Why Are You Using AI in Your Writing Career?

AI Can Save You Time, But Usually Doesn’t

First, I would like to tackle the argument that, “I just use AI for marketing copy, ads, creating email drafts, and posting on social media. All the things I don’t want to do anyway. That will give me more time to write.” Will it? let’s look at the reality for most writers (and people in other industries as well).

• ·With AI I can write email drafts faster, which means I should send out more, right? But because AI can make mistakes, I do need to review all those drafts, edit them as needed, and push the send or schedule button, right? 
• Yes, you do. We’ve all seen the blowback when an author sends out an email when the prompt somehow ended up inside it, or even accidentally in the subject like, and since they didn’t review it, now all of their readers not only know they used AI, but they know the prompt used to create the email, which can be less than flattering. 
• ·With AI, I can post more often on social media. And the ideas it comes up with related to my books and work are better than mine anyway. 
• This is great. Same as above, I need to review and schedule them rather than trusting the AI 100% to do this for me but compared to coming up with ideas and drafting posts on my own, this is so fast and efficient. The review process won’t take any time at all in comparison. 
• ·AI can create images and video for me. That is way faster than using Canva, BookBrush, or Photoshop. And I have more options than just with stock photos and backgrounds. I can be more creative by letting AI do the work for me. Of course, I have to be careful and review these, and I need to become pretty good at prompting, too. But my posts will be so much better. 
• In fact, now I can make book trailers. I had to hire someone before, but that is so expensive. Now AI can do it for me, with the right prompts. It just keeps getting better and better, and even faster. Of course, I have to edit and stitch those clips together, but AI can even do that for me. I can use AI to edit the AI! This is so much fun!
• ·In fact, I can make AI movies now. Just feed my novel into a machine, and it writes a script and makes a movie for me. Of course, I need to go in and produce, direct, and edit that, but AI makes all that possible. I never planned to make movies of my own work, but now, since I can, I’m going to add that to my list of things to do! I’ll take a couple of courses, learn to do this myself, and my fans will love it. 
• ·Oh man! Did you know AI can edit your novel for you? Those editors are expensive, and all they are charging me for is their time to read my book and make some comments. AI can do the same thing and just make changes for me. It’s so fast and easy, and the results are amazing. The work AI does is so much better than what I can do, and human editors make mistakes. AI does not make those human errors, and the process is way faster and cheaper. Of course, I still have to review the changes, and AI is certainly not the best judge of story quality, since it is a predictive model not a creative one, but that is good enough for me.
• ·I can even create my own covers. Of course, there are some things that have to do with fonts and graphic design I need to learn, but I can take a course quickly, and then just do my own covers. Why not? Look at all the money I am saving on those cover designers, not only sparing me the back and forth when they create something I don’t like. Sure, these covers are rarely spectacular, but they are good, and better than anything I could create on my own.  

Do you see the trap here? You aren’t really saving that much time when you still have to review and schedule drafts, and you have lost your voice to the AI; although it can write like you, it cannot be you, with your thoughts and feelings. 

And writing, even emails and social media posts, is an exercise in thinking and feeling. If you think and feel, the reader and even your social audiences will as well. But even if you win that argument, and those social media posts perform as well or better than the ones you create, notice you have done something else. 

You’ve added tasks to your list that you would have never done or attempted before. Because the ability to do so has convinced you that you should. The best quote to summarize what this means comes from Jurassic Park in 1993:

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” -Dr. Ian Malcom

Without relating to AI companies and the premise of this increasingly popular and soon-to-be increasingly expensive technology, let’s instead relate it to ourselves. Just because we can create our own book covers, movie trailers, and even films, does that mean we should? What we produce using AI is often adequate, but seldom excellent and almost never brilliant (in this context of emails, covers, movies, social, etc.). We’ll get to drafting a story in a moment. 

We are sold on using these tools because they are fast and efficient. But is that what your social network, readers, trailer and movie viewers, and even audiobook listeners want? Have you ever read a book or watched a movie, and said, “Wow, five stars! That was well engineered and created quickly and efficiently!” No.

AI creates well-engineered scripts, social posts, emails, movies, and more. But without skilled human direction, they are rarely excellent. 

AI movies can be great, with talented scriptwriters, directors, editors, animators, and more. It is likely that you, as an author, are not an expert video editor or movie producer, and taking time away from writing books to become one will not likely positively impact your career unless you are switching careers. 

The same can be said for being your own cover designer, your own editor, and all the things listed above. Why are you using AI for those things?

