A Bit of Rant about...
Writing is such a fickle thing, a few short thoughts.
Writing
Writing is such a fickle thing, especially if you have the hope of making a living off of it. If you have been writing for a while, dreaming of self-employment from the dancing rhythm of your fingertips, then you have most likely seen one of the many ads out there.
You know the ads, “ I made $$$ after I cracked the code and now I am willing to share my secret with you!”
Back in 2014, an editor I know advised me to start a blog and just see where it takes me. Not really sure what I was going to write, I forced myself to write seven posts, and that’s all I did that year. In the next three years after that, I generally ignored the blog, posting just a handful of things. You would think it should have just died, but one day I checked it and discovered that the number of followers had grown… a lot. So I decided to start “feeding the stove.”
Well, guess what, I made millions. No, seriously, the rate of followers subscribing dropped off to zero. This left me a little confused and perplexed. Then one day, I posted a blog on my old WordPress website. It was kind of therapeutic, my way of venting about the good and the bad struggles my wife and I went through working for Morningstar Ministries.
Well… the darn thing exploded. The typically dismal numbers started to gain several zeros as people re-shared the post. It went viral, and I started getting serious numbers overseas. So much happened with that post that I soon heard through the grapevine that my former employer was not happy about it.
In fact, some people were ordered to stop talking to me, and I was no longer allowed to visit, not that I was going to be, because I had moved so far away. What was troubling was that some of these people I considered friends. I guess following the orders of “Prophet of God” was justification enough for them to end things.
Numbers for that post, to my surprise, continued to remain strong for the better part of eight months. Seeing that it did well, I decided to write similar posts to keep the momentum going. And they did…poorly.
Other posts
Writing is so fickle; in many cases, I have “broken” the rules and done well, and other times I followed the rules and wondered why I even put in the effort.
So if you're going to be a writer. I would suggest tough skin and patience, along with a healthy dose of being flexible.
Skills
To me, it seems like everything has turned into a crash course on something. My skills as a writer have improved, and that has caused an improvement in some areas. But along the way has been the frustration of having to learn things like “keywords” for the title to get noticed. Or when is the correct time to post or not to post? It’s like learning a game only to discover that the goal posts have moved…AGAIN.
And from the post I did concerning the rise and advance of AI and Synthetic Intelligence.
Devastate
Sometimes, life just gets busy. You wake up in the morning with no real plans, just a few general concepts of what you're going to do for the day. But all that changes in a moment of time. Suddenly, you remember the car is almost out of gas, so you run to the station, fill it, and return.
I strongly feel like we are all going to need to relearn… everything to keep writing. Below is a post from Nick Johnstone. He turned his frustration with AI into a semi-funny post. But the reality is he may not be that far off; if anything, he might be understating the truth altogether.
Can quality come back?
A while back, I listened to a Gal on YouTube who is an architect. She was talking about what got her into the trade was the Lord of the Rings movies. She was fascinated with the architecture of the many buildings. So as an adult, she decided to read the books for the first time. To her surprise, Tolkien never described the buildings; he only described the emotions felt. And it was from that the drawings were made.
I bring this up because there is currently a pushback starting up. Some recent rulings in the legal courts have challenged AI content. Making it illegal to copywriter AI-written content. The thought on this is simple: the copywriter system was made for humans to protect their content.
There is also the fact that to many people, AI-created stories feel “off,” and people are getting really good at detecting them. There are even people trying to use it to build content here on Substack. Case in point, this stack ( The Artificially Informed ) uses AI for the creation of most of its posts.
So for us writers, I guess our best option is just to get better and stay ahead of AI.