Getting unstuck served as a descriptive image in a recent blog post I wrote for work. After publication, I realized that getting unstuck through the act of storytelling applied to my ongoing concerns as a writer. Writer’s block wasn’t the issue. For months, I felt stuck and less inclined to write beyond the needs of work and occasional freelance magazine assignments. Why?
Declining value when words become a commodity
The rising use of AI is directly tied to the devaluation of skilled writing crafted by humans like me. I have been a professional writer and creative for the past quarter-century. For various reasons, particularly the encroachment of AI throughout our shared digital milieu, I stopped sharing my writing online. No more meaningful posts on social media. I shunned writing blog posts like this on my personal website.
While not the only reason, increasingly, I felt less motivated to revise the book manuscript for Barons, Brewers, and Bootleggers: A Social History of Beer in Missouri. The book has been a work in progress for a couple of years. I have already had content from previously published books stolen from unknown parties and fed into LLMs without consent, credit or compensation. It’s an unsettling issue in a publishing industry not equipped financially to protect author’s work and their investment. To my knowledge, there’s no scalable way to counter the tide.
Undoubtedly, it’ll happen again with my next published book whenever I complete my labor-intensive, time-consuming work. Content from that book will likely be stolen and co-opted in the blink of an eye. The same theft has impacted thousands of authors and writers like me who make (made?) a living from and took pride in their creations. Nearly everywhere, the value of the written word feels diminished. Craft treated like a commodity.
That sense of disregard and commodification has been hard to reconcile. Once published, my words here and elsewhere will inevitably be vacuumed, absorbed, and processed by LLM’s and mashed into AI-generated word puree, ahem, content. Yes, that’s a simplistic, dramatic take but you get the point. Ethics and fairness aren’t a consideration.
How writing helped me get unstuck
No wonder I felt stuck. Why write and create at all? Well, to express my thoughts as a human being at the very least.
If I considered every word written by my hand and conjured from my head as “valuable” monetarily, then that “value” becomes negotiable in the marketplace. With the pervasive and systemic use of AI, the marketplace for words hardly exists now.
The more central point is that I needed to stop treating writing and the output for EVERY instance of writing as intrinsically valuable. No one’s paying me for a Facebook post I dashed off, no matter how eloquent or persuasive. There’s not an undetermined dollar figure worth haggling that can be attached to most of the words I write. I remembered that writing doesn’t have to be all or none, pay me or else, if at all (but that point’s been made).
How did I get unstuck? Essentially, I wrote something kind of wonky that spurred pride. It’s a reminder of why I have been writing for most of my life in the first place.
Recently, I wrote a blog post about the 2024 Statewide Nebraska Quarterly Workforce Indicators Dashboard developed by SourceLink and SourceLink Nebraska. Admittedly, it’s a far cry from the subject matter that I am mostly known for covering – food, craft beer, arts, history, and small businesses in my community.
Regardless, writing the blog post reignited my drive to tell stories focused on people and businesses, where the focal point will have significant positive impact on communities.
Here’s the constraint that the partners sought to resolve: Five-year-old workforce data or, worse yet, costly, hard-to-access data became a stick wedged in the wheel of progress for early-stage company founders and civic planners in Nebraska.
The partnership addressed the challenge of generating accurate real-time reports based on current entrepreneur-focused data. New and young firms don’t necessarily have deep financial resources or the knowhow to locate timely, useful data. Economic planning and operational decisions based on subpar data results in less optimal outcomes.
Data disparity created an ongoing opportunity gap for local companies, innovation-driven startups, and entrepreneurs that drive job creation and community-based growth. Small businesses with fewer than 50 people on the payroll, account for more than 40 percent of U.S. employment and 96 percent of all establishments.
Employers, civic planners and workforce development leaders at different levels of governement need accurate timely data to make smarter, data-backed decisions.
Got all that? Innovation produced a tool with practical uses to address a problem with big stakes. Using the dashboard could help people to make better decisions, apply resources, generate jobs, grow businesses and strengthen communities. The human stakes are real.
As a writer, I found it rewarding to meet the challenge and take the responsibility of telling the story. Not for pay, for clout or for ego-boosting engagement on social media. Hopefully, I wrote a story that makes the dashboard’s uses and implications more comprehensible.
Writing the post took time and care to apply skill, exercise craft, and produce work that generated a sense of pride. Writing to express and deliver value for an audience has value in itself, I remembered. No need to feel stuck.