If it is to make certain parts of marketing faster and more efficient for you in reviewing drafts and creating automations, awesome. If, by using these tools, you continue to add items to your list (and monthly costs to your AI subscriptions), then stop, and consider whether some of those things are things you need to do at all. 

AI Generally Intensifies Work Rather Than Reducing It

When we look across industries, including writing and publishing, what AI is capable of tends to make workers (and writers) believe they are more capable as a result, and take on tasks they would have previously avoided. 

In fact, according to a Harvard Business Review eight-month-long study of how Generative AI changed work tasks, “employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so.” What did that look like?

• ·The type of tasks workers performed expanded: “workers increasingly stepped into responsibilities that previously belonged to others. Product managers and designers began writing code; researchers took on engineering tasks; and individuals across the organization attempted work they would have outsourced, deferred, or avoided entirely in the past.”
• ·Boundaries between work and non-work became blurred: “Because AI made beginning a task so easy (it reduced the friction of facing a blank page or unknown starting point), workers slipped small amounts of work into moments that had previously been breaks.”

Sound familiar, authors? You can do more things, so the question of whether you should or should not do them blurs. You simply, and often subconsciously, conclude that because you can, you should.

But another problem emerged: multitasking. We as authors know this is a bad thing for drafting fiction, and focused time rules. We are less efficient and produce lower quality work when we multitask, but AI gives us an illusion of focus: I can focus on this thing while agents do work for me in the background, or while AI does this thing, I can do another. 

Like it or not, psychologically we still feel the need to check on that thing that is running, or we get a notification when one task is complete, and we lose focus. We technically might get more done, but we feel busier, more stressed, and less satisfied with our work. 

This is in part because of speed. We don’t have a true demand to be faster, but the new “normal” for authors who produced two books a year to now produce one a month has impacted our thinking. This is the rapid release philosophy that burned out so many writers but amplified. Even though AI is picking up some of that “work,” we are still creating the same “pressure” mentally that rapid release did, which, for most writers, was unsustainable. 

Why Would You Draft Stories and Novels Using AI?

I remember being six years old and drafting my first “book” titled George and the Giant Castle. I remember working over the prose and illustrations (by six-year-old me) over and over, trying to get it right. 

My first few drafted novels in both high school and college were terrible. I understood story, but not long-form story structure, so while I had talent, I didn’t know how to shape one longer than about 5,000 words, even though I read extensively. It took some education to learn the rules, so I could also learn to break them. 

I spent a ton of time trying to get those early drafts just right. That process taught me, along with constructive feedback, how to write a novel. 

The point? At that time, and really at no other time in my writing career (although I did dabble with the idea of rapid release for a moment or two before figuring out it wasn’t right for me), was writing about being fast and efficient.

For me, writing was about crafting my stories, the ones I felt like I needed to tell, and getting them out in the world for others to enjoy. That started with the traditional route but quickly transitioned to indie publishing, with some traditional thrown it (about 80/20 for a while before that 20 number decreased). 

The drafting process is sacred. This is where the magic happens, where the stories in my head become real, lived out by real characters in places that feel as real to me as the office I am writing in. I got better at structure, studied it extensively, but the reality is the soul of my stories, the voice of my stories is me. 

Do I want them to be well-structured, or “engineered” if you will? Yes. Do I want the prose to best convey my voice and meaning? Yes. Do I need AI to do that? Do I even want it to?

The answer is no. Because that part of my writing career is not about speed and efficiency, at least not at its core, I don’t want or need AI to draft. Can I use it, though, even to help the process? Sure! In fact, it can be quite useful for an intern to do some tasks for me that require a minimal amount of skill and experience. 

• ·If I am stuck, AI can help me brainstorm what is next, as long as I understand these models are predictive engines, so this will likely not be a wild, personal idea, but the most likely next step according to the model training. 
• ·AI can help me outline, or even reverse outline, a novel, and analyze it to an extent. I do need to use caution, though, as AI can, and has hallucinated (even models like Opus 4.6 with large context windows). So I still need to check its work. 
• ·I used to say you could use AI to generate names, but with the recent studies showing how often the models repeat names, I have taken to using a little more old-fashioned methods for name generation.
• ·AI can help surface information from earlier in the draft by creating a series bible for me. Again, you need to check the work AI produces, just as you would the work of an intern. 
• And while, arguably, according to some, AI can conceivably draft a story, it will do some things that, at least for me, that doesn’t mean I want it to create drafts for me. 
• ·AI adds its own voice. The more you try to prompt it out of using that voice, the more robotic that voice sounds. Stacey and I covered this in our podcast recently, but dozens of studies back this up.
• ·AI is predictable. As it has been trained, and is being trained, on a limited dataset of fiction, it is unlikely to come up with the idea for books like Dungeon Crawler Carl or even my own Call of Karen or Tilting at Windmills. 
• ·Even large context models can “lose the thread” over long texts and create the same inconsistencies we as humans do. 

