How To Maintain Your Writing Voice When Writing With AI

This is a very common question. How do I ensure the final output of using AI retains my unique information advantage and personal voice? Like, okay, I'm using AI. How do I make sure that it is preserving my voice? I am going to cut straight to the heart of the issue, which is 99% of the time when someone says this, they cannot articulate what makes their voice their voice. So they want an outcome that they have actually no idea how to generate. So let's use a simple example. Let's take this little sentence. And if I go— let's pretend that this is what AI gave you. Okay. And you go, how do I make sure that my voice is retained? That is the wrong question to ask. The right question to ask is to look at the thing that AI gave you and to go line by line, comma by comma, word by word, and try to pinpoint what exactly you mean by that. So let's go through that. Okay? Let's say AI gives us this and we go, I want AI. Yeah, okay, that's great. But I want AI to preserve my voice. Alright, and. Do I use the word and? Yeah, okay, well, I would say that that's my voice, right? The. Do I use the word the? Yeah, I would say that that's my voice. And the reason. Does that sound like me? Yeah, I mean, I would say that's my voice. Billy didn't wanna go to school. Is that my voice? Yeah, maybe. Maybe you go, "I don't like to use contractions." Okay.

Did not.

Congratulations, you just made it your voice. The point is when you actually go sentence by sentence, what you will find is that most people don't— they can't articulate the qualities that make their voice their voice. And so what they've done is they've created this objection. And it's almost like they've written off the output before they've even gone through the reflective exercise of, but what's actually wrong here, right? Like here, if we look closely, this is actually all one sentence. This is a long sentence. There's 3 commas in here. So maybe you say, Cole, my voice isn't long sentences. Okay, well, that's a very easy problem to solve. We go here, we make that a period, and we capitalize "but." Now instead of one long sentence, you have a shorter sentence and a medium sentence. You have two sentences. Okay, great. Is that more your voice? And the more you drill into the details, the more that you realize that voice is one of those words that everybody uses and no one knows what it means. Now, let's use a more extreme example. Let's say you go, "You know what, Cole? I hear you, but I consider myself the next David Foster Wallace. I am a seasoned vet when it comes to using advanced vocabulary." Okay, does that mean that all of this is wrong? No, it just means maybe we're gonna take this word and we're gonna take this word and we're gonna take this word and we're gonna use the advanced versions of those three words. You swap reason for something more verbose. You swap hated for despised. Is that your voice? You see how like it almost becomes comical as you dig into the details. You're like, all right, yeah, I pinpointed. I want to use a slightly more advanced word there. Did that have a huge impact? Eh, not really. This goes back to what I write about in The Art and Business of Ghostwriting, which is everyone likes to believe that their voice is different. And the honest reality is that 99% of the time it's not. Everyone uses the same voice. You're just writing with— you're just writing clearly. Now, voice in literature starts really happening when you start playing with more advanced techniques. These are not things that you see in everyday nonfiction. These are not things that that you see in the vast majority of pieces. These are things that, like, you're really only using these mechanisms if you're playing a certain type of game, which is literature. I'll show everyone, like, my favorite one. Here's a very specific technique.

And he didn't know whether he was going to pass the test or not, and he didn't care, quite frankly, because what he wanted more than anything, more than acceptance from his peers, more than accomplishment and recognition, more than winning the school trophy, more than immortalizing himself in the yearbook, what he really wanted was understanding.

What's the mechanism used here? Well, there's two. One is this is one long sentence. We're elongating the sentence to increase the tempo, to increase the tension. And then two is we have a repetition mechanism happening. We have more than, more than, more than. More than. This is like a little, like, internal, like, poetry mechanism. Is that your voice? Like, it actually doesn't have anything to do with voice, really. It's just this is a mechanism. And are you choosing to use it in this particular paragraph? Yes or no? And if it's not your voice, then maybe you go, I'm not going to use this repetition mechanism. Or if it's not your voice, you go, I don't want this to be one long sentence. I want this to be lots of short sentences. But voice, this is what took me so long to understand, is that voice is not quote unquote like yours. You don't find your voice. It's not this like big intangible thing. Voice is just a combination of mechanisms. It's a combination of variables. This is a voice, but it's a voice because we are using a specific mechanism. And so voice isn't something that you find. Voice is something that you create. And you create voice by using or combining different mechanisms. And you do that consciously. You are choosing those different mechanisms, no different than you're choosing different adjectives or verbs. And so going back to this, where whenever someone's like, how do I make sure it preserves my voice? It's like, well, first of all, define voice for me. Can you give me a tangible list of 50 things that explain and articulate what makes your voice your voice? And most people can't. And so if you can't, then you don't even know what you're trying to preserve in the first place, which is what makes it such a pointless endeavor. There is no objective goal here. You're just saying you don't like it, but you have to get down to the sentence level and go word by word and sentence by sentence and be like, what is it about this that I don't like or that I feel like isn't me? Is it using contractions? Is it that I'm using too simple or too complicated of language? Is it the length of the sentences? Do I prefer shorter sentences? Do I prefer longer sentences? And yeah, Carolyn, this is exactly what I would educate clients on all the time. When a client would say, "This isn't in my voice," the very first thing I would ask them is, "Great. So could you tell me what about this sentence is not in your voice?" Guess what they all say? They all say— they all start off really confident and then you start reading the thing together and then all of a sudden they're like, "Uh, um." 'Actually, it's fine,' because they don't know what makes their voice their voice. They are not conscious of these things. And this is fundamentally why, like, what is the separation between, like, everyday person, like, very average writer, and, like, Pulitzer Prize-winning literary writer? The difference essentially comes down to consciousness of mechanisms. One writer is like, I, I'm just writing. I'm like writing words on a page, right? The most proficient writers, what they're doing is they're cycling between hundreds of different mechanisms in their head. They're like, okay, in this next paragraph, I want to increase tension. How do I increase tension? Mechanism: long sentence, lots of commas, repetition. I am creating a voice for that specific moment in that specific paragraph. And then the next paragraph, they want a different feeling, so they use a different mechanism, right? But like the vast majority of writing, you don't have to worry about that. Like that, that this type of stuff doesn't really exist in like your average nonfiction book. This type of stuff doesn't really exist in like the vast majority of content. These types of mechanisms, like very rarely you see when you're ghostwriting pieces for clients. And so that's why it's like, I love studying this stuff 'cause I really enjoy the craft of it, but at the same time, don't overcomplicate it. Almost everyone uses the same voice. The voice is called writing with confidence and clarity. And if someone says, "That's not my voice," all you have to do is ask them and say, Could you please point to what part of it is not your voice? And they're either gonna realize they don't know, or they're gonna pinpoint something very simple and very basic that's very easy to fix. I don't wanna use contractions. Okay, great, we'll just say did not instead of didn't. That's a very easy problem to solve.

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