Sometimes traditional writer's block advice can fail busy professionals. This episode explores how to use AI as an ideation writing partner to move past your writing challenges while maintaining your authentic voice.

For executives, CEOs, and thought leaders, writer's block is especially costly because blocked writing time means lost billable hours, delayed publication timelines, and the frustration that can lead to abandoning a book entirely or watching a competitor publish first.

I discuss why both extremes with AI tend to fail, refusing to use it at all versus letting AI write your content, and how to find the sweet spot using AI purely as an ideation partner rather than a ghostwriter or a replacement for a professional editor.

Remember, copying and pasting AI output erases your voice, invites copyright issues, and produces bland content that readers can sense is inauthentic, so your unique perspective, stories, frameworks, and expertise must always remain the foundation of your book.

Using AI strategically to break through blocks, from overcoming opening paragraph paralysis to generating transitions, exploring multiple angles, and brainstorming chapter titles, always writing the final words in your own voice with the key being to use specific and detailed verbiage in your prompts, re-prompting until you get useful ideas, feeding in your own frameworks and examples, and choosing the content you want to use, then discarding the rest. Writer's block is solvable with the right approach, and when used well, AI enhances rather than erases your voice while you remain the expert.

Keep writing, keep dreaming, and keep creating. Your book is waiting to be born!

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Hey friends and future authors, welcome to the Self-Publishing for Thought Leaders podcast. I'm Lynn Liquid's smartest ghostwriter and publishing strategist, and I've helped dozens of authors write, edit, and self-publish their nonfiction books. Today we're going to talk about why traditional writer's block advice can fail busy professionals and the right way to use AI as a writing partner to help you move past writer's block.

Professional advice for maintaining your voice while leveraging AI as an ideator. But before we jump into today's topic, make sure to join my author support group, Self-Publishing for Leaders on School. If you want to move past that writer's block piece by joining our supportive authors-writers community. All right, so step number one: let's talk about the writer's block reality for busy professionals.

You have limited writing time, my friends. You cannot afford to waste time staring at blank pages because we can't edit a blank page. You can't afford to waste time sitting there thinking, what am I gonna do next? on my book. Blocks often happen before your project can even start. Sometimes maybe they happen mid-chapter for you, but either way, they derail your entire writing process, which makes it so frustrating.

For any writer, especially a busy professional. So the pressure to produce quality content creates paralysis as well, right? So you want to be like, I want to make this amazing, I want to make this book great, but now that pressure is sitting on you and it's really hard for you to move forward. And sometimes traditional advice, like just write anything, you know, write something different and then come back and write it, taking a walk.

That usually helps me, but it doesn't help anyone. And it also may not help you if you're an executive with a busy schedule. So let's talk about why writer's block is especially costly for professional authors who are executives, CEOs, and thought leaders. The number one reason is because every hour a blocked writing time equals lost billable time, right? So you're instead of

You know, being able to build client for your time, you are losing time writing your book because you can't write it because you have writer's block. delays in your writing push publication timeline back months, sometimes even a year or more, because you can't finish your book on time. And then that delays your editing, that delays your formatting, and also delays your book cover design as well. your your

Frustration with these delays lead to maybe abandoning your book entirely, right? At a minimum, it might put you off and it might end up stopping you from doing your book for a while. So either way, it's going to frustrate you, delay you, lose your billable time. And the compound cost of all of these things that are happening to you, right? Is your unfinished book that is not promoting your business or not?

Getting out there for the world to read. So one of my clients ended up taking six years, no joke, to write her book. We started writing it six years ago. She stopped for a while. She jumped back in. She had writer's block. She had self-doubt. She had a lot of different things lots of professionals deal with. But we finally got it done. But she did end up writing her first chapter nine times. And that is way too many times.

To write your book chapter, and she just got stuck in this loop and had a really hard time getting out of it. We finally got her out of it and finally got her book published. But it did take a lot of work and effort to do that. So you want to make sure that you are not getting stuck in that book loop and you're not getting stuck with being frustrated with all these pressures, that you can move forward without having writer's block and getting that frustration and getting stuck in that catch 22. So

If you're trying to avoid the problem, one of the things that I see happen all the time with authors is they are not just don't finish their book. They put it aside for months, maybe years, like my client did, and they never finish. It's a book that's sitting there waiting to be finished and a potential great business card to hand out to people or you know, legacy book or whatever that nonfiction book is. And it's sitting in their computer, still waiting to be written.

And you also miss marketing opportunities because if you don't have that published book, you can't get better speaking gigs, you can't get better paid events, you can't get into the bigger events because you're not an author, right? A book gets you into these events. You're also watching your competitors publish first. I can't tell you the frustration I had talked to in one of my authors and

They had an idea for two different books that we were gonna write. And the one was already off the table because they said I literally went on Amazon and someone published a book that was almost exactly what I was gonna write last week. That is so frustrating. I know I had a book, I've had book ideas before where I looked on Amazon and found someone's already published it and I didn't even start my book yet. So to even start your book and end up finding it on Amazon and when you're almost finished is super, super frustrating.

