Latest / HumanPrint: How to Use AI Without Losing Yourself / Episode 12: What Do YOU Want to Write About?

Transcript

Episode 12: What Do YOU Want to Write About? · 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,
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  and if you are open to collaborating with AI but you're
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  not interested in disappearing into AI, you're in the right place.
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  Each week we will look at one place where your authentic human signal is
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  at risk for drift and one way to shore it up.
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  Oh, and Human Print is brought to you by Abby AI Brand
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  bank intelligence that helps authors, thought leaders and enterprise
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  teams train AI on their voice and point of view so
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  written content stays unmistakably human, consistent and on
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  brand. Learn more@abbey.ink a
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  b b I.ink like you write with.
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  Let's begin.
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  Hello and welcome back to Human Print. Today I'm asking
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  the question, what do you want to write about?
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  Because as we've discussed in the last couple episodes, asking why gives
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  you your writing fuel. Asking how gives it a recognizable human
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  voice, preferably your own. But then there's what? Which sounds like
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  the easiest question of the three until you try to answer it without the aid
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  of algorithms, audience expectations, professional positioning,
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  any shoulds you have floating around in your head or whatever's trending this week.
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  What do you actually care about enough to go investigate and share your ideas
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  with the world. Now, my personal interests, they live at kind
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  of the intersection of science and creativity, and I've never treated those
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  things as separate silos. I can run the same scientific
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  method on a book project the same way I'd run it on a research project.
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  It starts with a question or a hypothesis, then followed by exploration,
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  evidence, any complications, discovery, conclusions,
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  and sometimes the conclusions spin off a new set of questions which could be
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  a sequel. And that's how science works too. I'm fascinated
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  by mapping human writing voices, the history of innovation, combinatorial creativity,
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  writing habits, storytelling, psychology, adult scoliosis research,
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  and the list goes on and on. Now, what's the one
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  underlying question or kind of common denominator that connects all
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  those things? I don't know. Maybe that's the point. I don't
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  need a clear answer for why I like everything I like or write the way
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  I do. I just need just enough self awareness to recognize my interests when they
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  show up, know that they're mine, and decide whether I want to follow them or
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  which ones I want to follow in any given moment. I need to know where
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  the mirror is and what's in it. And I don't need AI or an
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  algorithm or even a content strategist holding it up and telling me what they see
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  before I've looked into it myself. This gets hard because writers
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  are drowning in data about what audiences want these days. You can research keywords,
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  you can track trends, study what's performing, ask readers what they need.
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  And yeah, some of that's useful. But without keeping yourself in the center
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  of the conversation, those trends can also pull you towards subjects that have
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  no real life interest for you. I tried that during my scaling era,
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  as I call it. I followed the formulas and built the funnels and I made
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  the content that was quote unquote supposed to perform. The result was work I
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  didn't enjoy making in a voice I didn't recognize and
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  chasing outcomes I could not control. Social media algorithms
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  are unpredictable, no matter how many people claim to have cracked them. So you
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  can pick a topic you don't care about, force the content out, spin the roulette
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  wheel and still watch it flop. And that's a remarkable amount of
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  work and stress to build for yourself on purpose, especially if you don't
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  care about the topic at hand. One of my author clients has a
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  phrase I really like. She says hold your outcomes loosely.
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  I like it because it puts the emphasis back where you actually have control your
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  input, what you care about, how deep you go, what you say,
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  and whether the work actually represents you.
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  You cannot control how many people see it, share it, buy it, misread it,
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  scroll past it while watching a dog steal a sandwich in the next post below
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  yours or above yours, start with what you care about and
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  then tell the reader what you why you care about it. That small piece of
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  personal context gives the subject weight. It automatically
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  becomes an object of fascination simply because they see your readers see how
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  you are fascinated by it. A slice of readers will recognize something in
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  your experience or your questions, and they'll follow you down the rabbit hole.
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  So how do you find your rabbit hole or rabbit holes?
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  Think about what you return to when nobody's paying you,
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  assigning it, or tracking engagement. What do you
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  research for no practical reason? What sends you down? A trail of articles
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  and notes and questions? What do you keep explaining to people who
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  didn't technically ask for the full lecture? What makes time disappear?
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  What puts you in flow, like a learning state of flow?
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  Which topics do that for you? Those various interests? They might not look
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  connected, yet they don't need to be. Combinatorial creativity One of my great
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  interests the idea that new work comes from connecting existing ideas in
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  unfamiliar ways that runs on exactly this type of raw material.
