Writing is weird these days. Most creative projects at some point are thrown through ChatGPT, Grok, or whatever AI someone happens to use. Creating has slowly become a process of asking, receiving, choosing, asking again, and receiving again. You can make a song, write a story, develop a tagline or create an entire campaign without really having to create much of anything yourself.
As creatives, my wife and I have always loved writing. We love writing stories, music, taglines, bios, scripts and all the other random things that come with being creative. It’s not really about the pay check, although obviously getting paid is nice. We genuinely enjoy the process. We like staring at something that doesn’t work, talking about it for way too long, changing it, deleting it, putting it back, and eventually getting to something we’re proud of.
We have a little cabin in the woods on our property, and whenever you get out there, you either want to read or you want to write. Fortunately, there’s very little cell service. Not even enough for a simple prompt most of the time. So if you have an idea, you’re pretty much stuck with it. You have to sit there, think about it and figure out where it goes.
I’m not against AI. Heck, it spell-checks almost everything I write. I bounce ideas off it, use it for research, make contracts, ask it questions, and occasionally render out what my hair might look like fully grey. It’s an incredible tool, and pretending otherwise would be ridiculous.
But one of its major qualities is not storytelling.
It can write a story, obviously. I’ve done it. But trying to get it to help with much larger and more complicated stories, that’s where you start seeing the cracks. It struggles to understand theme and purpose beyond the obvious. It loses track of character development, emotional history, motivations, inconsistencies and the hundreds of tiny decisions that make a character feel like a person. It can build you a fictional land, but building a world that feels like it has existed for hundreds of years is something very different.
So while people are worried that writing is going to become less interesting because we’re about to be flooded with AI slop, I actually think we have an opportunity to take storytelling more seriously.
Your story isn’t something easily duplicated. Your creative thoughts are probably weird, complicated, in-depth and occasionally suspect. They’re influenced by your childhood, your relationships, the places you’ve lived, things you’ve screwed up, people you’ve loved, things you regret and thousands of memories you probably don’t even realize are influencing you.
That’s your fingerprint, and it ends up in the work you do.
Over the last three years, my wife Sheryl and I have started creating our own worlds, writing down our own stories and generally having fun being silly. Somewhere along the way, those creative ideas started turning into actual bodies of work.
The first was Stan of Green Stables, an idea my wife Sheryl had years ago while we were all kidding around on the farm. We had an orange pig with black spots, and she made a joke about Anne of Green Gables. Except he was a little guy, not a gal, so Stan was born.
The idea eventually became a children’s book about a little orange spotted pig searching for where he belongs. Stan thinks finding the right home means fitting in, but after being met with rejection time and time again, he discovers that belonging has a lot less to do with trying to be something else, and a lot more to do with being exactly who you are.
Sheryl wrote it, and it was illustrated by myself and our good friend and extremely talented illustrator, Ben Reynolds. Over the course of about a year, something that started as a joke on our farm became a real book.
Although the process was fun, I couldn’t help but turn it into a serious project. I’ve spent more than 20 years in the creative business, and I’ve learned that “fun projects” usually take too long, cost too much and never pay themselves back. So my goal wasn’t only to push the project forward and keep it on a deadline. I wanted it to pay for itself.
We gave it rules, budgets and timelines just like any other Considerate Agency project. We figured out what it would cost to print, what we needed to sell, how we were going to market it and what success actually looked like. Within three months of printing, the entire production had paid for itself.
That was pretty exciting. Not simply because we’d made the money back, but because this silly conversation about an orange pig had gone from an idea in our heads to something people were actually buying, reading to their kids and keeping on their bookshelves.
After that, I wrote a little short story for Sheryl and me. It was basically a love story built from pieces of our own story, except I put it into the romantasy style she loves. There were gothic beasts, kingdoms, magic powers, world building and, of course, a few risqué scenes.
The story was only ever meant for us. But as Sheryl read through it, her creative brain started doing what creative brains do. She could see what the book could be. Characters could be deeper. Things could happen differently. The world could be bigger. She started talking about how she would write certain parts and where she thought the story could go.
I love writing, but I wasn’t going to write a novel, so eventually I told her, “Why don’t you write it? You know these worlds, you know this style of book, and you have great ideas.”
