You, writer

I have coached or edited more than 50 nonfiction authors. Only two or three authored most of they wrote with AI. The rest wrote their manuscripts themselves.

Every one of these authors who wrote the books themselves had problems.

They were rambling, self-centered, disorganized, unaware of basic grammar rules, addicted to em-dashes and exclamation points, self-contradictory, lacking in a sense of drama, frustrating to read, unable to get to the point, unaware of what the point was, repetitive, repetitive, confused, and filled with imposter syndrome.

Every manuscript draft I read is a reminder that human writers are infinitely diverse in their ability to fail.

And yet . . .

Every one of those texts was uniquely and obviously human.

Every one had a unique personality struggling to break free of the constraints of words and connect with readers.

Every one touched me as an editor and coach in some way.

Some of them were easy to fix. Some were incredibly difficult to untangle. But every one, every one, was fixable.

The reason for this is that every human who has an ambition to write a book has something powerful and unique to say. I find that amazing. People as a whole are average. Individual people are outstanding. All of them. They all have something valuable to say.

My job is to identify what they have to say that is valuable, and help them to say it. What a privilege it is to have that role in the world. My bookshelf is filled with those unique books. Looking at them gives me joy. They said something worth saying. I helped.

Embrace your flawed self

I know you worry if you are the kind of writer who should write a book. You probably are.

I know you imagine that AI will make you sound like a better writer. It won’t. It will make you sound like AI.

Your confusion about your ideas is curable. Your organizational problems are fixable. Your language problems are correctable.

When the problems are fixed, your book will sound like you and connect with people who care about your ideas. They will feel like they just talked to you and learned something.

Your AI-generated text won’t connect. And while it can be improved, it will never really sound like you. The best I can do for it is to rewrite it to sound less like AI. That’s expensive and probably not worth it — and it will sound like me, not like you. What a missed opportunity.

Embrace your flaws and your weaknesses. Write anyway.

We want to read what you have to say. Honest.