Personal Note: On My Creative Break

This is the 11th edition of my newsletter The UX Writing Memo. Since I received an overwhelming response to it, I decided to make this the only edition I will also share on my blog.

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Today, I am writing to you from a special place. Not only physically, because as I write this I am sitting in my favorite coffee spot, on a rainy Thursday morning, and I have usually never written here, because this place doesn’t like laptops too much. But I’m writing this on a spiral notebook actually. Yes, pen and paper. I’ll get to that later.

But I’m also writing this from a mentally special place (I know it sounds weird, but hear me out).

If you follow me on Instagram, you might know that currently, I am on kind of a hiatus, meaning I’m not actively pursuing my business and I am not posting on social media. The only thing I promised to still show up for is my wonderful students and this lovely newsletter. So here we are.

The reason for what I’ve called a creative break felt complicated initially, but yesterday I explained it to a close friend and the words that came out of my mouth sounded really simple, so I thought I’d share them here as well. And maybe you can relate to some of my experience.

In the last months, AI (but also other things and other people) created an unsustainable production pressure for me, everywhere, pretty much on every platform: On Udemy, entirely AI-generated courses flooded my niche, and my LinkedIn feed was full of AI-generated posts. I was not a fan of either. The AI-generated content I saw did not only sound generic – parts of it were also factually wrong or even full of typos.

But people liked it. They engaged with the content, and they bought the courses.

And to be very honest with you, I felt the pressure to keep up. So I made ambitious plans: Post three times a week on Instagram, post three times a week on LinkedIn. And of course, the monthly blog post, this newsletter, and also, I finally had to pick up on YouTube again, right?

So the plan was made.

Now, since I work with ChatGPT a lot at my job, it felt very natural to let it handle parts of that workload. After all, I am an expert in my field, and I was able to direct Chatty in a way that would still ensure high-quality results.

The problem was: Slowly but surely, the parts I outsourced were getting bigger and bigger. I guess that’s how it goes with these tools.

At some point, I did not only ask ChatGPT to proofread my posts for typos and grammar, I also started asking it to “smoothen things out” because I simply didn’t take the time to put actual love into my own choice of words. I squeezed content production between my daily tasks. Until eventually I also asked it to give me some ideas for content.

And some of them were pretty good. And it did help me to keep up with my ambitious schedule.

But you know what?

It’s one thing to see these over-generic pieces of half-baked, half-faked content on your LinkedIn feed.

It’s another to see it in your own profile.

Pretty soon, I started being very unhappy with what I shared with the community. To me, my content started lacking depth, love, passion, uniqueness. And authenticity. But it wasn’t until a special trip I took with a friend that I realized this wasn’t what I wanted to stand for.

A lovely friend and I have a cool tradition. Each year, for the switch between Halloween and All Saints Day, we make a short trip. We watch cities turn their decorations from spooky to Christmassy, enjoy the last rays of Indian Summer or moody October weather.

This year, we went to Budapest. As an architecture enthusiast, this city felt like an outdoor museum, but one building stood out particularly: the Saint Stephen’s Basilica. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to that place or such a place, but it was just overwhelmingly beautiful. It had these black, deep green, and red marble columns, decorated with a richness of golden ornaments, filled with beautiful frescos and Baroque paintings.

Inside of St. Stephen’s Basilica, Budapest

For a whole while, we just sat in the pews and soaked in this stunning surroundings – in both its overwhelmingly majestic entirety and all its little brilliant details.

I remember I left that building thinking: Wow, humans built that.

The second thought I had: I need to shut my freaking laptop.

Yes, keeping up with AI and automation is crucial. I use these tools in my job on a daily basis, and as you might have seen in the last edition of The UX Writing Memo, I try to paint a balanced picture of new technologies and make good use of them where it makes sense, but:

The AI hype is shouting so loudly, I can barely hear my own thoughts. Except for one: If we only focus on speed and quantity, fast output, quick results – how can we ever build something really great? Something inspiring, something lasting?

One day after I had returned from that trip, I announced my creative break.

A break from pressure, from fastness, from output-only, from keeping up, from adapt-or-get-left-behind, from inauthentic, generic stories told through the lens of lifeless bots.

This right here is my business, my space.

And people come here because I have been working in the job of a UX Writer for about eight years, I’ve developed frameworks, brand voices, and templates that stood the test of practice.

ChatGPT has not. And that’s okay. We both have our right to produce things. But in our own roles.

And I figure that if you wanted to know what ChatGPT had to say about UX Writing, you would just ask it. You don’t need me or anyone else to put that into a LinkedIn post.

So I followed my urge and shut that laptop, quite literally.

I dug out an old spiral notebook that I had kept in my living room drawers for ages, grabbed a pen I was given by my friends when I first started my business, and I took both of them to the most beautiful places I could think of.

Libraries. Churches. The park. My local art museum. A fancy co-working space. And I kept on searching for more beautiful places to write in, to scribble content in, and on that hunt, I discovered so many new places of wonder. Places of art, depth, and love for detail.

And in case you’re wondering what all of that has to do with UX Writing:

Everything.

Absolutely everything.

UX Writing is about creating experiences with words. But:

How are we supposed to create experiences for humans if we don’t value human experience anymore?

How are we supposed to create something when we’re actively unlearning how to create?

How are we credible in being masters of creating digital experiences for human beings when we’re already overwhelmed by writing a LinkedIn post?

I feel like we’re adding an unnecessary spin of urgency around output to this world where all that matters is speed. However, if we look inside ourselves and look for what touches us, it’s never something that has been created just with speed.

It’s Rembrandt paintings, and Sylvia Plath poetry, and our grandma’s apple pie, and Metallica songs.

So why are we creating so much stuff that we don’t care about?

Yes, we put something out, but we’re robbing ourselves of the experience of creating something with actual passion. And we’re robbing other people of consuming something that was created with passion.

To be honest, I really like ChatGPT. The other day, it actually helped me home-dye my hair and the results turned out surprisingly awesome (please don’t try this).

But it cannot paint like Rembrandt.

It cannot write like Sylvia Plath.

It cannot write or play songs like Metallica.

And it sure as hell can’t teach anyone the science, craft, art, and magic of UX Writing. It can only mimic to do all that – regardless of how many likes its posts get on LinkedIn.

I honestly can’t wait to be back with the real deal of UX Writing, storytelling, brand voice, communications content. But I’ll be gone until I can make sure it’s good and truly worth your while, writers and writers-to-be.

Talk to you soon!

Kat

P.S.: This is also your sign to visit your city’s most beautiful places. Oh, and make sure you take a pen and paper with you.

If you want to share your thoughts, my inbox is always open: kat@writewithdrkat.com