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  My own fascination with mapping writing voices came together this way.
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  First AI showed up and I realized, wow, I've Been mapping people's
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  writing voices and points of view since, oh my gosh, like 25 years ago.
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  As a ghostwriter, I had to in order to write convincingly as them.
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  Then I went back to school and I learned about things like
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  measurement and statistics and psychometrics and research design and scale creation,
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  and that was super interesting to me. Meanwhile, I'm watching people
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  use AI in ways that told me they either don't know that they have a
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  distinct voice or they don't think it's worth keeping. So yeah, all those
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  threads came together into a single mission over the last year or so to
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  help people map their own writing voice and point of view. Because before AI
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  erases it, I couldn't have planned that combination years ago. I had to accumulate the
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  parts first. This is why I don't rush to force every interest into
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  one perfect brand statement, or monetize it, or mission or all that. Sometimes you
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  just need to allow space and time to collect all your parts. The real
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  question is whether an interest is substantial enough to carry a post,
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  an article, a series, a podcast, or a full body of work.
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  Now a book for me, that works like a science experiment. There's a clear question,
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  an exploration through story and evidence, and a journey for the reader. The conclusion,
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  again, doesn't have to resolve anything in science, you know, one study just produces better
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  questions for the next one. And you can think of a book the same way
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  a passing interest gets you one good post. A recurring curiosity
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  can support a series, a question with real depth,
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  intention and evidence and personal meaning and room to keep discovering.
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  That might become a book you can only find out by following it.
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  So AI can help here too, in the structural supplementation sense.
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  That's my latest phrase about how AI is useful.
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  Structural supplementation. It can suggest ideas from related
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  fields, historical references, various research directions,
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  structural comparisons, any gaps you missed. And it can pose questions that
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  deepen something you already care about. I have lived this
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  while building my voice intelligence system. It started with what
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  I knew about ghostwriting voice and measurement through a long stretch of conversations, research,
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  rabbit holes, failures, revisions. AI helped me add layers and directions
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  that I hadn't considered. It worked like a research collaborator in multiple
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  places where I already had baseline knowledge. Now, without the baseline,
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  I'd have had no way to judge the suggestions or catch any mistakes, any hallucinations,
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  throw out any weak directions that really weren't worth following or decide
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  what needed more digging. Generative AI can widen your field of view,
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  but you're still the one deciding where to look and it
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  still can't tell you what you care about most. It can study your
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  past work. It can spot recurring topics. It can build you a list
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  from your notes of things that you're curious about. It can point out connections you
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  missed. But it cannot get inside your heart, your history, your curiosity,
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  and define you as a writer. It's really a statistical system running
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  on data, and that training data represents an enormous number of other people's
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  words and language. It learns anything real about you only when
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  you tell it. When you hand it over, it's not psychic. It's statistical.
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  And how well that works depends on whether you understand yourself enough to
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  hand the AI something meaningful. So here's this week's exercise.
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  Build a curiosity map. Start with a blank page.
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  List every subject you return to voluntarily. Keep it unorganized.
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  Don't cross anything off. Don't censor anything. Nothing is too small or strange or weird
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  or commercially useless. Just keep it all. Don't censor anything. Professional interests,
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  personal fascinations, old obsessions, new questions,
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  things you just like to study. Stories, maybe the stories you keep telling other
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  people. Things that make you angry or delighted or some other emotion that powers
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  you, that fuels you so that you want to go investigate it further. List all
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  of the things. Next is fun with combinatorial
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  creativity, where you get to draw the connections, which ones overlap,
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  which share a question or method, a value or a piece of your history.
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  Where do science and art maybe meet on your list? Business and
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  psychology, your lived experiences and your research interests,
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  which seemingly unrelated things actually connect.
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  That's the most fun for me. Pick one connection that surprises you
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  and write a page about it without touching AI. Don't touch AI, Just do it
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  yourself. Write, journal, scribble. Then once you've said what you think,
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  bring AI in for structural supplementation. Historical parallels,
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  research directions, counter arguments, really have it. Challenge you. Adjacent fields,
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  anything you missed, and then go back to your original page and decide
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  what actually belongs there. AI can help
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  you travel further into a subject, but you're still the one who picks the subject,
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  the reason for going there, and what will bring you back to it over and
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  over again. All right, that's it for today's episode of
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  Human Print. Until next time, use the tool. If it
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  helps, just don't hand it the pen.
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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.