Why do you want to be a writer anyway?

One of the foremost questions that I think is crucial to get clear on right off the bat is, why you want to be a writer in the first place. I’m not elitist enough to suggest that there is necessarily a right answer or a wrong answer to this question. Maybe you have a story you desperately need to tell, but you don’t know where to begin. Maybe you just love books and have always wanted to write one but you don’t necessarily have an idea in mind. Or, maybe you want to make a quick buck and you’ve been lead to believe that you can ‘create’ a quick book for passive income with generativeAI to sell on Amazon.

Here’s the thing. There is no end to get rich quick schemes, and AI has really only worsened that in most respects. I talked about this in my Tuesday post, but it’s important enough that I want to reiterate it. AI is not a gold mine, it’s a gold rush, and there is a key difference. If your hope is to create something quickly that you can put out and make a quick buck on or even dozens or hundreds of things because it is the lowest effort imaginable, congratulations that is the worst reason to get into writing and this is not the guide for you.

I’m going to tell you a secret that most pro-AI people probably aren’t willing to tell you (especially if they wanna sell you a course of some sort).

If you don’t value reading or books or art enough to actually create it or read it, why should anyone else?

I’ve seen an increasingly disturbing number of people who will gleefully declare that they “read” 100 books in a week by feeding them into ChatGPT and reading the summaries. Or if they’re very very lazy, they feed the book into ChatGPT, have that create a summary, feed that summary back into Chat for a more bite size summary and then have an AI podcaster read them the summary of a summary of a novel. Which at that point as far as I’m concerned, it would have been far easier to just read the book in the first place.

If however the answer to the question of why do you want to write is because you have a story that you want to tell then congratulations, this blog series is for you! Especially if you’re new to writing and you don’t know where to start.

I’ve often seen the argument be made that newer writers, that is to say less experienced writers, want, or “need” to use AI because they don’t know where to begin. They have an idea but don’t know how to flesh it out beyond that. Writing is a muscle, and like any muscle you have to train it in order to be able to use it effectively and efficiently. And that’s why I’ve created this series.

I want to discuss the ins and outs of writing from the very beginning to the end. This is, all told, probably going to be an 18 part series and I know that’s a lot and it’s intimidating, but I know you can do this. It’s going to be worth it.

Inevitably there are going to be questions that I simply won’t have covered, topics that maybe you’re still curious about so please feel free to add them to the comments of this post and future posts as they come up and I will make sure to address them in future posts.

Do you actually have a story to tell? Or do you just like the idea of being a writer?

This could probably be a post all its own but I do think something to keep in mind and to ask yourself is, do you actually have a story (or even several) to tell, or do you just like the idea of being a writer? One of the other arguments that I’ve seen coming from pro-AI folks tends to be that AI is somehow democratizing writing and making it more accessible to a wider array of people. But writing has never been an elite thing. In fact, as a writer I’ve been told my entire life (literally since I was 12 years old) that writing was not something that I could make a living with. It wasn’t a “real” job. Even books that are primarily about the art of writing and the business of publishing go out of their way to tell you on page 1 that writing is something that few people make money from and even fewer making a living doing.

The idea that someone might actually create something simply for the love of it is kind of anathema to some people it would seem.

This might surprise you to learn but I don’t think AI is going to help that problem. Publishing already has been more democratized thanks to indie publishing options which have been available to us for the better part of twenty years now, and if anything the rise of generated AI books is only going to make it more difficult for people to be seen and for their books to achieve any type of readership and by extension any type of monetary incentive that might have been available to them. You know, kind of the opposite of “democratizing” anything.

There’s this strange misconception that I think some proponents of AI have that seems to be, now that they can (potentially) and unlikely make money from it, suddenly writing and art have value. Suddenly calling yourself a writer holds a prestige in a way they didn’t believe that it did before. But of course they will soon learn, as many writers learn early on that writing (and no using AI is not writing by the by) is not the same as publishing, and publishing is not the same as actually making money from your work, let alone making a living from it.

This isn’t to say you can’t make a living from writing or that people don’t, because people do and have forever. Even in indie spaces. I think it’s important to keep in mind that as more and more people want to use AI to call themselves a writer and flood indie spaces with generated “works” the harder it’s going to be for anyone to find any sort of success in this space.

For every TikTok video promising you a $10k/month income with just one prompt, there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people who are undoubtedly too ashamed to admit that they tried it and it didn’t work because everyone else is trying it too and now the market is so saturated that no one is buying it. First rule of supply and demand. If the demand is lower than the supply then you have no sales.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that even if you have a story to tell, there are other ways to tell it that aren’t necessarily writing a book. You can tell it through music, or a video, a play or film, you can tell it through art and animation, there are so many ways to express yourself and tell a story that doesn’t have to be through writing. If it’s not something you truly enjoy doing or think you would enjoy doing, you don’t have to.

