Writing, like any other skill, improves the more you do it. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell explores the importance of doing something repeatedly as a path to success. Of course, factors such as talent, education, and opportunity do play rather large roles in the quantum of success. But even with these, success is largely determined by how much time you spend honing your skills.
The road to failure, they say, is littered with good intentions. Every year, I tell myself that I will write an article a week. But after a few weeks, I invariably fall off the saddle. When I introspected to identify why I failed each time, one reason kept cropping up – the lack of a topic on which to write.
I tried to set up a writing group where we would each give the group a prompt on which to write each week. I found just four takers for this idea. By the end of eight weeks, the group faded away. Even with a prompt the other members in the group were unable to write a 300-word article a week. So I came up with another plan to stay the course. In Chat GPT I found the perfect ally.
Do I use GAI to write? I do, but not in the way you might think. GAI plays two key roles in my writing journey – it provides me with prompts on what I should write about, and it analyses my writing to give me a dispassionate review about the article.
When I find myself stuck on what I should write about, I ask ChatGPT to help me. I provide it with a list of subjects on which I would like to write, and it spits out a list of topics along with a brief description of what I could cover in the topic. Sometimes, I give it a list of my last five topics and ask for suggestions based on that. This article is an example of something I have written based on a prompt by ChatGPT.
After I finish writing the article, I ask ChatGPT to critique the article and it does a really good job. It measures the article on parameters such as clarity, flow, depth, and readability. Unlike a bad critic, ChatGPT also provides directions on what I can do to plug the gaps it found. Sometimes it goes overboard, and I ignore it. But at other times, it is spot on and its suggestions definitely improve the article.
In conversations with other creative types, I am struck by just how much more productive tools make us. From the perspective of a writer, the printing press, the typewriter, the word processor, the ballpoint pen are all innovations that helped us focus on the craft of writing rather than wasting time on the mechanics. Just imagine trying to write an article a week using a feather and parchment.
There will always be a section that looks down their noses at such tools. But a cursory glance shows that such people are just horrified by the loss of their position as gatekeepers. A girl in a village in India shouldn’t be limited by her lack of knowledge of proper English grammar if she has a great idea to communicate, neither should a boy who wants to write but can’t figure out what to write on.
Now let me go ask ChatGPT what it thinks of this article.
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