You should be your own AI writing assistant

You look around at the hype around AI. It’s a huge business. Everywhere you turn, people are using it to do their work faster and, to be honest, sometimes just as well as they were doing it before.

If you teach, your students are probably using it. Your colleagues might be using it. Your boss might be telling you to use it. But I remain deeply skeptical that in the long run, you’re going to be glad that you did.

There’s two problems that I see with using AI, as a writer.

One of them is this (And you might recognize this in your own writing process). When I write, I generally start with an idea that I think is a good idea. But as I go, it’s not at all unusual for me to realize that the original idea was a little bit off target. Maybe my trajectory was just a little bit wrong. Maybe the stories I was using to illustrate it were just a little bit wrong. Maybe I thought I had two ideas that I could connect that didn’t connect all that elegantly.

There’s always something.

And in the process of realizing that and fixing it, the writing improves. Substantially. Because changing course, coming up with a new story to tell, splitting what I thought was one piece into two pieces or realizing I need to add something I hadn’t thought of before in order to back up a point that I want to make isn’t a time-sucking drawback to the writing process. It is the writing process.

You can see the problem. It’s right there.

If I had used AI and prompted it to write the piece I’d originally dreamt up, I might have written something–correction: I might have had it write something that I don’t actually believe in when the chips are down.

There is a big risk in that. And it’s closely connected to the other issue with having AI do writing for you, which is this. The process of writing a piece well, whether it’s a substack post or a book, makes you the person who can write that piece.

Do you understand how profound that is? By the end of writing the thing, you are the kind of person who can write that thing. This is why the dissertation remains, and will always remain, the centerpiece of doctoral level education. This is why authors of books get an enormous amount of respect.

And this is why people who use AI to do their writing are absolutely, 100%, no doubt about it, stealing from themselves.

The same can be said for using a ghostwriter, and I’ve written about that before. [Ghost your ghostwriter]

But to do it with AI seems even a step further than that.

I cut a section here going into more detail on the risks of using AI as an author—if you want to hear about that in a future post, let me know!

The upshot of all this is that you look at the people around you using AI and you kind of think you’re missing out. Shouldn’t you find a way to use it to help you? Because everybody else seems to be making really good progress with it. Everybody else seems to be taking advantage of it to be more efficient, get more work done, or spend less time doing the work that they already do. And why wouldn’t you want that? Isn’t my warning a little like telling a farmer not to use a tractor, just stick with the plough horses?

To have an easier time writing your book is a great goal. And I want to help you do that in a way that sustains the quality not only of your end product, but also of the process by which you’ll become AN AUTHOR.

So here’s how I like to think of it.

The only way I’ve found to use AI that doesn’t feel icky and that also feels like it genuinely helps is to put pieces of my own work into it, tell it my goal, and tell it to ask me a few questions about my writing to help me improve it. It does a fairly good job at that. There is, however, a significant potential downside to putting all of your own work directly into an AI chat. I wouldn’t trust the companies to have your best interests at heart where that goes. So if you’re writing something really important, something that’s going to be a centerpiece for your career or your platform or that you really want to be a part of your legacy, maybe you don’t want to put it in there. That’s understandable. There’s another way, which may be even better. And that is this.

At the start of your project, you’ve laid out your book with your concept, your table of contents, and then you’ve detailed your table of contents into some form of an outline, whether it’s a descriptive table of contents or whether it’s a detailed outline with A heads and B heads and maybe C heads. (if you haven’t done this, don’t even think about outsourcing it to AI. That would be like saying, “dear ChatGPT, what are my ideas? Okay, now write those for me.”)

We’ve talked about all this before in my Author Club, where members meet regularly in a small group to test and refine their ideas, develop their work, and use that accountability to make amazing progress on their writing goals.

Speaking of Author Club… I’m offering a discount for new members, and LUCKY YOU, I’ve neglected to promote it, so there’s still space! Click below for more info, and if it sounds like a good deal, don’t wait to join the waiting list.

What you can do next is look at each topic in turn and give yourself a couple of writing sessions to pose questions about those topics. For example, putting each bullet point in your outline into the form of a question. Think about your audience and the way they might phrase that question. If I was using this technique for this piece, my outline might have had a bullet called -”AI-fueled productivity and FOMO” and I might have attached a question like, “Am I foolish for not wanting to use AI to get my work done easier and faster? After all, it’s me telling it what to do.”

You have a point you know you want to make, and this makes you think about what your readers might care about in all that detail. Once you’ve got questions developed related to each of the key points in your manuscript, you can essentially turn yourself into your own AI assistant. What you want to do is imagine you got an email from the person who represents your target readers with this question in the subject line.

All you have to do is hit Reply and answer it. Answer one or two, or five questions each day, and you’ll be flying through your outline. Doesn’t that sound easier than writing a book?

Answering questions is way easier than sitting down and drafting a book from a blank page and a blinking cursor to 70,000, 80,000, or 100,000 words.

Set yourself up for success by thinking of the questions that you would want people to ask you so that you could give them the information that you know they need.

This is not going to give you a 100 % finished and polished manuscript, but it is going to get the important words on the page that you will be able to shape into the final book. Writing isn’t like painting, where every day you come to your work and add layers. It starts that way, but then it turns into something more like carving a sculpture. You’re trimming and shaping material that already exists. You have to know what you see in it and stay true to your vision for the end product, but if you have good material to work with, you know you can get there. It’s probably too obvious to say that getting words on the page is an absolutely essential step in this process. If you can be your own AI writing assistant, you’ll be able to get there much faster.

You might be thinking it would still be okay to use AI for your first draft, if you’re going to have to edit (sculpt) the draft either way. Both of these are just ways to go faster to the thing that you then have to edit, right? Wrong. If you use this method, you’re going to have worked through it with your own mind, with your own reader in mind, so that by the time you get to that draft, you will have gone through the personal growth necessary to get it done. And you will have put the extra layers of hard thought into the material so that you’ll know you’re working on a block that contains the right stuff.

This might sound like a little gimmick. Try it out and see what you think.

What if you traded “question outlines” with a friend who’s also writing a book, and emailed each other the question of the day?

Eventually you’d each have a thread containing your friend’s entire draft manuscript, written in a series of daily emails. I think that sounds like an awesome project.

Do you want to try this?