Latest / HumanPrint: How to Use AI Without Losing Yourself / Episode 16: Head Down, Eyes on Your Own Paper

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Episode 16: Head Down, Eyes on Your Own Paper · HumanPrint: How to Use AI Without Losing Yourself

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Foreign.
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Welcome to Human Print. I am Christine Whitmarsh and
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if you are open to collaborating with AI but you're not interested in
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disappearing into AI, you're in the right place. Each week
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we will look at one place where your authentic human signal is at risk for
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drift and one way to shore it up. Oh, and Human Print
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is brought to you by Abby AI Brand bank intelligence
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that helps authors, thought leaders, and enterprise teams train
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AI on their voice and point of view so written content stays
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unmistakably human, consistent and on brand.
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Learn more@abbey.inc a, b b
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I.ink like you write with. Let's begin.
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Hi everybody and welcome back to Human Print. This is
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episode number 16. I'm calling it.
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Head down, eyes on your own paper. So yeah,
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this is the first in a three part series that I'm calling Writing
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through the Noise. Protect your headspace, know your process,
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and keep creating. While everybody else argues about AI across
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these three episodes, I'm looking at one question
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in three different places. So what gets access to your head, your process, and the
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work you haven't made yet? Today, let's start with your head.
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Because long before generative AI came along and gave
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writers a whole new category of stuff to worry about, we were already pretty good
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at worrying about writing. So, you know, people were
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asking things like, does anybody want to hear my story? Who cares what I think?
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Am I actually any good at this? What if I publish it and people hate
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it? What if people I know read it and think I'm weird?
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What if I share something personal and regret it later? Like I said, writing writers
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are really, really good at getting in our heads and worrying about writing. I spent
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years and years talking about variations of these questions on my first podcast called you'd
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Daily Writing Habit. And I've spent even more years talking to book coaching
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clients about them and really talking them off of the cliffs and talking
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them through these questions. Because the resistance that writers feel toward their
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own work tends to come from within before any other type of
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resistance shows up. Usually nobody has actually criticized their work
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yet, but the writer is imagining the criticism in advance and sometimes in extraordinarily
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lifelike detail. So now with
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AI, we've added another layer of resistance. Questions like what
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if people think I used AI? What if someone runs my writing through
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a detector? What if I use a word somebody has Decided is an
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AI word? Am I still allowed to use em dashes even though I
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was totally using them before ChatGPT existed? What am I
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obligated to disclose how much do I have to explain?
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And depending on where you spend your time online, you can find plenty of people
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willing to answer every one of these questions for you. Which brings me back
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to one of the first lessons I learned and then taught writers years ago.
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Head down, eyes on your own paper.
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I originally used that phrase in response to what I called the peanut gallery
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method of writing, which is something I've seen happen with first time authors, especially over
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and over and over again. They'll have a book direction that we'll have agreed
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upon as coach and client. It makes sense. The author's excited about it,
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we're making progress. But then one day they show
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up for a coaching call, suddenly questioning everything. The current direction is
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all wrong. They have 11 new ideas. Maybe they should change the structure,
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switch the audience, start over, make it a completely different kind of book. And the
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new ideas usually have very little development, very little weight
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behind them because, you know, they appeared like 48 hours ago.
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some point, I'll ask my coaching client the obvious question, who have you been sharing
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this manuscript with? And there it is. They got excited or
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anxious or both, and they started passing around a very rough draft to friends and
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family members. Everybody had an opinion because of course they did.
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And now the writer is trying to incorporate every single opinion, every single
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thought, every single idea from. People just have no idea what they're talking about most
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of the time into a book. So we were still trying to figure out what
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the book was, but now we're going in a hundred different directions. Now,
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these aren't necessarily mean people in the peanut gallery. Usually it's friends and family
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they're trying to help. The problem is that the peanut gallery has
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no stake, no investment in what happens next.
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They're not part of the project. It doesn't matter to them if you try all
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these ideas and they all fail and you've wasted all your time, they don't have
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to write the next 40,000 words. They don't have to spend six months rebuilding
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the book if the new direction fails. They don't have to publish it,
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put their name on it, explain it to readers, or live with the consequences
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of every creative decision the author does.
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So I usually end up talking my client down from the ledge a little bit.
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I tell them, protect your work. Breathe. Give yourself some time.
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Go back to the writing assignment in front of you instead of trying to solve
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your entire future book tonight. And maybe most importantly,
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remember what you knew before everybody else started talking.
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Theodore Roosevelt addressed a version of this problem from a much larger
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public stage in 1910, when he gave his Citizenship in a
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Republic speech in Paris. Now, the section most people now know
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as the man in the arena was was part of a much broader speech about
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citizenship, effort, responsibility, and participating in public life.
