Four tips for writing about spirituality and competing against any AI.
Well, well, well.
I don’t give writing advice (usually).
But lately, writers in my niche (spirituality) have very low morale.
Good people are considering quitting in the face of the rise of AI.
And I want to put my two cents.
Here are the four tips I would have liked to receive when I started writing about spirituality years ago.
These lessons will allow you (or so I hope) to survive the AI boom.
Let’s start.
1. Writing in the first person is not about the first person.
It is to look at the world through a lens shaped by a particular socioeconomic and cultural stratum.
It is to phagocytize the world from experience (AI cannot do that), chew it up, and, after digesting it, vomit an always subjective opinion of objective reality.
Remember, fans and haters want to send their love or hate TO A REAL HUMAN, not a soulless and heartless AI.
Note: subjectivity, your point of view, is what differentiates you from artificial intelligence.
Writing in the first person is a challenging task (if you decide to do it well).
Your first person is an invented narrator, a character that is not you. It’s someone the reader (which is the crucial thing) identifies with or viscerally rejects.
Your first person is a statement of intent. But it’s not you.
Even when you talk about yourself, you must keep your distance and treat yourself as if you see yourself from the outside.
Your success or failure in chronicles and spiritual opinion pieces has much to do with constructing that artificial and contrived ego that narrates reality.
And for that, you have to submit your real ego to the service of that narrator.
You have to stop being you to be someone else, like a method actor who not only plays a character but embodies it, as Jim Carrey does, when he prepares his characters.
That requires you to empty yourself of your ego and fill yourself with the light with which you intend to approach a particular subject.
Lesson: Your vanity makes your text boring and worthless when you talk more about yourself than how your “narrator self” perceives the world or the problems you face in your texts. Humans seek humans, so give humanity to your texts. Imperfection sells, so don’t be afraid to be imperfect, dear human.
2. It is more important who you are not than who you are.
After seven years of writing professionally, I have realized that what you don’t do is much more important than what you do.
In particular,
- The topics you don’t touch.
- The audience you don’t write for.
My readers don’t read me (even if they think they do) because I discuss spirituality; they read me because I don’t discuss politics.
And they know that no matter how diverse my texts are, I will never make their breakfast bitter by polarizing them with my political thinking.
An AI can’t do that. It can pretend to care about you, but it doesn’t care about you.
I DO care about my readers; that’s why I respect them. (That’s why I’m writing this article, for you, my dear reader).
My publications are a safe environment where people feel comfortable commenting on the texts and interacting with other readers.
I don’t write for people who don’t read.
This seems obvious, but it is not.
I have hundreds of thousands of followers on social networks where people go to watch short videos, not to read.
I’ve also wasted a lot of time creating visual content to reach a younger audience (with excellent results).
But what’s the point of having videos with millions of views if none of the people who watch them are interested in reading you?
Note: Yesterday, I got a message from a lost town in the middle of Venezuela. A lady was pleased because her son could send her my books despite the country’s impediments. She had been trying to get them for years. That is your reader. You write for that person.
An AI does not do that. Only a human can connect that way with another human.
Lesson: don’t look for followers; look for readers. While readers are everywhere, there are places where the reader percentage is much higher. Dedicate yourself to writing in those places.
3. Enthusiasm is your secret weapon against AI.
Enthusiasm is contagious (and can’t be spread by an AI).
And it is not only contagious between people; it is also infectious to things. It gives them life. (That is what happens with books 🙂
That energy is transmitted to the reader. That is the magic of art.
It doesn’t matter when a reader accesses your text; it can take hundreds of years. The medium in which your message is delivered, whether a blog or a book, acts as a freezer that keeps your words fresh.
By reading those words, the reader thaws your advice and feeds on it.
We eat with our mouth and stomach, but also with our eyes and brain.
Words are food for the soul, and everyone wants them to be authentic.
You can create an avatar of Marcus Aurelius and have it respond to you as Marcus Aurelius, but it is not Marcus Aurelius.
No AI can replace the Book of Meditations (Marcus Aurelius’ human handwriting is the source; the AI without the human data source is useless).
When you read an AI-generated text, it feels artificial, and that’s because it has no soul; the soul comes from only one source: the person, the human being.
Lesson: Enthusiasm is essential to spiritual writing. Texts have vibration (rhythm), and the reader can feel it in his head and feed on that energy.
4. The issue of money
I understand that an AI doesn’t have to pay bills or eat.
But don’t be discouraged, because the human connection is a rising value.
As my grandfather used to say, “Kindness is the new oil, son.”
It can allow you to make a living from writing.
How?
I’ll answer with an example.
How much is a month of Yoga classes worth?
Suppose you spend $100 monthly in a random Yoga center close to home.
You could also take Yoga classes designed by artificial intelligence and practice at home for much less. But you wouldn’t have the extra human interaction and honest company.
Spiritual writers can do the same as Yoga instructors, even online.
For example, $100, three one-hour weekly classes in small groups of 25 people to build community, Zoom chats, and email support.
That can’t be done by an AI, either. People are looking to be part of a community with real people. Not with artificial intelligence.
A virtual or face-to-face literary workshop is very traditional in my country and the Spanish-speaking world.
This concept is ideally suited to people who do not seek to excel in literature but write as a hobby to express their feelings and organize their ideas, do something different, or pass the time.
In short, to connect with other human beings who share their passion for writing and reading.
Like people who go to Yoga and pay $100 for three weekly classes with an anonymous teacher with a studio near their home. (My mother paid $85 for two classes a week of Pilates when she didn’t have her illness so advanced).
Lesson: when you focus on doing your work (writing) well, plenty of people want more access to you (not to an AI). And will pay for spiritual writing classes to relax and feel part of a community.
I don’t write about writing tips, but I hope these four little lessons can help someone to keep fighting for this beautiful dream of writing.
A virtual hug
AG
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