Writing, Creativity, Language and AI

The first stage of creative writing is when you see it simply as an outlet—a way to put your thoughts “on paper”. You then publish them on Substack or Medium. Or LinkedIn. This is the raw, unrefined form of writing—and as I’ve come to realize, the first stage of the creative journey.

While there is nothing wrong with it, you’ll put out a lot of low-quality stuff which might come at a price of deterring certain people and audiences, and you may never get them back. Putting your thoughts on paper or writing them down is a great way to analyze your train of thought and decision-making process; nevertheless, it’s not always a good idea to publish these unrefined pieces of stream-of-consciousness content right away.

Creative Impressionism in Writing

I used to advocate for this sort of “creative writing impressionism”—just publish whatever you feel like at the moment, as it is—and it certainly has its time and place. And its place is your draft folder with material that’s not suitable for publishing or for the world to see. Yet. (This is different if you have a writing group or an editor your work with regularly, based on a certain arrangement. In that case, by all means, send them your first draft). Usually, the need or desire to publish your first draft stems from not really wanting to do the work and avoiding the “hard part” which is being self-critical: editing your work for clarity and logical flow.

Or it may stem from the heat of the moment; you feel an emotion and want to quickly capture it. That’s completely fine. Write it down as it comes and flows through you.

That would be the first stage of the creative writing process summarized, as I see it and as I’ve experienced it. The creative impressionism. It’s where the “magic” happens; your thoughts and ideas seem to wander to a place you’ve never been before; you start to see new connections and logical pathways. You are excited. You need to capture these ideas and connections as accurately, authentically and as quickly as possible. In the moment.

Editing the Impressions

If you’ve managed to capture the flow of ideas, don’t publish or send them to anyone just yet. Take a break after putting these ideas down; make sure you have the time and space to detach yourself. Read a book. Watch a movie or a whole TV show. Run a marathon. Spend time with friends or family. Try a new hobby.

Then come back and commence the second stage. The editing. Evaluate. Organize your writing—your thoughts and ideas.

First, you jot down these ideas and trains of thought only to come back to them later and polish them. Let the first draft sit. Let it cool down a bit. Come back to it later and evaluate each sentence and each word, the flow and the overall feel. Ask yourself—Is this necessary to get my point across? Isn’t it confusing? Isn’t it distracting? Does it make sense as a whole?

Stop and think. While creating and writing often feels like being in a frenzy, editing should evoke the feeling of certain stillness.

It’s good to be in the moment; it’s also good to be able to be still and reflect upon whatever you’ve already written or created.?

Look at the words and sentences from a different perspective. This will help you find some new ideas and themes that branch out further. Find their place in the mosaic. And replace those that don’t fit the narrative anymore—maybe they never have. That’s what it’s about. Shaping the mosaic of your thoughts and ideas on the canvass, layer after layer. One editing session at a time.

Making sure you have a clear idea of what you want to write about is as important, if not more, as having a clear idea of what you don’t want to write about. Keep this in mind throughout the whole process—when creating, writing and editing.

Write down your goal as a single, simple sentence in the beginning, at the very top of your document. Highlight it and don’t delete it until you’re done.

If you wonder what my sentence is, and whether I have one—I do. It’s simple and gives me all the motivation, focus and info I need:

NICHE DOWN!

Yours might be different; but it certainly helps to have it right in front of you throughout the process.

Note: I’m writing about etymology in fantasy worlds and parallels between them. Just to give you more context to the “NICHE DOWN!” thing.

Write and Edit to Think

There is so much value in the art of editing your writing—maybe even as much as in being able to come up with that first draft. If we were to look at the art of writing as “thinking”, then we could see it as the mythical corporate “brainstorming” session. That’s what the first draft is all about. Many famous writers would advise you to “turn off” your inner editor when sitting down to a blank page (like Brandon Sanderson, for example)—and they would be right to do so.

But after writing and publishing tens of these “raw” pieces, you’ll realize that the real work starts with refining the thoughts you’ve put on paper as they came to you—or editing them. Editing for clarity; switching up the order of your sentences; changing a word here and there just so it feels right; finding new connections that lead to new ideas or conclusions; making space for those ideas in the flow and structure of your text; going beyond the surface-level structure and meaning…

This and a lot more comes into play when you sit down to look at and refine your draft for the second, third, fourth, hundredth… or nth time. Self-editing. And that’s what truly makes you a better writer and, effectively, a better “thinker”.