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And it contains that famous line the credit belongs to
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the man who is actually in the arena. That quote has been
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slapped on enough motivational posters at this point that it's easy to tune it out,
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but it really remains very valuable for writers.
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Questions like who is actually doing the work?
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Who knows what this piece is trying to become?
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Who has to make the decisions? Who understands the
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intended reader? Who will continue living with this work long
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after the person leaving a comment has moved on to something else?
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Now, that doesn't mean outside criticism is useless. Of course it isn't.
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I've always told authors to pay attention to patterns in criticism
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because one person disliking something may simply reflect personal
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preference, while multiple readers independently identifying
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the same weakness. That might create a pattern worth looking at constructively,
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of course. And don't do it in a way that hurts your own feelings.
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Don't do it in a destructive way. Look at it very objectively. Look for the
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patterns. Then you can decide what to do with the feedback.
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Now that second part gets lost when criticism arrives before you've developed
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enough confidence in the work to evaluate it. So instead of using feedback, you're just
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kind of getting pushed around by it while you're still trying to figure out your
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work. And I think something similar is happening now around AI.
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There are legitimate criticisms of generative AI. There are legitimate ethical
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questions about training, data, labor, environmental impacts,
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authorship disclosure, education, publishing accuracy,
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and what happens when enormous amounts of mediocre machine generated
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material flood the Internet? I've talked about these a lot so far on
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this podcast, but someone having a legitimate concern about
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AI in general does not automatically make that
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person an authority on your writing process.
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They don't know what you're doing behind the scenes. They may
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know what the finished text looks like, they may have a strong opinion about a
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certain tool. They may have read research you haven't read. And if
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they have useful information, fine, go read it. Go check it out.
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But they still don't know what happened between the first idea entering your
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mind and the words they eventually saw. And if you
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start letting every possible future accusation influence your decisions while you're
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writing, you've recreated the peanut gallery without ever showing anybody the
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manuscript. Now think about how strange that can get. You've always
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used EM dashes, maybe, or Oxford Commas but now you have to remove them.
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Or you feel like you have to remove them because somebody might think AI wrote
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the sentence. You naturally write in a particular structure,
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but you deliberately make it less organized, because organized writing has appeared
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on someone's AI tell list. Maybe you stop using a word that
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has been in your vocabulary for 20 or more years. Or you start running your
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own work through detectors before publishing because you're trying to anticipate what
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strangers might accuse you of later. It's like Minority Report for writing.
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Maybe you begin explaining your process everywhere, even though you would
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otherwise consider your process private. At some point, you're no
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longer responding to actual criticism. You're trying to write around imaginary
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future critics as writers. Again, we were doing
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versions of this long before AI. One of the most common things I've
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worked through with book clients is the fear of sharing the personal material that gives
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a book its weight. This comes up especially with business authors who want to
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sound credible and knowledgeable and successful, and they want to just, you know, like they
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always had it together, their whole lives. So then I start asking them questions
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like, what happened before you knew this? In other words, what was
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your life or your work like before you understood these lessons that you're now teaching?
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And when did you get it wrong? Like what mistakes and bad assumptions and
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failed attempts or misjudgments came before all this expertise that
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you've acquired? And what did you believe back then? So what did you think
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was true before experience changed your mind? And what
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did this cost you? So what were the consequences of not knowing yet? Was it
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time? Money? Stress? Missed opportunities? Damaged relationships?
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And finally, what were you afraid of? What fear or vulnerability was
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present while you were still figuring all of this stuff out? And eventually we
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get to the part of the story that makes them uncomfortable because it feels too
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personal, flawed, or strange to include? And that's actually where
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I become very interested. With generative AI especially,
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readers today can get generic information and advice about practically
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anything in seconds. It's like Google on steroids. Like,
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information is the abundant asset, the human story behind why
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you know something, what it cost you to learn to learn it, and how your
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thinking changed. Now that's become the scarce asset.
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And if we're going by the economics theory of scarce versus abundant assets,
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one of my favorite things, people will naturally squander the abundant and
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protect the scarce one. So personal story and unique point
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of view, those are the scarce assets. That's what the
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smart writers should be honing right now. The scarce assets of personal story and
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Unique point of view. Yet those two things are exactly the material
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that writers tend to censor. First when they start imagining what other people might think.
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And again, this was happening long before AI which is why I keep coming back
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to this. How much of what's bothering you right now is actually new?
