Why Write? Your Voice vs AI

As a Writer and a Creative, do you have to use AI? How can it hinder and help? Dive into the conflict built in to using AI and re-discover the power of your writing voice.

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Hi, I am Dr. Gwyn Erwin, and welcome back to my channel "Healing For Your Life."

Why Write?

Today we're going to focus on Why Write,? why should you write, why should you have AI write for you? This can be a very controversial topic, but I want to focus in two particular ways.

The act of writing is one of the most vulnerable things anybody can do. It is being willing to be a snail without a shell, because once it's out there, it's there, and especially in today's world. It's very hard to undo it, or erase it. It's there, somewhere. Now, I'm not talking about a fear-based experience of writing. I'm talking about the vulnerability of putting one's heart and mind, and thoughts, and convictions, and beliefs on the page that is writing. It is deep, it is profound. It can be superficial and silly. It can be romantic or mysterious. It has all of its genres. Fiction, nonfiction, whatever the genres within them, but it is an act of bravery and courage.

Your Unique Voice

What is most important about this act is your unique voice. Just as we have unique fingerprints, and no two people in the world have the same fingerprints, each of us has our own unique writing voice. It is the way we sound on the page. It is the way we come across on the page. It is how our being, our sensibilities, our interests, our cares, our worries, our fears, our thoughts, our sensibilities inform the writing, whatever that genre is.

Now there are all kinds of writing skills that can be taught, and I've been teaching them for decades. I've been a professional writer, editor, book doctor, instructor, teacher for decades in writing, and I've been a professional writer myself since I was 14 years old. The trickiest part, I don't like that word. Tricky. I'm going to delete that. The most momentous and the most challenging part besides the skills which can be taught is finding one's writing voice, which is not necessarily the same as your speaking voice.

Your writing voice is when you read something someone has written, the author in their sensibilities and what they have brought to the page, and they don't sound like anybody else. Now you get writers who mimic writers, who copy other writers, but they don't have their unique voice, and that's what's missing, and that's why it doesn't succeed.

How do you go about finding your voice? It is through a daily practice that I call flow writing, which I've talked about in a recent video, that I suggest that you start working with, taking a topic and letting your mind flow right onto the page without stopping, without editing, without judgment, without critique for at least 30 minutes a day. You'll find, after weeks or months or a year, your voice, and then you can start applying it to your projects.

The Use of AI

AI is prolific. It is taking over the world. It will more and more. I'm not trying to be a tiny, tiny David in the face of an enormous, Goliath, but it is a mixed bag. And it's a mixed bag for several reasons.

It replaces you. It may follow your instructions. It may follow your guidelines. You can even tell it to use the kind of voice you want, the kind of language you want, the kind of tone you want. It can come close to sounding like you, but it replaces you. And for anyone who is serious about writing, it is not the same experience in any way as the creative originality of you sitting down to a page pen in hand or at your keyboard.

There are other dangers to AI. Of course, it can be misused in hundreds of ways. I don't need to explicate those in this video.

But one of my greatest concerns for children and adolescents and young adults is that they will lose the ability and the opportunity to find their voice and to use it to craft their stories that no one else can craft the way they can.

And they will lose the skills of writing. They won't know how to write. That's already happening. It's happening in schools across the country.

They won't be able to think as well because there is brain science to show the power of the hand, the pen, the eye, and the page. Now, that doesn't mean that they won't go on to learn. It doesn't mean that they might not even be successful in ways, but it's not the same, and it's contaminated, and it's missing the most vital piece of writing: the author behind the page, not showing up on the page, waving a red flag, "I wrote this. I wrote this. Look how good a writer I am," because that destroys the writing.

You As A Creative, AI As Your Assistant

You as a writer inform every word you put on the page. And if you are a Creative, use AI as an assistant. It's a great help for research, as long as you verify it and make sure it's legitimate. It's a great help in formulating some of your ideas. It's a great help in suggestions you might not have thought of about a certain topic or a way of saying something.

It's an assistant, but it is not you. And so I encourage you if you want to write, if you are called and pulled to writing, to use AI as your assistant, but you are the master of your page.

I encourage you to check out my online course "Designing Your Nonfiction Book."

And, I want to tell you the exciting news that I will have a new course out this fall called "Designing Your Fiction Work," which I think will appeal to a wide swath of fiction writers.

So check them out, follow me, subscribe here, and I'll see you very soon. Thanks for being here. Bye.