The Zing is a curated weekly newsletter for sophisticated writers navigating the self-publishing journey. Get bite-sized essays, swoon-worthy strategies, and practical how-to guidance from an author and writing publication coach. Whether you're dreaming of writing a book or have already drafted yours, join a circle of high-caliber authors who deserve encouragement, guidance, and kindness on the path to publication. Bonus: Goofy jokes occasionally included.
The hidden trap of letting AI write your book
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If you're thinking about using AI to help write your book, please hang on a sec. AI promises speed, yet there's a hidden cost authors discover. Editing becomes harder after using AI. So, why is that? Well, AI text usually doesn't have a consistent voice. On the surface, it's wording can sound polished while lacking the specificity that creates a voice. To top it off, you're fighting against a style that isn't yours when you edit. This means you can spend hours rewriting paragraphs that read like someone else's work, and that can feel frustrating. AI loves (wait, can it really love?) to use versions of phrasing, such as “it’s not about X; it’s about Y.” While there’s nothing wrong with using that phrasing a few times here and there, AI will add it hundreds of times. Yikes. That creates a dull experience for your reader, and a lot of extra work or money for you to get rid of it. And if you leave it in? Readers may not turn the next page... Something to Try: Use AI as a Research Assistant A researcher at Harvard recently shared that she used AI to find an article she’d not been able to find on her own. --Need background information on a historical event? --Want to explore different perspectives on a topic or get a list of links to research? AI can do well with gathering and organizing that info. Your story deserves your voice and your own unique fingerprint. When you generate ideas and craft sentences yourself, you keep your voice and sound like you. And that saves you oodles of time. Warmly, Deb Ager PS: When you’re ready:
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The Zing with Deborah Ager
The Zing is a curated weekly newsletter for sophisticated writers navigating the self-publishing journey. Get bite-sized essays, swoon-worthy strategies, and practical how-to guidance from an author and writing publication coach. Whether you're dreaming of writing a book or have already drafted yours, join a circle of high-caliber authors who deserve encouragement, guidance, and kindness on the path to publication. Bonus: Goofy jokes occasionally included.
To get a monthly summary of these letters instead of weekly, please click this link. Hello there,Lately, several folks asked me about the steps involved in writing a book. In case you're wondering, I'll share a short story below. Arvashni had a story she needed to tell. When I first spoke with her, she said: “I can't even write a long email." That's normal! To navigate around that, we used my Clarify-Storify-Amplify process. Clarify Her story was rooted in her family’s history as part of the...
To get a monthly summary of these letters instead of weekly, please click this link and your wish will be honored. Last week, my husband and I caught an advanced showing of the documentary “LORNE, which is about the creator of Saturday Night Live (a comedy show in the United States). Initially, I was skeptical of this documentary about Lorne Michaels. Yet, I ended up surprised that I absorbed useful lessons from his work life. A lot of these lessons apply to both writing and life in general....
In the Paris Review, the writer Emmanuel Carrère talked about how he drafted a book that wasn’t working out. (That's pretty normal, by the way.) To say goodbye to his project and honor the effort he put into it, he wrote a letter to himself about what he had tried to do with the book. The process of writing about his ideas led him to a breakthrough, and he was able to finish. So, why did this work? My theory is that something called our "reticular activating system" (RAS) played a role. The...