On Creativity

A funny thing about creativity is that it usually happens when you’re not working on the given thing you want or need to be creative with. Creativity is dependent on stimuli and prior knowledge—so the first spark of creativity occurs when you read, listen to music, watch a movie, look at a painting, etc. The “creativity as a cognitive process” happens when you take the information and stimuli in, not when you spew them out in one form or another.

That’s the foundation. The phase when you take it all in.

And then there’s the moment when you jump out of your bed and run to your notebook or laptop to jot down a connection, relationship or logical pathway you did not see before. This might happen in the middle of the night; but also while you’re watching a sports game, taking the prodigious shower or just lying around whole day. The important aspect of this stage is also that it is almost invariably a solitary act. Not a group session; not a discussion; not a conversation. The “productive” phase of creativity happens when you’re alone. Everything leading up to the productive phase is the opposite—taking in various stimuli from your surroundings, a process that inherently calls for the presence of other elements, texts, music, art or people.

The formation of the output, or the productive phase, is much closer to manual grunt work than cognitive or intellectual activity. That’s the process of writing and self-editing. It takes time and comes in layers. You layer ideas and stimuli on top of themselves, and that’s also how you arrive at different relationships, logical connections and conclusions. Your inspiration may often stem from the previous step—and that’s how the layers are created. One idea leads to another, until it doesn’t. The goal is to capture these moments in one way or another—in music, words, pictures, paintings… And when the train of thought stops, that’s it for the day. That means you’re now ready for the phase of taking in again, not producing.

Reading, watching, experiencing, listening, interacting. Balance.

The pitfall of this process may be that in the act of becoming inspired you become a little “too inspired”. The whole idea of creativity is to formulate or manufacture something new based on various inputs, experiences, logical pathways and connections—as we’ve already established. But some people actually fail to do the part where they need to make NEW logical pathways and NEW connections; they just take a blueprint and copy an existing concept. There’s nothing wrong with doing this as an exercise—or passing it off as “fan fiction”. There’s certainly nothing wrong with it on LinkedIn where you see the same post copied for engagement and impressions 14 times a day.

What I see as the peak of moral ambiguity and naivety, though, is J. K. Rowling and her largely derivative (and largely successful, not to take anything away from her—that’s the world we live in), unoriginal work in the form of Harry Potter. The only point where her creativity could be close to undisputed are the spells; when you realize that most of her worldbuilding doesn’t really work; many things don’t make sense (like how is Harry so good at quidditch—seems more like quidditch was designed for Harry to be good at something); and then, if you go deeper, the magical appeal of the world just falls apart with the realization that Dumbledore is Gandalf; Harry, Ron and Hermione are Frodo, Sam and Pippin; Voldemort is Sauron; Snape is reversed Saruman; Horcruxes are Rings of Power and so on and so forth. So, were there any new connections made on the level of the structure of the story? Sure. Is it largely derivative, unoriginal and, even for fantasy, na?ve and far-fetched? Definitely. Does this lack of creative invention make it any better or worse? Well, that’s for you to decide. For me, Harry Potter—from the creative point of view—is a laughable, low-quality and na?ve derivative.

BUT! And there’s a big but… Many people would consider Harry Potter to be a great creative fantasy feat. And this again depends on what is their frame of reference; how they perceive creativity; what is their prior experience… That’s also why “creative competitions” and “creative awards” are worthless and meaningless, especially in the ad industry. You simply can’t say whether something is objectively creative or not because you would be denying the very thing you are trying to judge—you would be saying that creativity is an objective, measurable phenomenon. Which the very example of Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings refutes. Or at least the public opinion refutes it.

Are we really fit to judge any creative piece of work if the general idea of creativity and the benchmark for creative quality is, in one way or another, Harry Potter? Or, going even further, can we judge creativity if we, after scrutiny, realize that there is no frame of reference for its quality or evaluation? Is it enjoyment? Conversion rate? Click-through rate? Emotional experience? We could say none; we could say all; we could say a lot more.

Only marketing gurus know.

It begs the question, why does no one—and I mean NO ONE—in marketing talk about Banksy and his creativity? The way they use the surroundings and objects… I guess we have yet to find out.

