Write your way out - Free

We need your voice. 

You might think your words aren’t necessary; someone else must surely have said them already. But the truth is, now more than ever, real humans sharing thoughtful ideas intended for a personal audience is exactly what our world is craving. It's a way to push back against the deluge of AI generated crap (following the decades long slog of for-SEO generated junk).

Writing—or more specifically for this post, capturing quick concepts to inform ideas and spark further thought—is so much easier than anytime in the past. The tools we have to go from initial idea to fleshed-out piece are better than ever. Even comparing last year to now we see a massive shift in what software we can use to capture audio and voice, and turn it into something useful.

Somewhat ironically, with all the distraction around us, it’s become harder to sit down and focus long enough to actually create ideas. But that’s another topic.

Now, you're probably thinking that I'm about to suggest we all start writing with AI. If you've been on social media, or alive in general the last year, you're seeing that suggested ad nauseum. That's not what I'm suggesting at all. Yes, AI tools can help facilitate the process of writing, but they don't have a voice. What I want to hear is your voice. If AI helps improve and tweak things, fine. I use it myself on a daily basis now. But I don't want the words I write to be the average sum of everything slurped up by AI bots.

Writing messy first drafts is the start of any good work.¹

Years ago, I first tried using technology to help with this process. One author suggested bringing a physical voice recorder on walks.

I tried.

Bought a recorder with an SD card built in, and started talking into the mic. I tested it a few times; even tried Siri with a notes app to transcribe my ideas. 

But the extra device was a hassle, requiring a lot of steps after recording to get the files into a workable state. And Siri’s transcription was a joke. It would fail after about a minute, so I’d have to fiddle with the software and spend more time pressing buttons than actually dictating. Google had an app (I can't remember which) that was better, but I still got the sense that it just couldn't interact with the hardware at a level I needed; and I wasn't willing to switch to Android.

Capturing audio, then turning it into text, was a path I have known about for a while. But the manual steps of transcribing took too much effort until now. More often than not I'd only bother capturing the highlight of the idea (a single phrase or sentence) then maybe come back to it later.

Yes, sitting down at a laptop in silence, with great music on—and time to kick out a bunch of posts—is my preferred way to take an idea all the way through to its inevitable end. In fact, it's where I can type the fastest.²

But ideas don’t always come when we want, and having great tools to trigger at a moment’s notice increases the chances of collecting whatever pops into our mind, and hopefully we can then do something useful with it.

With the advent of better technology, capturing early ideas is so much easier. And I'm more excited than ever.

I can go on a walk or run, open my iPhone—search for the Voice Memos app, and start talking. I can also trigger that app from the home screen, set a shortcut on the action button to turn it on, or speak straight into my Apple Watch to start capturing audio. Then when I'm done I have a near-instant transcript that I can start to edit in a notes doc.

Last week I tried this on a trip into the woods for an unintentional test run.³

I was trail running along a single track path, and kept pausing to pull out my iPhone and speak into the mic.

My mind as usual was firing with ideas. Normally I'd capture the idea in a few words and move on.

But this time I tried pushing the technology a little. I ended up recording the start of four articles, including the one you’re reading now, and last week’s post on the pathless path. I also, incidentally, almost tripped multiple times because I was paying more attention to my thoughts, and less to the path ahead (yes, there’s a life lesson in there somewhere). This is just one of the many benefits of getting out on walks/runs; it gets the body moving and expending energy, leaving room for the brain to light up with ideas.

After capture, the recording can be the start of a draft, turned into a podcast, essay, daily blog post, a subscription product, a course, or even a book chapter. 

On top of all this, I can get a transcription straight from the Voice Memos app. I can read it, edit it, feed it into AI, and review it.

AI tools are here to stay. But we can use them to take the start of great ideas and wrangle through them, not be captured by them.⁴

I’ve started using AI to help with illustrations, like the one you see on this post (not taking over the work of illustrating, but assisting).⁵

It feels like we’re fast approaching a point of no return with the speed of information and the internet as a whole. Everyone is angry at everyone else. Injustices and cruelty are happening at breakneck speed, and those we love are hurting. Social media discourse has turned into lobbing grenades of righteousness over the fence and revelling in the fallout. There’s got to be a better way. There has to be a way we can take the world that exists today, and still add our voices on top of it, our clarity to the chaos, and a signal to the noise.

If you’ve been waffling over whether to write, and put your ideas out there, then I’d ask that you just try. Set up a blog (I prefer Ghost or WordPress) and start adding your own thoughts. Yes, you can use all of the short-form social media platforms, but it feels like there might be a shift coming, where owning your own site and controlling your output (separate from the algorithms) might be better than the days of old where we all tweeted and assumed we had control over the output.

What stories do you have to write?

^{1. Granted, there is debate about this. Some authors I admire prefer to write a simple, clean, and good draft from start to finish and ship it. Others get out absolute chicken scratch and refine it over time. Both work. I’ve waffled along the spectrum of clean and organized to messy and chaotic. But at the end of the day, the thing that matters most is getting your ideas out there. For me I'd rather capture quickly, organize later, as opposed to slowly plodding along and forgetting half the ideas that come to mind.}

^{2. Real story, my brother and I once got paid to transcribe nearly 30 hours of videos for closed captions. I bought a small travel DVD player (can’t believe those were a thing) so that I could listen to the videos alongside my laptop. At the time, it was faster to start/stop the DVD player than to try and wrestle with the videos while typing away on the laptop. My hands have gotten a little slower with age, but I can still almost catch thought for thought when I’m typing out someone’s words on a video call. At the time, I could slow down the speaker to roughly 75% speed and capture everything that was said in a 1:1, with the occasional pause or rewind. My how the times have changed.}

^{3. For the curious, this post started as a 4:08-long ramble. Because I’m talking through my process, you can listen to the original audio clip if you’re curious. After recording I opened the voice memo on my iPhone and copied the text of the transcription (for some reason, I can’t figure out how to do it on my Mac—probably because I’m not on the latest beta OS yet). I then pasted that into ChatGPT and just asked for it to turn that rant into paragraphs. That’s it, I didn’t want it to re-write my voice or change anything up, just dump that into legible, somewhat grammatically correct, paragraphs, and I’d take it from there. Then I opened it up in Apple Notes and started re-writing and refining until it got to the point of what you can see now.}

^{4. I'm familiar with how AI tools also help you to write as an assistant, be your copilot, or can straight up right of for you. I'm not interested in the latter, but am curious about the former. Less so because I want anything to write for me, but because I'm curious about finding suggestions to improve on my writing.}

^{5. I had an illustration I needed to make for work last week. Normally, I go through my typical illustration process—which I love. I think through ideas, sketch, mull over it, sketch again. But this time, I tried to shortcut the process. I asked ChatGPT, “Here’s my idea. What are some illustration concepts that could work for it?” It gave me ten options. I refined one, asked for ten more, and eventually found one that clicked. I asked it to generate a sketch, and it did. The concept was good enough to get my ideas flowing. I took it into my hand-drawn sketch process using Freeform. I redrew it myself, played around a bit, refined it, and got it to the place I wanted. Then I showed it to my team—and we all loved it. Normally, if it were for personal use, I might stop at the sketch stage. But this time, I redrew it in Illustrator. I might also take it into Figma and polish it as a final illustration. It’s fantastic to have the ability to speed things up—AI cut out so much time and let me move faster through my process.}