You can also just get can you know fall down that rabbit hole of self-doubt. Like, am I good enough to write this book? I haven't even finished it yet. Am I really the expert because I can't even finish it? Because I can't even think of what to write next, right? All of these are questions that my authors commonly ask me or talk about, or you know, a self-doubt frustration that all roll into this writer's black piece. Okay.

So there's two extreme approaches, and these typically both fail, right? They rarely, rarely work. One is refusing to use AI at all when you have writer's block because you're missing using a powerful tool. Now, AI is not for everybody, right? So that's why I say sometimes these work and sometimes they don't. But if you are open to using AI, not to write your book, but to help you with ideas past the writer's block.

Okay. And the other extreme is using AI to write everything, which is never a good idea. I never recommend anybody do that. And if you want to go with a traditional publisher, a traditional publisher will not take your work if you are actively using AI to do anything for your book. So if you're considering a traditional publisher, you cannot use AI at all. So those are some exceptions, but you really

Don't want to go with either extreme, right? So some common mistakes if you're using AI that can erase your voice. So these are the things you want to avoid with AI if you're using it for ideation to help you get past the writer's block. Copying and pasting AI output directly into your manuscript. Bad idea. We don't want to do that. We're using vague prompts, right? That produce generic content. You want be very specific and very detailed in your prompts, as specific and detailed as possible.

And you'll know that you're not being specific or detailed enough because the answer that comes back from AI is not going to, it's gonna just sound really generic and boring. It's not gonna sound interesting and it's not gonna be pointing that idea is not gonna be pointing you towards another idea. Treating AI as a ghostwriter instead of a thinking generator, AI should never be your ghostwriter for several different reasons.

One is because again, like we just said, it's gonna just be plain, boring vanilla content that you don't want to publish because that's not the type of quality of work you want to post in your book. the other is that you always end up with copyright infringement possibilities because you're using other people's work. So we don't want to do that. another is you're losing your voice and if you're using AI as your ghostwriter because it's not writing in your voice, no matter how hard you try, it cannot write in your voice. So

You want to make sure that you're not using AI as your writer. You also want to make sure you're not using AI as a replacement for a professional editor, which is what my next episode is all about. Because a using AI for your professional editor, it does not work. It is not a professional editing tool. Now using Grammarly to fix your grammar and your you know, your syntax and things like that, that's fine because grammarly is that's very black and white. It's either your your

You need a comma there or you don't need a comma there. But it's not going to change your voice and style when you're correcting where do I need to put a comma or a period in my sentence. But using AI as a developmental or line editor definitely will. It will definitely take away your voice and style. Whereas a ghostwriter, a good ghostwriter is going to enhance your voice and your style, and it's going to sound exactly like you, just like an editor would help you with line editing.

Help you sound like your voice, but make it stronger and more confident with the right descriptive words. Another mistake people make is skipping the personalization and refinement step. So they take what they use out of AI and they're not personalizing it. They're not refining it, they're not applying it towards their framework or their process or their step-by-step, whatever it is, right? So you need to make sure that those all connect. You don't want them to be separate.

and not working together. So generic AI content does really damage your brand. And that's why you don't want to copy and paste it. I've had people that I've edited their book to people who literally copied and pasted AI. And I told them when I edit your book, it's not going to, it's still gonna sound like AI because they did not disclose that to me before they handed me their manuscript.

So I told them, I said, I'll do my best to clean it up, but it's still gonna sound like AI because I unless I'm rewriting your book and I gave them a price for rewriting their book, it's still gonna sound like AI. And they said, that's okay. And they were self they were self-publishing their book. So I was like, okay. So I make sure I see the whole manuscript typically before I start editing a book to make sure, and I ask people, my authors, the prospective authors, are you using any AI to write your book?

and that's okay if they do it for ideation like we're talking about today, but if they're doing the copy and paste, I do not work with those authors in editing because it's just it's it's just doesn't ever sound like good copy. and readers can sense that auth inauthenticity when you write with AI because it just sounds bland, it sounds boring, and it's just so dry. If you ever just read AI content, you can tell it just doesn't sound like a human being.

So you want to really avoid writing with AI generated content. So you're also your unique perspective is what makes your book valuable, right? Like how your case studies, your experience, your framework. And AI is not going to know that. So you want to make sure that you're using AI as an ideator only so that you are putting in your unique perspective.

And that you are using your your framework and things like that inside it. you wanna make you wanna you also want to know that AI heavy content lacks stories and expertise only you have, and professional credibility builds on authentic voice only, right? Like you can't have that trust factor with an inauthentic voice. And AI, that's what it does if you're just copying and pasting. So your the misconception.

With AI and authenticity, is that AI isn't cheating when you're using it as an ideator, right? So you're just using it for ideation, like as if you were talking to a friend or another professional and say, Hey, I've got this idea. What do you think? That's how a good an author uses AI correctly for ideation in their book. professional writers use AI tools sometimes to write their book, unless, of course, you want to go with a traditional publisher.

