Should writing a book be a huge effort?

Book authors are like marathon runners.

There are the purists, the one that know exactly how to train, how you should run, how not to hurt yourself.

There are the athletes. Running the marathon is their fucking job. There are here to finish it, get a medal and a prize.

These are the loudest people running a marathon. But they are not really the majority of marathon runners. The majority is made of people who want to either do it once in their life, or like it as a hobby.

The key point is not that it takes long.

In this metaphor what I like is not so much the idea that writing a book takes long. But rather that there are so many different ways of doing, so many different reasons of doing it.

The key point is not the effort

I was in the crowd of volunteers for a Marathon, as I chatted with a bystander we were seeing the people that were finishing very, but very slowly. He told me:

"What's the point of running a marathon if you finish it nearly walking? There is no effort here!"

I feel that sometimes people have similar opinions about writing a book. If the process didn't hurt, then it's not a real book writing process.

But I personally believe that writing a book, with or without effort, with a specific technic or not, still makes sense.

This summer, I had a bit of a hard mental time. Writing like I was doing in the past was too much for me. But going out and taking audio notes that were then transcribed and cleaned with a tool like Audiopen was something I could manage.

Purists might say: you didn't write your book, it's an AI that is writing your book. Sure you can say that.

But did I take the time to reflect, share my thoughts? Yep. The first draft was mine. AI cleaned it to create a second draft. I created a third draft. And a proofreader will work on the fourth and fifth draft with me.

Why is this in my mind at the moment?

At the moment I'm doing an experiment where I created a Notion template that helps people who have interesting life experiences to write their first book. People who don't usually write. But people who have something to teach or share.

And in that template, I use Notion AI meeting notes to help people go from rough bullet points to a first draft by doing an interview about the book section that they are writing. Because for many speaking about their passion is easy. But writing it is not what they are so good at.

As I'm building this template, I'm also testing out with a new book idea I'm working on. And as I was working on the book I asked myself: "Is this too easy?"

That's when this image of the marathon came to me.

It's too easy if the goal is the effort. But if the goal is just finishing the marathon, even if it's walking, then it's perfectly fine.

Some people write books for the effort.

Some people write books because they want to share a few of their ideas.

Some people write books to order their thoughts.

Some people write books because it's a hobby.

Like a marathon, there are many reasons and ways of writing a book. And that's okay.

So is writing a book with AI bad? It depends what's your idea of what a book is. For me, if you use a tool to help you get your thoughts on paper and you feel that these were your thoughts, then it's fine by me.

What about the ethics?

Some people will say: AI is ripping off the work of others. When you use it in the way I described it, it's not. It's transcribing what you say, and removing the hummm, the repetitions and adding some punctuation and making some sentences sound more like a proper English. It's not stealing sentences from another book. It's not using the writing style of someone else.

Sure you can ask AI to write you a book like a famous author. But that's you asking a tool to do something stupid.

Some people will say: AI is trained on content without people being okay with it? That's a good point. And I admit that this is an ambivalence that I have that I haven't solved yet. I'm exploring ethically trained AI tools, but for now they are still behind, but I'm hopeful they'll be there in the future.

Some people will say: But it uses a shitload of electricity. Yes. But let's be honest too, writing a first draft by hand takes a shit load of electricity too if you are not someone used to writing books, it will take hours and days. Using electricity for sharing our thoughts feels to me like a good use of electricity. Using that electricity to generate fun images in ChatGPT that's for sure wasteful.

Yes I'm ambivalent

I'm not fully on one side of the debate about AI being bad or good for writing books. There are things I really appreciate about it. And there are things I still have issues with. Yes I'm ambivalent and haven't solved it yet. But I think it's much more of a gray scale than a black or white choice.