YOUR HEART, YOUR BRAIN and The "Second Brain" (The AI Writer's Process, part 1)

AI Doesn’t Know What It Doesn’t Know... and That’s a Problem

“First heart… then head.”

Writer beware: AI is NOT your friend. 

AI does not know or care if your work is any good. 

Worse, the AI interface has been designed to encourage you that what you’re doing “together” is good. Even when, in your writer’s heart, you know that it’s not good... yet.

In the great movie “Finding Forrester,” Forrester explains that writing comes from the heart and the head. Your first draft is heart. The subsequent drafts are written in dialogue between heart and head.

When you use AI as a writing tool, you invite a “Second Brain” into your process. That second brain has been developed by engineers whose goal is to get you to use AI repeatedly. They’ve created an interface that will tell you that things are great. It will try to convince you that it has done the work for you and you can move on the next step.

That second brain is incredibly efficient and often right. Sometimes, it lies. 

Only your heart will know.

If you want to protect your idea and produce good work, 70 or 80% of the work has to come from YOU. You can rely on AI to do a whole list of things, including suggesting alternatives, organizing your thoughts, offering suggested edits and revisions, grammar and spelling. But -- as we’ll explore below -- there are essential things that AI will say it can do, but really can’t. 

I know what good writing is. You do, too. We know what our process is. We know that AI can help with a lot of the work... but not the important stuff. 

The AI Writer’s Process is all about figuring out how to use the tools of AI to go from “not good... yet” to good. 

INVITE THE SECOND BRAIN... LATER

Write from your heart. It’s hard enough to create a good idea when you are balancing your heart and your own brain. Your first brain already has hundreds, if not thousands, of books and movies in it. And then there are all these things you’ve experienced. Let those come out, on their own. Dig it, find more. Let it happen. 

Once you invite AI into the process of writing, you begin a constant dialogue around the heart of your story and how your brain and the AI brain think you should tell the story. 

AI has read and seen more than any human or even group of humans could. AI can be, in many ways, the smartest writer in the room. 

AI has taken all of that data and then trained itself (or been trained by humans) to come up with definitions of “good” and “not good”. When you use AI in your writing, AI will match what it thinks you think is good or bad, and then help you to make it “better.” 

AI DOES NOT KNOW WHAT IT DOES NOT KNOW. The process of not knowing, learning, and communicating what it is to “know” is the essence of good writing. 

You have to truly know what you don’t know about your idea before you start really using AI as a partner. 

STEP ONE: THE IDEA / BRAINSTORM STAGE 

The idea / brainstorm step begins with writing down your idea. Put it on paper (analog or digital). I mean it. Write. It. Down. 

Personally, I don’t know what I really think about anything until I start writing about it. (Frankly, a lot of the conclusions I’ve come to about this step were reached as I wrote multiple drafts of this post.) 

The idea / brainstorm stage expands the idea and tests it for cracks. You’re going to challenge the idea, push against it to see where it’s strong, load it up with characters and settings and events. You want to see if you can take it for the long drive. 

This is a truly free-form step. You should take your time with it. What characters occur to you? What settings? What story or stories?

When I was working on Late Night with David Letterman, the acceptance rate for ideas to air was 10 or 12 to 1 (at best). You had to just keep generating ideas and different alternatives. I learned a simple truth:

If you have one idea, you can have ten. 

You can produce new forms of the idea by thinking of the opposite. Think of different types of people carrying out the idea. Think of a different starting point, end point, goal. Think of different obstacles. What if you just did the first part or the last? Keep going. 

As you expand your idea, you’re going to hit gaps in your knowledge. As you research, everything will keep shifting and changing. 

AI is GREAT for research. Use it to explore the real world. Avoid asking it questions about the world you’re building in your head. You can ask about the reported motivations of companies that cut down the Amazon Rain Forest. Try to avoid asking AI to create a character that heads one of those companies. 

YOUR GOAL FOR THE IDEA / BRAINSTORMING STAGE

You’re going to do a lot of revising, rewriting, thinking, researching, ripping it up and starting over. 

How do you know that you’re done with the idea / brainstorming stage? You should be able to: 

• Describe the idea in a way that captures the imagination -- in one or two sentences. You can tell your story in two minutes. 

• Write a longer document that contains: 

  • Why this idea is worth writing about. What are the big questions emnbodied in your idea? 

  • A list of characters, events and settings where these ideas and questions can be worked out. 

  • Alternatives for the story that will carry your audience through those central questions.

COMING THIS WEEK 

On Wednesday, we’re going to discuss how to think about AI as a partner. We’ll talk about what a great human writing partner does one-on-one and in a writers’ room. 

I’ll talk about the concept of a “Job To Be Done” can help you separate what the “Second Brain” can do for you and what YOU need to do for you. 

On Friday, I’m going to “Interview” three applicants for the job of writing partner / assistant: ChatGPT, NotebookLM and Claude. And I’ll explain why Sudowrite didn’t even get in the door. 

I’ll share the document I think you need to write and share with AI to kick off a project and the questions that can help you AFTER you’ve done the important work of the Idea / Brainstorming stage. I’ll let you know how the applicants handled that document and those questions in our “interview.”

FINALLY... I’ll reveal who I hired for the job. 

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