The question isn't AI versus no AI if you're self-publishing your book. It's how you use AAI as an ideator because your ideas and expertise should remain the foundation of your book no matter what. So, your solution is overcoming opening paragraph paralysis using AI. So if you can't figure out what to write on your beginning paragraph and you've written the rest of the chapter, put it in AI and say, hey,

Give me some ideas for an opening paragraph for this chapter. Don't ask it to write the actual paragraph. Say, this is my framework, this is the basis for it. Give it some details. Maybe you upload a PDF on your framework and say, based on this, what are some ideas I can write about for an introduction for this? And it will give you some ideas. Sometimes you'll like them, sometimes you won't like them. You might find one idea that's sort of what you like, and you can take that and say, okay.

This is sort of where I'm going, but I really want to focus on fill in the blank, right? And you write in that detail and reprompt it until you find something that you really like. And it will take sometimes five, six, or seven reprompts to find the right words that you want to use that apply to you and your framework. You want to get past transition sentences if you need a idea for a transition between paragraphs or chapters or sentences, right?

Say, give me some ideas for how I can transition from this paragraph to this paragraph. And AI can give you some suggestions. You all be able to write it in your voice though. So remember that. Generating multiple angles on the same point. So you can give it your framework or give it your piece of your framework or piece of your process or piece of your, like this is this third step in my process, right? And say,

Hey, I wanted to have some different perspectives on this angle. Can you give me some different perspectives on how I can talk about this? And then from those perspectives, maybe they give you an idea for like, I've got a case study on this, or I've got a client review on this, or I remember working with a client and this happened, and you can put that into your book. Breaking through how do I explain this moments. So if you have a writer's block and you've got a piece of your framework, you're having a really hard time explaining, you can

Put it into the AI and say, this is what the piece of my framework talks about. This is what the end result is. How can I give me some ideas on how I can explain this when I'm writing my chapter in my book? Ask for outlines and structures, okay? Not full paragraphs or chapters. Like I said before, we're using this for ideation, not to write your book. But you can use AI to expand your bullet points, right? So, like if you say,

Hey, I've got these three ideas, bullet point them out. You you write them out and type them out and say, give me some other ideas based on these bullet points that I can use in this chapter. Or this is my chapter outline. What else would you suggest that I put in here for a topic? And you don't have to use all of the topics AI gives you. You can say, okay, I like this topic. What else can I put in that's based on this topic? So remember, pick and choose what feels right to you.

Asking AI for more topics on a chapter is also a great idea, or using AI to create titles for your chapter. So one of the things I do sometimes is I'll put a chapter in the AI and say, okay, this is what my chapter is about. This is the point of the chapter. Please give me three to five titles you think would be good for this chapter. And typically what I do is I never pick a specific chapter title that AI gives me. I'm like, I like this word, I like this word, I like this phrase.

I take those and I put them together and I'm like, okay, based on this is what I like, give me three to five new chapter titles. And I still typically don't pick out one whole one. I'll pick out something from one, something from another. And then usually I'll pill throw in my own thing, and then I've got a chapter title. So it's never AI directly written when I'm doing chapter titles for my chapters on my book. When you're doing this, friends, make sure to be specific and detailed as possible.

When you are prompting AI, the more specific and detailed you are, the better answers you're gonna get, and the easier it's going to be to ideate with AI. Reprompt until it understands what you're asking and reprompt until you get the answers you're looking for. Use your personal stories and case studies and re personal reviews and

personal and business stories, right? For ideas and and in your prompts when you're doing this so that you can get some really good, rich feedback from the AI that you're using. Put your unique frameworks and terminology into the AI when you're talking to it and explain what it is that you're trying to accomplish. And you can exclude include, excuse me, include only specific examples you would know, right? Don't include like because AI is going to give you general stuff that's out there.

But you want specific examples in your book, only you would know, or only you could share with somebody. And some common obstacles that you can have when you're doing this is sometimes people feel like they're cheating because they're using AI. It's not cheating if you're using it for ideation. It is definitely cheating if you're using it for copying and pasting. There's a complete difference with that. Losing your voice and spending more time on the transformation step.

So make sure that when you're using it for ideation, you are writing it out in your voice. You're modifying it to be in your voice. If you're getting anything back from AI, it's not getting the point. Don't use it. You do not have to use everything it gives you. Pick and choose and be very picky on the type of content that you are using. Right. And there's always time investment concerns, right? AI does save time overall when you use it correctly and you prompt it well.

Alright, my friends. So remember, writer's block is solvable with the right approach. And while a generic AI can destroy your voice, strategic use gives you great ideation to move past the writer's block and can actually help you enhance your own voice. You remain the expert, and AI is just an ideator partner in this, right? It is not writing your book, it is not the expert on your framework, it is not the expert with your experience and your professional expertise.

So remember, if you're stuck on your book and you want to simplify the process and get personalized guidance on using AI while maintaining your voice, then join my school community, Self-Publishing for Leaders, where you can sign up for workshops, book coaching, and other tools to move you past writer's block. And make sure you hit that subscribe button because our next episode is all about AI-assisted editing versus human editing, what authors need to know.

All right, my friends, remember to keep writing, keep dreaming, and keep creating. Your book is waiting to be born.