Part 4—Maintaining your unique voice while working through revisions with Claude AI
This is Part 4 in my series on Artists, Writers and AI—my musings on how artists and writers can use AI without losing what makes their art uniquely theirs and distinctly human.
New to using Claude AI for revisions? Start with Part 3—Using Claude AI’s projects for revisions.
Understanding Custom Styles
Writers can use Custom Content Styles to shape Claude’s responses. Claude creates the custom style from text examples, taking tone, vocabulary, and narrative elements into account, and aiming to match your unique tone.
Setting Up Your Style
- Click into your revision project
- Open a new or existing chat
- Click the Style selection dropdown at the bottom
- Select “Create & Edit Styles”
While revising The House, I uploaded content from The Fragments: two prologues, the first three chapters, and the first interlude.
After setup, test your style in a new chat. Use the “Edit style manually” option to refine it until Claude’s responses naturally align with your voice.
Tailoring Styles to Projects
Create distinct styles for each of your projects: manuscripts, blog posts, YouTube scripts, and social posts.
Focused examples yield more precise style matching.
A Word of Caution
Only upload your own material—you want to find and improve your voice, not mimic another author.
Claude’s custom styles are just one more tool in your toolbox to improve your manuscript. Don’t let a machine dictate your output. Trust your ear: if it doesn’t sound right, it’s not you.
New here? I am New Zealand-based writer, artist and maker Minu Freitag. I have published my first book—The Fragments, an inventive mix of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Dystopian fiction—in 2022 and am currently working on the second book in The Spheres Series—The House—due for release in the first half of 2025.
You can follow my writing adventures on Bluesky, Instagram, Goodreads and Amazon.
