My Writing Secret: Don’t Write

I’m sure you looked at that headline thinking, “What is he talking about? How can not writing be your writing secret?”

Would you believe me if I told you I am not writing this right now?

I am talking into my phone with Google documents, sitting on the porch overlooking an orange grove in a little village in Hunan, China.

I haven’t written an article since I discovered this trick. I can’t type as fast as I can speak.

Voice to text is a fantastic way to write your articles. Simply open a Google document, hit the little microphone button at the bottom of the screen, and start talking.

I am going to tell you my entire workflow to take a rough transcribed voice-to-text document and turn it into a Medium story. A lot goes into post-production, but the core, the meat and potatoes, happens right here while I am speaking to you.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how you can write faster without writing at all:

Step one: Record

Open Google documents or a Word file. Enable the voice to text.

Speak your truth

Tell your story and explain the things you want the world to know. Do it authentically in your own voice. The most important element of writing is sharing your style with the world.

Marketing copy has been reduced to the same generic, bland writing that is now easily accessible by simply asking ChatGPT to do it for you.

What the world needs is your story in your voice.

Step two: Edit and Proofread.

What you will get after doing this is a large, unbroken, and unparagraphed block of words.

If you know anything about Medium, no one reads more than one or two sentences at a time.

You need to create space, add pictures, italicize some words, underline some things, capitalize some stuff, and make things bold.

We Medium readers and writers have very short attention spans, and need things broken up into little chunks so that we do not lose interest. This is the part that you have to put the most amount of time into.

The reason I like Google Docs is I can create the document on my phone and quickly access it from my computer via the cloud.

This is where I incorporate AI. I use ChatGPT to proofread and punctuate my document. I believe that ChatGPT is a powerful tool, but one of the things it cannot do is write.

You cannot give it a prompt like, “Please write me an article,” and get anything that’s not generic, boilerplate, run-of-the-mill word jumbles anyone can recognize from a mile away.

However, it can take this raw document and fix all of the broken punctuation, grammar, and misspellings.

I’m from the American South, so Google and I don’t necessarily speak the same English. We speak different languages, and you can see that in my transcriptions. So can ChatGPT.

It is capable of looking at the context of the sentence and the paragraph to correct minor errors that don’t make sense. My ongoing conversation with ChatGPT has this prompt as the foundation

Do not rewrite my words. Please fix all grammar and spelling from this voice-to-text transcription.

Step 4: Format

The next step is to put it into Medium and begin the formatting of the article. As we all know, and I’ve already mentioned, we Medium readers and writers like our information in a particular format.

This is where I use my computer. Once I have the grammatically correct document from ChatGPT, I transfer it to Medium and edit and modify the document so that it’s ready for you, the reader.

Step 5: Visuals

The next step is to go to Canva and create a custom image, preferably with a picture I’ve taken myself. But sometimes, I will use a template already prepared on Canva and modify it like the one above.

My Canva subscription is one of the best purchases I’ve made. I’ve used it for my website, for work, and now for Medium. It is the quickest and easiest way to modify any digital content.

Final Step: Publish

Once all the pieces are put together, I hit publish.

There’s my simple way of writing without writing. Give it a try. You may be surprised at how effective it is.

I want to leave you with a little bit of history. Anytime a new technology is introduced to the public, the people accustomed to the older methods will attempt to gatekeep the authenticity of the new technology.

If you are telling yourself that I am not truly writing because I did not physically type it into the computer know that someone in the 19th century thinks that your typed words are not written because you didn’t write them onto paper with a pen.