You’re Not Born with a Voice

There’s always talk of finding your voice in your writing, content, music, whatever.

You have to find a style that’s uniquely yours.

And at the same time, there’s this pressure, right from the very moment you begin creating, that you have to be unique. If you do something even remotely similar to someone else’s work, then you’re a plagiarist.

But the reality is this: we’re not born knowing who we are. We don’t come into the world with a voice and a style all our own. From the moment we’re born, we learn by pretending, by copying what we see, by emulating those around us.

And finding your own creative style is no different.

Learn by Copying

To quote Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, “Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy, you will find yourself.”

An essential part of learning any skill is copying what you see around you.

I learned to use Photoshop, Illustrator, and a bit of Cinema 4D by finding stuff I liked and figuring out how it was made.

The author Chuck Palahniuk, known for Fight Club and a whole bunch of other works, is quoted as saying: “When a poem works, I re-read it a million times to ‘reverse engineer it’ and learn a new storytelling technique.”

If even titans like Yamamoto and Palahniuk will pull apart existing works and emulate what they like, why should we be any different?

Find something you like, figure out how it works, and use those insights to create your own style.