it’s probably better to pay attention to the things you can’t stop doing, the little obsessions that drive you forward.
One way to do this is to keep a journal. As a dumping ground for your thoughts and preoccupations. I’ve found the best time to write is first thing in the morning or right before bed, when your mind is softened from life’s constant demands. In that half-awake, liminal time, your interests can surface without judgment. It’s best not to worry about completing anything or even to “make sense.” Don’t write for others, and don’t let anyone else read your writing. Do this for a while—months, years—without reading what you wrote. Focus on the habit of writing the first things that come to your mind, without any critical judgment.
Then, after you’ve filled a notebook or two, go back and read it. This advice comes from Dorothea Brande’s book, Becoming a Writer, who recommends that you use your journal as a tool to discover your own “tastes and excellences” (i.e., your creative signature). Your journal writing becomes a kind of laboratory: what are you drawn to when you write the first things that come to mind? Brande recommends reading your journal as though it were written by a stranger. Your goal is to try to discover the tastes and talents of this “other person.” Put aside all preconceptions of your work—who you should be, what you should be writing, etc.—and look for the repetitions, the recurrent ideas, the frequent forms in which those ideas appear. This examination will show you where your richest veins lie; where your creative signature is hidden. Yes, hidden. Your signature is always already there, buried deep within you, waiting to be unearthed.
Writing over the years, sitting at my desk on weekend mornings, I began to (slowly) notice the things I kept circling back to, even across genres, platforms, and years of false starts. Uncanny domestic spaces. Consciousness under pressure. Platforms that promise salvation but are actually parasitic. Digital communication as a kind of haunting. The tension between making and marketing. It was only in building a body of work over a decade that I could begin to see the shape of what I’d been building (without knowing that I was building it).
You will also find, as I did, in reading your journal, that your work is less patchy and uneven than you feared. When you write without expectation, without performance anxiety, you fall into a natural stride. You develop your own rhythm. You write openly and freely on the subjects that actually interest you, not the ones you think you should care about.
Since creative signatures are seen in hindsight, a useful approach (and one that Abloh recommends) is to create at a high velocity: make as many different things as quickly as possible to see what sticks.
Working quickly is a great way to outrun your inner perfectionist. As Abloh said, “It’s easy to do a million things at once and go to sleep at night when you don’t have to make perfect things. Your hand and brain will tell you when something’s finished.” Abloh crystallizes this approach in his 3% rule: creativity is not about making something from scratch but about altering what already exists. Take an existing creative piece and then alter it by 3%, putting your own spin on it. The 3% rule makes it easy to go fast; you don’t have to create everything all at once, but can build on what’s already there.
A few years ago, I followed this advice. From 2022 to 2023, I wrote a new short story every week for over a year. Seventy-some stories. Most of them weren’t good. But the sheer volume and the speed required to come up with a new idea every week revealed my tendencies. The same ideas, the same tensions, the same forms kept appearing whether I wanted them to or not. Looking back, I can see the seedbed for my best ideas appearing during those years.
So, if you feel stuck, try putting stuff out there. Get into the habit of creating and releasing. Don’t be precious about it. A signature is representative of a body of work, of a life spent creating, not of any single piece. If you feel like you need to hit it out of the park every time, your anxiety will interfere with the creative flow. You’ll overthink, over-exert, create less, and what you do create will be awkward, halting, stilted.
The “one big thing” that defines a creative’s life is usually identified later, by future generations, and it usually functions as a synecdoche: a single work standing in for the entire oeuvre. If you read one Vladimir Nabokov novel, for example, you’ll almost certainly read Lolita. It’s the most vivid expression of the obsessive idea he spent his entire career exploring: the loss of childhood innocence. But read more Nabokov, and you’ll find he returns to that idea constantly, from dozens of different angles. He never exhausts it. No one exhausts their creative signature. It sticks with you forever.
Abloh offers a few more useful ideas. First, return to your earliest memories. What interested you before you learned what was “important.” Children have an easy, natural way of conceptualizing the world, a way of sorting and arranging and remembering that becomes an embedded signature. It is interesting to watch my young boys and how they decide what to pay attention to, what to ignore, and what sticks in their minds. There is a clear sense of personality and preference emerging, even as they can’t articulate it, and the same was true for your earliest years. Are you still following those impulses, or have you allowed yourself to drift? This is an exercise in unlearning. Too much received wisdom about what creativity should look like can deaden the act.
Second, note your mentors. We all have creative mentors, dead or alive. Connect with the creative work that resonates with you. Take what others have created and build on it. Your mentors didn’t create in a vacuum either; they had their own mentors, their own creative lineages. See your work as part of a historical tradition, and add to it. Even a 3% change is enough to create something new.
Your mentors created with an ethos in mind; what was it? How did it animate their work? Why did they make things the way they did? What is your ethos? Why are you creating the things you create? When you understand these questions better, you can create with more intentionality.
