A few years back, a coworker came by my desk to ask when we were starting on the thing I’d decided in the meeting that morning. I hadn’t decided anything. I’d been thinking out loud. But apparently I think out loud in complete paragraphs, and it had sounded like a plan.
That’s happened more than once. It’s a problem in a conference room. It turns out to be the whole reason I can write books.
I don’t draft at a keyboard. I draft into the voice memo app on my phone. In the car, on a walk, standing in the garage. I talk through a chapter the way I’d tell it to someone sitting across from me: what happens, who’s in the room, what they want. Then I hand that transcript to an AI to shape into rough prose, and I rework every line until it says exactly what I meant.
The obvious objection is that I’m dodging the hard part. I can write the long way. I’ve done it. I can sit down and grind prose out of a blank page like everybody else. I’m just slower at it, and shallower. By the time I’ve typed the third sentence, the seventh one is gone. When I talk, the whole shape of the idea is still in front of me, and I can get all of it down before it fades. I didn’t choose this way because I can’t do the other. I chose it because it gets the better book out of me.
Here’s the part that took me a while to understand. At twenty, this wouldn’t have worked. My talking would have been sloppy, because I didn’t have much to say yet and hadn’t learned how to say it.
But at twenty I became a youth pastor, which meant standing in front of a room of teenagers every week with something to deliver. If you’ve never tried to hold a youth group’s attention, know that a congregation will politely sit through a weak sermon. Teenagers give you about ninety seconds. You learn to be clear, in order, and interesting, or you learn to watch them check out.
In 2007 I started my corporate career, and for almost twenty years now my job has been explaining technical things to people who don’t speak technical, out loud, in rooms, so they can follow along and make a decision. In 2012 I joined Toastmasters and spent thirteen years turning whatever natural ability I had into deliberate craft.
Three rooms. Teenagers, executives, and a club full of people grading me on filler words. By the time I pointed a microphone at myself alone in the car, I’d had nearly thirty years of practice saying complicated things in a way someone else could follow.
So the AI didn’t give me a voice. It gave me a pen that fits my hand.
That’s the thing I think gets missed in the whole argument about AI and creativity. We spent a few hundred years treating the ability to produce clean sentences as proof that someone had something to say. It was a decent proxy. If you could grind out eighty thousand coherent words, you’d probably thought about them. But it was always a proxy, and it quietly filtered out a certain kind of mind: the talkers. The preachers, the storytellers at the kitchen table, the people who could hold a room for an hour and never got their ideas onto a page because the page wasn’t built for how they think.
The filter is coming off. That makes some people uncomfortable, and I understand why. If your identity was built on being able to do the hard thing most people couldn’t, it feels like a demotion when the hard thing gets easy. But the skill that mattered was never the typing. It was knowing what to say.
One caveat, and my coworkers will back me up on it. Sounding finished is not the same as being finished. The transcript that comes out of my phone is rough, and the line-by-line rework is where the real writing happens. I don’t skip the wrestling. I just do it after the ideas are down instead of while I’m trying to catch them.
If the keyboard is where you think best, keep it. I mean that. But don’t mistake the tool that fits your hand for the only one that counts.