Failing to Understand Creativity, Language, Machines and AI

Yes, I’m basically saying that creativity “just happens”—but we need to account for everything that precedes it, so everything you read, saw, talked about, felt and so on—the prior knowledge and experience. It doesn’t come out of nowhere; and it definitely doesn’t come from creative marketing courses. It comes from experience and variety that allow us to form new logical connections and pathways, which in turn give us something to build on, to think about and, therefore, something to write about; something to paint; music to compose and so on. The formation of new logical pathways then may become perpetual, so you get into this state of creative flow when you begin to notice new and new connections based on what you’ve already discovered. And that’s when the true creative process kicks in and takes over. It often overrides any formula, specific order of steps or “guru advice”. It’s a state of natural flow when new connections and relationships become naturally apparent to you based on previously explored and analyzed concepts. Sometimes—or actually quite often—you might not even be aware that you are mentally referring to the particular concept; sometimes, you don’t know where exactly the idea or connection came from or where it’s headed—you just know it feels right in the natural order and flow of things.

It's something like what happened just now. As I was writing the last paragraph, I thought about writing another one (or maybe another article) on why exactly this means that AI can’t be considered “creative” and thus, pawning off creative tasks on AI like copywriting or writing in general is a fundamentally and logically flawed approach. As I’ve come to realize, the more experienced and creative a person is, the less use and help they will find in AI or LLMs. Same with translation (as it is, to a certain extent, a field of my expertise)—the more experienced a translator is, the less use they will find in AI and machine translation engines because they only become a distracting element which hinders thinking and results in lower quality. This actually makes a lot of sense as language is something that was created and developed by humans; and there is little to zero chance that machines, language models, statistical models or any other artificial, technological form will be able to master language better, or even to an equal extent, as humans.

So thinking AI can be “creative” is, as stated before, a fundamentally flawed notion rooted in the failure to understand the very basics of the creative process—and the very basics of what we today call AI or LLMs.

Another group of people—the ones in marketing—also utterly failed to understand creativity as a two-stage process of taking something and then producing something based on prior knowledge, experience or sensory stimuli. For them, creativity is a “skill” that is first and foremost output oriented.

We need you to come up with three captions for this image for Instagram in the next 2.5 minutes.

We need you to use these keywords and this is the max. character count.

The budget is max. 5 euros.

These are instructions of a person who knows nothing about creativity, creative process and has no experience with it. While there is nothing wrong with putting constraints on yourself or setting certain guardrails for the output—it just doesn’t make sense to talk about creativity in the context of marketing. Because the marketing process is purely output-focused; mindless ticking of imaginary boxes and criteria that are set by someone who knows very little about a lot of things.

That’s why we can’t talk about “creativity” when it comes to marketing; at least not the authentic, OG creativity that was the virtue of Hemingway, Tolkien, Beethoven, Salinger and so on. Creativity in the marketing context is corrupt. Colonized and appropriated by wannabes and has-beens; people who are famous for 5 minutes; or as we call it in the age of social media—those who “went viral”. The problem is that all it takes to go viral is to copy the concepts that “already work”; those that already went viral. That way you corrupt the fundamental aspect of creativity, which is to find a new pathway, connection and you miss the point of actually thinking about a concept in a new or slightly different way. But it’s worth the imaginary pats on the back and fake digital hugs, I guess.

Then it’s pretty obvious why people in the ad industry try to conceptualize creativity, put it in a box with a nice ribbon on top and find the universal “formula” for it. Except for everyone’s appetite for virality, getting likes and impressions: this pretty, overly simplistic packaging helps them to sell their courses and books (which are mostly useless) and, as a result, claim this imaginary dominion over creativity—in their words—as a business skill.

(Shockingly, creativity is not a skill. It’s a similarly innate and unchanging trait as the colour of your eyes. It is, after all, either the process of making or the ability to make new connections based on inputs and experiences, which can also be said of intelligence. You can get better at writing. At playing tennis. At reading. But you will always have a certain level of intelligence, i.e. creative or problem-solving capacity, to work with—and that doesn’t change. Just think about it: Are you more creative now than when you were 3 years old? I don’t think so. What changed is your ability to produce outputs; you certainly have more experience to work with; but your raw ability to think creatively, i.e. to make new connections and conclusions hasn’t changed at all.