You likely have some burning idea, some project you believe in and want to see exist. That project is likely the distillation of your creative signature. Make time to do it. It will broaden your life in ways that are likely to surprise you.
I promised to define a creative signature against related concepts like voice, brand, and style. Think of it as a 2x2:
X-Axis: Inward vs. Outward. Is this something you discover in yourself or something perceived by others?
Y-Axis: Scale. Does it operate at the level of an individual piece, or across a body of work?
This gives us:
Voice (Inward + Individual): How a single piece sounds, how the sentences move. The tonal, textural, sentence-level quality of the work. The choices you make at the microscopic, detailed level.
Style (Outward + Individual): What a reader or critic would describe about how the work looks and feels. The external perception of the same qualities that voice names from the inside.
Signature (Inward + Body of Work): The deep patterns that only become visible across multiple pieces. The recurring preoccupations, structural moves, and characteristic way of framing problems that emerge from the inside over time.
Brand (Outward + Body of Work): The public perception of your body of work as a whole. What someone says when they recommend you.
Voice is the building block of a signature: enough consistent voice across different pieces of work, and the signature reveals itself. Style is the building block of brand: enough consistent style across different pieces of work, and a brand crystallizes. But the inward/outward distinction is important: voice and signature are things you discover about yourself; style and brand are what is perceived. You can cultivate them, but you can’t fully control them.
Here are three well-known creatives and how I would define their voice, style, signature, and brand, to help illustrate the differences:
Virginia Woolf:
Voice: lyrical interiority, flowing sentences
Style: literary modernism, stream of consciousness
Signature: time, memory, and consciousness, and the permeability between the inner and outer worlds
Brand: Bloomsbury intellectualism, the Hogarth Press, woman of letters
David Lynch:
Voice: uncanny juxtaposition of Americana and nightmares
Style: red curtains, industrial soundscapes, dreamlike pacing
Signature: the familiar is a thin membrane stretched over something both terrible and beautiful
Brand: Weird Cinema
Joan Didion:
Voice: cool, clipped, precise sentences
Style: spare, “California,” white sunglasses
Signature: how narratives (personal, political, national) break down and what remains when they do
Brand: cool intellectual
You can see how creative signatures “infect” bodies of work. Woolf’s obsessive return to time, memory, and consciousness is apparent across all her novels as well as her essays and diaries. Lynch insists on the thinness of everyday mundanity across film, painting, music, furniture design, and even coffee. Didion explores narrative collapse in her journalism, memoirs, fiction, and screenwriting. You’ll also notice that a creative signature is a way to say something about the world. It’s not merely a way of seeing, but a deeper insistence on how things are.
This framework implies something important: signature is the only quadrant you can’t fake. You can adopt a voice or borrow it from other work (writers do this all the time with pastiche, imitation, genre conventions). You can construct a style (this is essentially what MFA programs teach). You can engineer a brand (this is what the creator economy teaches you to do to sell yourself). But you can’t fabricate a signature because it’s not a choice, it’s an accumulation. It’s the residue of an individual mind working over time. It’s the stuff that keeps leaking into everything you create, regardless of your intentions.
Most advice for creatives tells you to build something. Find your niche. Develop your brand. Choose a lane. There’s some practical utility to that, especially if you’re trying to earn money, but it gets the causality backwards. You don’t build a creative signature like you build a house, progressing from blueprint to foundation to walls. A signature emerges like a path in the woods. By walking the same route again and again, the undergrowth clears, and you can see where you’ve been going the entire time.
I spent years trying to figure out what I “should” be writing. I chased after various forms of writing legibility: poet, horror writer, essayist. I studied craft, analyzed writing structure, created checklists for what constituted good writing. It was all chasing after competence instead of writing from necessity. Because I discovered that the things I dashed off quickly—in the little spare moments of life, when I had twenty minutes, an hour—those half-formed, personal, slightly embarrassing dispatches, they had more life to them than the over-engineered pieces I labored over. And readers responded to the writing that had life in it.
What I’ve found (and I don’t pretend to have this all figured out) is that when I write toward the currents of my creative signature, the work flows more easily. When I try to write against them, everything is difficult. I’ve decided to stop beating back against that current, let myself be taken forward, to see where it leads. That’s what I’m trying to do here on The Driftless. What I’ve found is that this approach produces a greater sense of freedom, of ease. I don’t need to care about subscriber numbers or views or comments or publication opportunities. It’s just me trying to articulate what I think in public.
You can’t “find” your creative signature because it’s been there the entire time. You’ve already found it. You’ve been leaning on it this entire time. It was never missing, it was just invisible to you because a signature is raw and intense and illegible and scary, and what you were hoping for was something clean, polished, finished, legible. A brand you articulate, a lane you can name. Something light and easy to put in your bio, in your query letters.
But a creative signature is an ache. It is a wound that can never heal. A set of questions you can’t stop asking. The thing you can’t get away from, even if you try. I thought the problem was finding a creative signature, but the weird thing is that it’s something you try to escape.
But you can never escape it. It will haunt you for your entire life.