I love writing.

I say it all the time because it’s true.

I’ve literally spent the last month or so dedicating myself to writing and planning a years’ worth of blog content (from my own mind mind you). Why? Because I love what I do. Writing is my greatest passion. It’s the first thing I think about in the morning and the last thing I think about before I go to sleep. There is nothing I would rather be doing than writing. Even when I’m not actively writing I’m often thinking about a story that I’m working on. I’m thinking about what I want to write next.

I do it because I enjoy it, because I feel passionate about it. I do it because it feeds my soul. Not in the religious version of a soul either, my soul as in my essence, my mind, what makes me me. I write because I have to. I have a deep unceasing desire and a drive to write, and hopefully, if you’re reading this you do too.

Why does this guide exist?

The simple answer is that I want to give new and beginning writers the knowledge and the tools of how to start writing without AI.

What makes you qualified to write this guide?

I’ve been writing for the last 20 years, I’ve been blogging for the better part of 10+ years, and I’ve written millions of words in all that time. Every story, every page, every word you write, you learn something about yourself and about your writing and who you are as a writer. Even while writing this guide I’ve discovered things about myself and about my process that I want to share with you.

Why “without AI”?

I could list the MIT study about how AI is damaging our brains. I could list mutliple studies about cognition and the use and reliance on AI, or even better yet I could cite the studies specifically on how social media reliance is damaging to our brains and our self perception. I can discuss the copyright implications, how there is no ownership of AI generated creations because it is based off of stolen art and writing. I could discuss the climate implications. How much water is used even in simple AI usage, or the red lining that takes place in deciding where data centers should be placed and how it disproportionally affects poor neighborhoods particularly where black and brown people are located. I can talk about the AI psychosis that is breaking people’s brains.

There are about a million reasons not to use AI. Some people have already made the choice that they simply do not care and to be fair this is something that is being shoved into our faces quite significantly without our consent, so it can feel unavoidable at times. Even as I write this (on the WordPress site, there are about a dozen different “generate” buttons constantly making themselves abundantly known. (Honestly I usually write these in Scrivener so I should know better than to write within the site itself).

All of the above cited reasons are important enough reasons to me for why I don’t use AI and why I created this guide for how to write without AI. Because the reality is, you don’t have to use AI. You don’t need it. Maybe it seems like it makes things easier in the short term, but the trade off is not worth it.

“I want to write, I just don’t have the time”

This is another topic that could have its own entire dedicated blog post, but I feel like it’s important enough that I’m going to take a second to discuss this point specfically. One of the arguments that I’ve seen people make for why AI is better for writing or even expanding upon ideas is time.

Time is a commodity that most of us simply do not have. Maybe you’re balancing two jobs, school, and raising kids, and for the record that’s a lot for anyone to have to deal with on their own, and I can undersand why you would want to save time wherever you can. I admit that writing can be time consuming as a process. Coming up with a story itself is time consuming, creating settings, characters, and dialogue, not to mention plots, and subplots and side characters is all time consuming.

I’m not going to recite the stories of writers who worked by day and raised their children and wrote in the dead of night. I’m not going to cite my own experiences of writing in my free time while juggling school, a job, and YouTube. Because the reality is, everyone’s experience is different. We all need sleep, we all need rest and we deserve that.

I’m also not going to suggest that maybe writing isn’t for you.

But I am going to say this, would the world be a better place if all of us had more time to focus on hobbies and hanging out with the people we love and care about rather than having to work? Yes. Would the world be a much better place if work-life balance was an actual thing that existed rather than a mantra companies use to placate workers into thinking that they actually have any balance between their work and their private life? Also yes.

We may all get 24 hours in a day, but that 24 hours isn’t exactly an even distribution. If twelve of your hours are just spent at work (traveling to and from to say nothing of the work itself), not to mention taking care of children or family members or being in school, you do not have the same 24 hours as someone who isn’t working, or doesn’t have children, or has someone to take care of their children and the chores around the house. It’s a lot to balance, and things fall through the cracks when you’re focusing on one thing over another. Even when I’ve been laid off from a job somehow time still manages to get away from me.

I’d like to say that I have the perfect answer for you, but I don’t. I will say this, chances are you may have time that you didn’t know you had. I often feel as though I don’t have an adequate amount of time to get things done in a given week (let alone in a day) but then I realize that sometimes I end up having a few hours here and there of free time or downtime that you could be dedicating to something else. Even if it’s only twenty minutes or a half hour. I’m not saying give up all of your very little free time, I’m just saying you may not even realize that you have a little free time in which you can work on something else. It might be worth writing down your daily and weekly schedule and seeing where you have a block that you could use to write if you really want to.