Over the start of the weekend, I completed 9 hours of writing, with a couple of hours of research thrown in for good measure.
My efforts were catalysed by the London Writers’ Salon yearly 24h Writing Around the World, a sprint which invited writers of all kinds to move the needle on a project they cared about, or perhaps even get to the finish line by the end of the sprint.
The set up was simple: a five minute introduction to set our intention, then write alongside each other in silence for 45 minutes, followed by a 10 min break. At the top of the hour, we go again. The room doors re-open for those who weren't available earlier. Twenty-four times in total, going around the globe, as every hour of the day is 8am somewhere.
I didn’t mean to spend so much time writing. In all honesty, the dust bunnies that had appeared around the edges of my parquet floors in the latter part of the week more than hinted that I was overdue for a deep clean.
I ignored the call. Sort of. Instead, sat my bum down and tackled a project that‘s been as stagnant as my metabolism of late. A book proposal. Aka a business plan for a book. The kind you send to agents and publishers.
While my overall effort was consistent, I varied the settings.
The first two hours were spent on my slate grey mid-century sofa, the spot where I read and write every morning, with the dog snoozing against my shin.
At 11am, I settled myself in the sun trap that is my balcony with an iced coffee. A couple of years ago, I purchased a charpoy (an Indian day bed) nestled outside the French windows of my bedroom. This spot gets sunshine until about 2.30pm. I‘ve loved lying in the sun and reading since my teens. It's kind of like habit stacking. I love being in the sun. I love writing. So I'm now sitting in the sun writing. This works, though the dark shell of my iPad makes theprocessa little challenging at times. After lunch and a walk with the dog, an intentional stroll that led me to my local Italian deli for a homemade parmigiana and a bottle of Chianti Classico, I returned to position myself in the vintage velvet cloud chairs in my living room.
My sprint became a surprising 9 non-consecutive hours, in three different settings. By the time we reached hour twenty-four it wasn't just me elated by the energy and the momentum we'd created. Nearly five hundred of us filled those Zoom tiles, page after page, thanking the kind folks at LWS. Beaming, I put away my screen, and went to turn on the oven for the parmigiana.
THE SURPRISE IN THE SPRINT
This wasn't my first time participating in this online event. Despite a positive memory from last year's edition, I'm still taken aback by its resounding effects. The rhythm set within the hourly container does something to me. It’s like an encouraging beat. Go go go. Stop. Take a breath. Start again. It's easier to commit and make progress when you're moving to a collective groove. *
And something invaluable happened in that virtual space.
I forgot to worry about the quality of my writing.
The time compression meant that I did not shuffle virtual documents around to re-read earlier drafts. I just typed away. In so doing, I left the good girl, or good student habit behind. I forgot that I’m not a native English speaker. Ignored the limits of my English grammar. I rode the wave, hour after hour, in a state of near flow.
This reminds me of an essay by Jeremy Utley, a professor at Stanford's d.school, about how to turn off critical thinking and how to get ourselves in flow states.
"…The most interesting part of the study was that creative flow wasn't just a function of what turns on. Creative flow has every bit as much to do with what turns off. You know what part of the brain deactivates when you enter creative flow? The part responsible for judgment. That's right: to enter into creative flow, you've got to turn off censorship, that critical part of your brain that says, 'That's a dumb idea.'"
In my case (and I can't speak for others), the pressure cooker of the 45-minute writing sessions, one after the other, somehow disabled the critical inner voice.
I worked myself into a bit more of a frenzy by (and don't laugh) spending a few of the breaks between sessions vigorously hoovering the pollen and aforementioned dust bunnies from my floor.
Something else happened that surprises me.
I didn’t use AI.
Not until hour 6, that is, when I turned to some market research.
Also, AI didn’t do the research. It's embarrassing how good I am at research, AI has nothing on me. I hand over my findings for supplementary thoughts, but it’s not invited to take the wheel. I found heaps of great stuff, and Claude, my dutiful assistant, formatted and collated the stuff into organised notes, a virtuous and helpful role, creating order where I normally leave a chaotic trail of new leads.
So what's special about not using AI?
For many who produce a lot of regular content, writing or otherwise, it's likely that like me you've been in relationship with ChatGPT, Claude or other LLM for a few months, maybe longer. Quickly, just like we did with many tools, we’ve become accustomed to having AI do the work (offering a first draft), or check the work (and letting it do edits). Essentially, many have been delegating the creativeprocessto the machines.
It's absolutely understandable.
There is a near magical quality in witnessing this non-human entity deliver pages in mere seconds. There's the 'time back' effect. Because at first, it looks like AI will be a fabulous time saver. At first. We save time, but we lose something in exchange. Isn't that what the fairytales always told us? There's a price we pay for the use of the magic.
We feed the machines what we have. Some of us push much of their work to AI, and just use the results that are the LLM's spit back out. Others, like me, enjoy a back and forth, a refiningprocess. It's been fun.
Like with many other relationships, the honeymoon period is over, at least for me (a year and half, it was about time).
The words that have been streaming out of the chatbot start to look like the same day in, day out.
Just as there are expressions that we default to in daily language, the machines also repeat themselves. They don't notice. I do. And not only when it's commenting on my work.
This week, I’ve come across two pieces of content, one essay and one email, by a literary agent and one Substack superwriter, that were obviously (co-)written by Claude. I can tell by its overuse of the word 'quiet'. Also by the structure of the first paragraphs. And while the words read well, they feel empty of meaning.
This reminded me of the work of etymologist Adam Aleksic who delivered a TED talk at TEDNext 2025, called Why are people starting to sound like ChatGPT?
I don’t have a fancy AI tool to analyse these texts, but I read enough quality writing to notice the pattern myself. My heart sinks when I recognise the word choices.
I'm grateful for the good things technology brings, I am. Content creation is challenging. Writing and creating remain a complicated if essential human pursuit. It's also a deeply satisfying source of meaning, if we give into it.
Let's encourage each other to do the hard work ourselves.
This coming May, I'll be offering a new workshop on cultivating the conditions for creativity, by filling our cup, with mindfulness, somatic and other tools. It's not designed as an antidote to AI, or to this era. It's 'just' for the non-machine types, those made of flesh and blood, who need another kind of juice, rather than electrical current, to come up with their best work.
It so happens that the things we do to nourish ourselves, metaphorically and otherwise, when they are good for us (aka not junk or frankenfoods per that earlier article), they also feed that deep well of creativity. My hope is that it will increase our capacity to draw from that well.
* This reminds me of the Pomodoro method, named after the kitchen timer shaped like a ripe tomato. Twenty-five minutes of work, five minutes of rest. I may just give that another try myself.