She hummed and hawed, as they say, and the conversation moved on.
The idea didn’t.
Over time it started weighing on her. Ideas were popping into her head. Timelines started forming, characters started developing, kingdoms needed histories, and one idea created another. Eventually she sat down and started writing her own novel, Lands of Fire and Ice.
The story takes place in a world shattered by the misuse of an ancient magic called Orra, leaving two kingdoms divided by the Veil, one claimed by fire and the other by ice. At the centre of it all is a forbidden connection between two people from opposite sides, surrounded by kingdoms, histories, loyalties, betrayals and a magic far older than either of them fully understands.
The book has been selling incredibly well, and more importantly, people genuinely love it. I can’t say I doubted that part. When I read it, I knew people would connect with it. The story is rich, the world building is deep, there are tons of characters with their own motivations and histories, and underneath all of it is a love story and a larger story arc that keeps pulling you forward.
But I can also see Sheryl in it.
Not because any particular character is her, but because her personality, emotions, humour, fears, experiences and view of relationships are woven through the entire thing. She built the world, so naturally pieces of her exist everywhere inside it.
Now, you could argue that these are fantasy stories. Both books are made up, and some people think creating from nothing might actually be easier because you can simply invent whatever you want.
I’m not convinced.
I’ve also written a book based on my own experiences, my creative life and work, and all the ups and downs that have come with it. In some ways, writing that has been easier because I lived it. I tell these stories all the time. It’s mostly a matter of remembering what happened and putting it down properly. And talking is one of my favourite things to do, so I’ve had plenty of practice. I wish I were kidding.
I wouldn’t say one style of book is easier than the other, but it’s pretty hard to prompt or generate your own true story.
When it comes to new technology and the ability to simply ask something to make a book, song, script or story for us, I think the result is missing three incredibly important ingredients:
Your story. Your emotion. Your pain.
Your take on a short story, your mind forming worlds, your actual embarrassing moments…that’s what computers can’t replicate. Sheryl has her true story in her novel, and I have it in my business book. Only she can keep her story moving forward the way she sees it, and only I can tell mine from the perspective of actually having lived it.
Pain might be one of the most important parts of that. Real deep emotions.
Pain is a general word, because I’m not only talking about hurt.
Embarrassment, resentment, bitterness, jealousy, regret and insecurity all sit somewhere close to it. So does heartbreak. So does failure. So does remembering something stupid you said 15 years ago while you’re trying to fall asleep for some reason.
Those emotions become part of the glass we see the world through.
That glass can never be the same glass AI peers through.
AI can understand the definition of embarrassment. It can write a scene about resentment. It can describe what heartbreak supposedly feels like because millions of people have written about heartbreak before.
But it has never been embarrassed.
It has never resented someone.
It has never been heartbroken.
It doesn’t have a memory that still pisses it off. It doesn’t have a smell that reminds it of being eight years old. It doesn’t hear a song and suddenly remember someone it hasn’t thought about in 20 years.
Those things matter in storytelling. Whether it’s a song, a book, a script or even a really great piece of advertising, they give creative work depth.
The other thing Sheryl and I both noticed after producing these books is that there’s a real sense of pride that comes from accomplishing something like this.
Lands of Fire and Ice is more than 500 pages and over 120,000 words. It’s no joke. It took an enormous amount of time, thought, editing, frustration and work. There were timelines to keep straight, characters to remember, histories to build and entire sections that had to be rewritten because something that happened 300 pages later changed what needed to happen earlier.
And when you’re finally holding that finished book, there’s pride attached to it because you know what went into making it.
Having something create something for you isn’t the same accomplishment. The process is the fun of it all.
So overall, what’s my goal with this post?
Keep creating, the new way, and the old way. Use AI to enhance your vision, not create it.
And don’t stop creating because you’re discouraged by the amount of stuff being produced around you.
There’s nothing stopping your story from being a cut above the rest, because the thing that makes it different isn’t necessarily your ability to write the perfect sentence. It’s everything that happened before you sat down to write it.
So write it. Produce it. Record it. Print it. Upload it.
If you’d like to read the stories that came out of all this creating, you can find them at Stan of Green Stables and Lands of Fire and Ice.
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