While I have heard the argument that through iterations, this voice can be removed, and some of these mistakes, my question here is not “can we draft with AI?” but “should we draft our work with AI?” And this has everything to do with motive. 

Can AI Draft Publishable Work?

Arguably, yes. It may not be great fiction, but it could be readable, especially by a voracious Kindle Unlimited audience who just wants to read as much as possible of the same formulaic fiction over and over, and is not necessarily vested in “great” or “amazing” or unusual stories, but “good” ones. 

Hell, Danielle Steele built a career on that assumption. 

So did the old-time pulp writers. 

Formulaic fiction is not new and is often created by human writers as well. If that is what you want to create, that is fine. If you want AI to create it for you, or heavily assist you, so you can create faster and make more money on KU, awesome. 

If that is your “why.” Because if you are just out to make money, there are a lot easier ways to do it. This business is both brutal and difficult, but sincerely? If your motive is to create as much consumable content as possible for the Amazon machine, or even your own sales platform so you can be a writer who “makes a living” at this, go for it. 

But is that really your why? Is that the reason you started writing? For me, the answer is no.

I’m not even going to address the copyright issues or the issues with the court of public opinion and the problems recently illustrated with publishers’ reactions to AI (again, not saying they are correct or incorrect, but they are real). 

If you want to be an AI writer, and this is how you want to put your work into the world, embrace it. There is an entire community of AI writers who will embrace you and even teach you how to get better at it. 

But for me, the next question is more important. 

Should We Use AI to Draft Our Stories?

For me, the answer to this question is no. This is not for ethical reasons, although there are those. This is not about environmental concerns or even concerns about readers or publishers and their reactions to AI use. 

There’s only one reason for my answer. Motive. My why.

The reason I started writing was to get my stories and my voice into the world. AI is not my voice, nor is it entirely my story. For me, it would be like hiring an intern or even a ghostwriter to create my story. It would be like someone else, in this case a machine, fleshing out my ideas, and then me claiming them as my own. 

My why doesn’t include that. Do I still use AI for some business things? Yes, but I am reconsidering its use in some areas, including those where I need to humanly connect with my audience, my readers, and build my community. 

The hype got me at first, but I have determined some next steps for me, and maybe they will work for you as well. But will I be drafting my books with AI? Nope. 

Next Steps to Avoid AI Burnout

Okay. To avoid insanity, and to slow things down a bit, here are some next steps. The key to all of this is to slow down. We don’t need to, in publishing or life, to move so damn fast. 

• Figure Out What AI Can Do for You, and What it Can’t: AI is not the answer for everything. I don’t want it to draft books, but emails and ad copy are fine, as long as I am not expanding the scope of what I was doing before. That means I really do save money and time. I’m also looking at a lawn mower that uses AI to map and mow my lawn, and even decides how often and when the lawn needs mowing. That’s a good use of AI. 
• Take Intentional Pauses: Take a day off, keep break times sacred, and learn to relax a little. Just because you can remotely start and even check on tasks Claude Co-Pilot is running on your phone as you eat lunch doesn’t mean you should. Take a technology pause and go walk your dog or something. 
• Sequencing: do things in order of priority and one at a time, even if you are using AI to do them. This prevents you from multitasking and burnout. The exception to this rule is things like cleaning up your email inbox or social media posting automations. As long as you don’t need to actively check on them, let those run in the background for you. Just be sure you are adding your human touch to them before they are automated. 
• Human Contact and Grounding: As AI becomes your chat and work partner, don’t forget the value of human interaction and input. AI can be just as addictive as anything else, and people using it as a counselor, or as one woman in Japan did, a marriage partner, is a foolish use of this tech. Take the time to talk to and listen to humans as well as machines. Social exchange supports and enhances your creativity as well. 

 The final step? Immerse yourself in story. Get back to your “why” for writing in the first place. You might find yourself breaking up with AI drafting or embracing it more. Either way, be sure you are making a conscious choice, not just following the crowd out of a fear of missing out. 

Your story matters. Your voice matters. Ultimately, make sure it’s your choice how it makes its way into the world.