How to Incorporate AI into The Publishing Process

Leveraging AI in your writing workflow

Taptive runs online educational programs to help members of online communities come together and publish their writing during a 3 or 4-week writing program.

During these cohorts, we introduce “The Publishing Process” (here’s a Notion template) to support cohort participants on their writing journey.

The Publishing Process can be summarized by the following 4 steps:

💡1. Topic. Choose your high-level topic for the week

🚄 2. Bullet Draft. Write a Bullet Draft to get your ideas on "paper"

📝 3. Substance Draft. Remove the bullets and add substance to the post (This is where AI comes in)

🎯 4. Clarity Draft. Make your final edits to the post

In this post, I’ll share when (and when not) to incorporate AI into this workflow.

Topic

The first step of The Publishing Process is to choose your high-level topic.

We typically share some basic prompts during our cohorts to spark participants’ imaginations. While AI can help you generate ideas, it's important to take action and create content that is unique to your life experience.

Grant Nissly @grant_nissly

Writing is never the first step in the writing process. It comes after taking action in the real world. Writing is just a tool to make sense of these actions

Why? We are entering a world where an AI can write an essay on any topic in minutes. So, the best way to not produce commoditized writing is to be authentically you. Through action, you can create information that is unique to your own life experience.

For example, a summary of how to start a company can be easily replicated by AI. However, sharing your direct experience of building a company with vivid examples of different experiments you’re running and interactions you’re having is far more difficult to replicate.

Grant & Stable Diffusion 1.5

Bullet Draft

Once you’ve determined a topic that you can have a unique perspective on based on your experience, it’s time to move to the Bullet Draft. Cohort participants consistently cite the Bullet Draft as the most helpful stage of The Publishing Process.

Here’s a quick summary of the Bullet Draft:

Goal:

• The goal of the Bullet Draft is to get your IDEAs on paper

• The Bullet Draft helps us to break writing into smaller, more manageable milestones

Steps:

• Take 10–15 minutes to write a series of bullets about your topic (aim for 10–20 bullets)

• Brainstorm as much as you possibly can about the topic

• Draft your bullets as quickly as possible

• Do not edit, delete, or pause while writing

• Do not worry about grammar, style, or structure

• Writing the Bullet Draft should be a creative, exhausting sprint

The Bullet Draft doesn't require AI, and it's where you craft the bulk of what you want to say in the post.

Substance Draft: Enter the AI 🤖

At this point, you can input your bullets into your favorite AI writing tool. Prompt the tool with something like, "Turn these bullets into a 500-word blog post." AI is excellent at transforming the ideas you've created based on your real-life experience into a well-written essay.

And by using the bullets created during the Bullet Draft, you will create something with your unique perspective.

Clarity Draft: Edit and Add Context

Once the AI creates the essay, you can go back into the post to add additional personal examples, backlinks to projects, other writing, and screenshots of what you're building.

Finally, you can make edits, and input the completed post into an AI writing tool to ask for feedback.

In summary, AI can enhance The Publishing Process by transforming your Bullet Draft into a near-complete post.

While this is useful, it’s far from perfect. Don’t be afraid to discard most or all of the AI-generated content if it doesn’t align with what you want to share with others.

Happy Publishing!

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Read more on AI and Writing:

3 Ways AI Can Transform Your Writing

Did GPT-3 Write This?

The First Step of the Writing Process