Anyone who says they “learned” creativity is either lying, trying to sell you something or doesn’t have a clue what they are talking about. If it’s a skill that can be learned, it needs to be measurable and comparable. So was Hemingway more creative than Salinger? Are the Surreal ads more creative than the ones that Ogilvy made? You can’t say? Well, exactly…

The problem is that people seem to recognize creativity only in certain areas—like marketing, writing or arts. But creativity can be seen in any activity, any problem a person faces, any project they undertake—without ever learning “how to be creative”.)

After all, who wouldn’t want to be creative? CEOs, employees and even the cleaning lady. They all want to be and feel creative. What they don’t realize is that they are creative, it’s within them, and they don’t need charlatans selling pipe dreams and courses—further contributing to this artificially created mirage and demand. You’ll find a lot more value and creativity when you focus on finding your passion rather than watching hours of video courses where the “Creative Directors” keep beating on about how great they are and that they hold the dominion over the creative industry because they’ve “won awards” and have been members of juries in “creative competitions” (whatever those are). Because they are the ones who know what “good” and “bad” creativity is. Anyone who says there is good and bad creativity is not worth listening to because they failed to grasp the very basics of the concept.

Still, these people are mostly admen and those who have been “infected” with these ideas, so we can’t say it’s entirely their fault. They’ve been victims of capitalism, consumerism, 3-second attention spans and people who are unable to sit down and read a book. If that’s your audience, there’s little room for creating something meaningful—I get that. Either way, in my opinion, they are the ones who should at least try. Try to shape the industry or public opinion and steer the attention toward meaningful and worthwhile agenda, instead of pumping out endless swathes of mindless, AI-generated, subpar, “viral” or SEO content for likes and digital hugs. Not to mention their “cheat sheets”, yellow books, yellow notebooks, e-mail courses, Notion boards, Coda boards etc. (Where does it start and where does it end?)

(As for SEO, it has nothing to do with the human experience. Articles, words and texts in general should be intended for humans to read and to enjoy; or to educate; or to find new and stimulating ideas. Writing for SEO is like writing for digital hugs—they’re cold, non-existent and worthless.)

Conclusion

While I initially failed to understand the importance of self-editing in the creative writing process, I never failed to understand the true meaning and role of creativity. This “essay” is an attempt to point to these misguided groups, individuals or industries who are inevitably corrupting the creative process. This is then exacerbated by recent “developments” in the area of large language models and the misguided use thereof.

First, we need to understand that creativity doesn’t mean producing as much as possible, going viral or “doing what works”. Second, we need to reclaim our dominion over language as an inherently human tool—by humans, for humans. We invented language to develop society up until this point, and it seems to me we’re giving it up too easily. Using LLMs to augment our productivity and help with tedious, repetitive, statistical tasks? Sure. Using them to point out possible issues in translations or texts—inconsistencies, possible misuse of grammar, etc.? With proper and professional human oversight—definitely.

But let’s not pawn off creative tasks and those that involve language architecture on inherently derivative and naturally uncreative AI knockoffs. As mentioned in this short essay, creativity stems from sensory experience, knowledge, learning and stimuli that AI has no way of accessing or experiencing. Or learning.

And that’s also why the marketers’ view on creativity is wrong.

It's not a skill. It’s not something that can be learned through courses or in 2 three-hour sessions with gurus. You come in “uncreative” and leave “creative”? Really? Come on…

Experience and variety of stimuli is essential; along with intelligence to be able to make connections among the various pieces of information you take in. You can’t learn creativity by “learning about it” through courses. You need to experience it. Put your readings, experiences and knowledge into practice. It’s not a subject in school you can score an A at.

(Although I know many of you would like that to be the case, and many people in marketing would even tell you it’s possible—that’s why they do what they do. They’re making just another one of their subpar products or services by packaging creativity into their useless courses and books. Because that’s just what they do.)

And if you find the outlet for those learnings and experiences (writing, painting, music etc.), the mosaic will get clearer, more apparent to you in the process. You’ll find natural logical and “creative” pathways that’ll lead you further and further down a certain road. And if you hit a dead end, you retrace your steps, find a different angle, different approach. New connection. This might happen while you sleep, while you do the dishes or cook.

So go and find your passion. Take a lot of stimuli and information in. Be creative in your own way. Put your experiences on canvass or on paper. Don’t let experts and gurus tell you what “good” and “bad” creativity is. Let your first drafts sit and edit them. Feel good about what you’re doing.

And, finally, steer clear of AI.