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That's a good question. Because writers can take an old insecurity and attach
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it to a very current controversy. Maybe five years ago, the thought
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was people are going to think this story is stupid. Now the thought
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is people are going to think AI wrote this. Different concern,
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but same result. You stop writing or you interfere with the work
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before anybody else has had a chance to. And once you recognize that
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some of the old mindset tools, you know they still work remarkably well.
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Like find your why. That's my favorite one. And I
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know if any of you listen to your daily writing habit for any length of
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time, or if you've been my coaching client, you've heard me say find your why
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maybe about 9 million times. And there's a reason for this.
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The clients I've watched push through the most resistance usually have
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a very strong reason for wanting their book to exist. Maybe there's
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a particular group of readers they want to help. Maybe they lived through something and
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they don't want other people to go through the same thing without the information that
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they wish they had at the time. Or maybe there's just a story they simply
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need to tell. When that reason has enough emotional weight, it gives
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them something stronger to return to when anxiety starts trying to
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run the project. Freestyle journaling. There's another tool
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that still works, especially if you can feel yourself reacting to criticism before
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you even figured out what you're thinking about your own work.
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Write the ugly version. Journal it if you have to. Write the defensive
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version. Write down exactly what you're afraid might happen if you publish
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it. Nobody else needs to read it. Sometimes your brain becomes
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much less convincing once you make it. Produce actual evidence and also
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protect your writing cave. That special time you carve out each day or week
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to write when the world gets blocked out and it's just you and your precious
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words. And there's another historical example I want to bring into this
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to clarify reader criticism. What I mean by that, Even by the most
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passionate anti AI censors. So that versus actual censorship.
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James Joyce spent about seven years writing Ulysses.
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Portions were serialized in something called the Little Review in
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the United States, and after that magazine published the Sorry
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Naucica episode and its publishers, Margaret Anderson and
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Jane Heap, were prosecuted for obscenity in 1921,
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under laws governing obscene material sent through the mail,
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Ulysses remained banned in the United States until a
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federal court ruling in 1933 opened the way for legal publication.
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I bring that up because that is actual legal censorship.
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Someone criticizing you on LinkedIn or Substack, that's not the same thing.
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A reader deciding they hate you, your AI use, that's not the same thing.
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A platform changing, a distribution rule, that's also its
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own category. So I think we should preserve those distinctions, because if
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every uncomfortable response becomes censorship, well, the word stops,
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helping us understand what's happening. Self censorship is, is where
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this becomes especially relevant to writers. You can be completely free
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to publish something and still decide not to, because you've imagined the
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real reaction so vividly that you shut yourself down first.
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You self censor. Nobody needed to ban it. That possibility has
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always existed for writers, which means learning to distinguish valuable
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outside information from noise. That's always been a part of the job.
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I've dealt with this in my own writing career as well. There were plenty of
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people who told me in various ways when I was much younger that writing probably
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wasn't going to take me anywhere. They could point to the statistics, or to all
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the aspiring writers who never made a living from it. Nobody was. They weren't
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trying to be cruel, but some people thought they were just being practical in protecting
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my feelings. The problem was that nobody actually knew what would
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happen to me. Being honest, neither did I. I had
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no clue. I couldn't control whether someone bought a screenplay,
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hired me, published something, referred a client, or handed me some magical career
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making opportunity. Those were beyond my control, but I could
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control the inputs. When I had a day job, I wrote during every available
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hour I could find. I kept submitting, I kept learning,
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I kept getting rejected, and I kept working and I kept writing.
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And for whatever reason, every time someone told me some version of this probably isn't
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going anywhere, I dug in my heels a little harder. Maybe that's my inner Aries,
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my stubborn Yankee. Maybe both. That's still one of
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the most useful ways I know to handle the noise. Get very clear about
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which part belongs to you. Your inputs, your work
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belongs to you. Your effort belongs to you. The decision to
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keep learning belongs to you. Whether another person approves
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of the eventual outcome, that's an output that's outside of
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your circle of control. So before we move into the
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next episode, episode 17, where we're going to compare your actual writing
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process before and after Generative AI, think back to your
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pre AI writing life. What could shut you down back then?
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Was it fear of being judged? Perfectionism?
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Showing your work too early? Worrying that nobody cared?
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Comparing yourself to other writers? Or feeling unqualified?
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Which of those things still shows up now for you?
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And which parts of the current AI noise are actually giving you
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new information that you want to use? That's the sorting
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process, because everybody doesn't get equal access to your head
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just because they have an opinion.
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And that's it for this episode of Human Print. If you want a
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practical framework for protecting your voice amid the AI noise,
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please follow the show. And before you go, take a minute and ask yourself,
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as the AI noise grows louder and louder, which areas of
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yourself do you need to protect the most? I'll see you next time.