Writing from the Heart: Authentic Voice in Memoir and Creative Writing

A couple of weeks ago, The Marlon Show on Dublin South FM welcomed writers: Gary J. Martin, Daniel Wade, Alan A.R McNevin & Donna Kennedy who joined from Alicante - Spain to discuss writing in the age of AI. A fascinating conversation you can listen back on this link… https://lnkd.in/e_hwJHa7 #themarlonshow #dublinsouthfm #communityradio #writing #artificialintelligence

I'd like to propose a new word, bloviAItion, to describe overly verbose AI-generated writing. I realize the capital "AI" in the middle is a challenge to newspaper editors, spell-checkers, the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and LLMs. And the necessary pronounciation, blo-vee-AYE-shun, sounds a bit Aussie to American ears. But I think the time for this word has arrived! Are you with me?

If feedback makes you angry, it’s probably doing its job. 🥊 On Pros Talking Prose, we dig into why honest criticism (not validation) is the shortcut to a stronger book and career—first drafts are supposed to be bad, editors push because they care, and your ego may grumble while your manuscript improves. You’ll hear how to take hard notes without losing your voice, when to push back, and why letting AI “help” can quietly flatten your prose. ✍️ Give it a listen and lean into the wind. https://vist.ly/42qxy #BookEditing #WritingCommunity #SelfPublishing #IndieAuthor #AIWriting

Seriously, I'm exhausted! Rolling my eyes at every single LinkedIn post and almost every YouTube thing on Michael Jackson, for example. The moment I step on a sentence like - Not because blah blah blah but because a b c... And the three step reasons - forming a staircase. And some more that you, readers, have identified or suspected as AI-generated script as well.. Of course, we speak in these ways - hence AI has learnt these styles. But did we speak like these in every post, in every two minutes? 🙄🥺😩😫 The other day, a new writer on Medium shared her work with me. Original idea, great start to a short essay on some trend she observed; I was actually enjoying the piece. By halfway, she probably ran out of arguments yet felt the need to lengthen the piece, or maybe didn't know how to finish. The rest of the piece read like AI vomit. But it doesn't have to be this way. There's a reason essays, memoirs are called creative nonfiction. Or writing poetry or fiction- are creative endeavours. Creativity is an exploration, an adventure- you can follow the beaten path yet do something fun, or walk the grass-covered trail, or entirely carve your own new way to tell your stories. And you have enough resources within the human wise-dom to do so. #CreativeProfessionals #CreativeCoaching #TheWritingRoom My personal favourite is Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, a book authored by Jane Alison where she teaches the forms and patterns creative writers might use to tell their stories in the most efficient way. We read this in The Writing Room to kickstart our story structuring ideas. As also poems, paragraphs, advice and troubleshooting tips by established writers and teachers to support the creative framework; plus essential cognitive mentoring to help you lean on for goal-setting, consistency, showing up, attending to emotional vulnerabilities - so that you can reach the finishing line. See you inside. DM for more information. Registration soon.

Just switched to Claude? Here's how to make it actually work for you. Import your memories, set up writing styles, and learn which model does what. #ClaudeAI #AITips #AIWorkflow

Something else clicked for me whilst on my book writing retreat with Karen Williams and Sheryl Andrews last week. (To be fair a LOT clicked 😄) Of course, the writing part of a book gets a lot of attention, it's all about the word count to start with! But then what? From my own experience, the editing and publishing stage is where people either get stuck or overspend. The process can become surprisingly time consuming, especially with the back and forth between drafts, edits, and revisions. So this time, I’ve been doing something differently. I’ve been using AI, alongside a clear style guide, to: 📚 tighten structure 📕 improve clarity 📓 create consistency across the manuscript 📒 reduce the amount of back and forth needed later Before it ever goes near a professional editor. Not to replace editors, (you absolutely still need them), but so that you show up with a much stronger draft which can save time, reduces cost, and make the whole process smoother. So I’m thinking of running a small live workshop: “How to Get Your Book Ready for Editing Using AI (and Save Time and Cost)” It would be a practical session where I walk through: how to create and use a style guide how to use AI properly, not just throwing prompts at it how to improve your manuscript before it goes to an editor It would be for a small group of 5 - 10 people and in return I’d ask for honest feedback as I shape this into something more structured. If that sounds useful, or you’re at that stage with your book, drop a comment or message me. #amwriting #selfpublishing #businessbooks #writingcommunity #editing #manuscriptready Pic: Archive shot from my first book launch

“Eventually readers will not care.” Coral Hart published over 200 romance novels last year alone. She was open about the use of AI in the writing of these books and can even generate a book in a day. Quotes from her interview triggered lots of discussions among writers. To be fair, she is right about the speed part. Writing teams that use AI to ship content get to produce a lot more content per writer. Increased volume exposes the sameness. It also exposes the gaps and inconsistencies. This isn’t another “Humans still matter” post (they do). What teams need is a system behind how content is produced. Content is still produced faster, but the time is saved from reduced decision making before writing starts. Coral published those books under 21 pen names, so you may love one of her AI-generated books without even knowing it.

A Modern Twist on Writing Lessons 🎥✍️ Firstly ,I've designed a special AI video to deliver a new writing genre : Here are the steps of ''Realistic Fiction'': 1: Lead-in : We watched a custom AI video to get the ideas flowing. 2: The Analysis :I elicited the characters, setting, and plot from ss while watching .  3: The Format clarification :Ss learned specific rules and format of writing realistic fiction.  4: The Draft :Students wrote their own stories inspired by what they saw.  5: Peer Check :Ss paired up to review their work using a checklist. 6: teacher's overall feedback for all , and written feedback individually for each draft. #Learn_English_with_Marwa #Together_we_learn #writing #Learn_English

Perhaps the future of writing is an irony worthy of Samuel Beckett — the writer disappears just when the entire stage begins speaking in his language. Today, AI can write emails, blogs, documentation, summaries, scripts, proposals, and even poetry in seconds. And because of that, many believe writing itself is becoming less valuable. Yet every AI-generated sentence stands on layers and layers of human-written content accumulated over decades: books, articles, technical manuals, stories, research papers, product guides, forums, conversations, reviews, screenplays, documentation, and millions of forgotten drafts written by people who were simply trying to explain something clearly. The theatre analogy feels impossible to ignore. The actors perform brilliantly. The audience applauds the performance. Technology modernizes the stage. The production becomes faster, sharper, more efficient. And somewhere along the way, the script becomes invisible. Not absent. Invisible. But perhaps invisibility is not disappearance. Perhaps it is what happens when something becomes so deeply woven into the system that everything else begins speaking through it. And maybe that is why, even in the age of AI, the world still quietly depends on people who know how to think, feel, observe, question, and give shape to meaning through words. #theatre #documentation #AI #writers #AIProduct

Ryan Leack, a writing professor, wrote an essay in the Brooklyn Eagle about AI and writing that reaches back 4,000 years to Enheduanna, one of the first documented poets in human history. His argument, distilled: writing is a living medium. It interacts with the present and changes the future. And what makes it alive is the writer — a three-dimensional, emotional, experience-carrying human being. Yes, AI can generate text. What it cannot do is generate consequences. It cannot write from grief, from wonder, from the specific texture of a Tuesday event that changed someone's mind. It's a distinction that matters enormously as writers watch the current content landscape fill with machine-produced babble and wonder if there's still room for them. I'm here to tell you that there is, and there always will be. Your stories will move people and change the way they think. They will make someone see their own life differently, simply because they come from lived experience intentionally rendered. That's not a feature AI can replicate.  So, if you're a writer doubting whether what you have to say is worth saying. Stop doubting, and start writing. Enheduanna's words survived four millennia. Yours deserve a chance to find their audience, too. --- I've spent my career collecting stories and finding the humans inside them. With execs, I help build the narrative. With writers, I help find it. I'm here if you need either.