On the Creative Self-Publishing stream of the Self-Publishing with ALLi Podcast, Orna Ross and Joanna Penn discuss creative confidence and the process of finding and sustaining an author voice. They talk about how life events, like grief or illness, can interrupt creativity, and how daily practices such as journaling or walking can help maintain a sense of continuity. The conversation also covers how recurring themes shape a writer’s voice, how AI tools like voice cloning are changing audiobook production, and how authors can decide when and how to use these tools without losing their individual style.
Listen to the Podcast: How Creative Confidence Shapes Author Voice and Guides AI Use
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About the Hosts
Joanna Penn writes nonfiction for authors and is an award-nominated, New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author as J.F.Penn. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker.
Orna Ross launched the Alliance of Independent Authors at the London Book Fair in 2012. Her work for ALLi has seen her named as one of The Bookseller’s “100 top people in publishing”. She also publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is greatly excited by the democratizing, empowering potential of author-publishing. For more information about Orna, visit her website.
Read the Transcripts
Joanna Penn: Hello everyone and welcome to the Self-Publishing with ALLi Podcast with me, Joanna Penn and Orna Ross. Hi Orna.
Orna Ross: Hi Joanna. Hello everyone.
Joanna Penn: Yes, we are back and today we are going to talk about our personal updates, what we've been doing, but around the theme of creative confidence and finding your author voice.
Now, we've been talking about this privately and we really wanted to get into it deeper. So, just as an introduction, when we're talking about author voice, this is the recognizable fingerprint of your writing, your tone, your worldview, the themes that keep coming up, the obsessions you return to over and over again, a lot of your words, your characters, plot elements, topics, if nonfiction, memoir.
For me, it's like, oh yeah, this is a JF Penn book or it's an Orna Ross poem, or something like that.
Exploring Creative Confidence
Joanna Penn: Creative confidence, I'm obsessed with this at the moment, is this self-belief that you can keep producing original work overtime. Even if you feel empty, your confident that it's going to come back.
I guess also the confidence to move out of your comfort zone, try other genres, try other ways of publishing, and that as a creative person, you will figure it out along the way.
I feel like this is so important in this sort of age of generative AI, people are worried about things impacting their creativity. So, we're going to talk a bit about these topics around our personal themes today.
But I wanted to start off now, Orna, you've had a big life event, and I wondered if maybe you could talk about that in relation to this confidence when big things happen and making space and returning to creativity again.
Orna Ross: Yes.
Dealing with Grief and Creativity
Orna Ross: For those who don't know, and thank you for the many of you who do know and the lovely messages and so on that I've received over the last while, my mum passed away at the end of April after a long illness and then a quite intense illness in the last six months of her life. So, I took a step back earlier on this year to focus on that because I wanted to be around and there for the family, and just to be present for such a huge event as well.
A lot of people have been talking about that hiatus and what it means and what I'm going to do, and what my plans are, and I thought it'd be interesting, as this was our topic for this time, to talk a little bit about that because I think when we stop, as creatives, and whether that's enforced because of a life event or maybe just because we find ourselves blocked or whatever, our thinking mind is always there trying to harry and hurry us on, and always feels that we're not doing enough, and is always very focused on the outer stuff.
So, as a more experienced creative who's been doing this for a very long time, I know now that there is a deeper rhythm there and that the stuff that life is bringing up is probably going to feed into what's coming back out.
It's different for everyone, obviously, but I think you can feel creatively confident once you know how the creative process works and you know how to consciously tap it, and I think, that applies at any stage, whether you're just beginning or whether you are further on.
Certainly, for me, when I began to be more experienced as a creative, and particularly when I became interested in the whole idea of applying the creative process to life, understanding how that process worked really helped me, and that was one of the ways that I tapped into it during this time.
So, I realize now that the creative process isn't about doing. That there are seven stages, and some of those stages are very much about stillness and paying attention to what's beneath rather than the surface stuff. So, sometimes it's about expressing stuff and taking actions, but sometimes it's just about embracing uncertainty and going a bit deeper.
Once we have a trust in the process itself, and a creative practice that keeps us connected, I think no matter what comes along, we can still feel confident that whatever is happening is unfolding the way it should.
Joanna Penn: Yeah, and obviously I'm sorry about your mum, and I know people listening are sorry about that, and a lot of people will understand what you are going through because the death of a parent, obviously, should happen to most people in a normal life. But I guess grief specifically is a really tough one, and it might be grief about death, it might be grief about other losses, different times in our life we experience grief.
Have you found that the experience of grief in particular has changed your experience of what I feel as emptiness sometimes? It's, oh my goodness, I can never write again. There's that moment, often it's very momentary, this sort of, I am empty.
You described it there, stillness and being able to go deeper, but I have felt that, oh my goodness, I am empty moment. So, have you experienced that as part of it?
Orna Ross: I haven't personally in this time experienced it around writing, so I've stayed connected to writing but not being able to write the big project. So, I always have one big book, that's how I think of it, but I have a free writing practice every day where I write just whatever hops into my head, and that's handwritten, and I was able to sustain that.
I often find that when I'm free writing the part of me that trusts the process rises to the surface and reassures me. So, I'm grateful to have that in place because I think without it, that I would feel stopped by a wall almost, and definitely right now there are things that I'm not capable of doing. More on the publishing side, I just can't go there, and I'm completely stopped on some things. I took a hiatus from some other things.
So yeah, I'm definitely feeling I'm not at my normal rhythm and pace, and I don't expect to be, unless this feeling just disappears overnight, which doesn't feel like it will. I don't expect to be in my normal pace for the next month or two.
Joanna Penn: No, absolutely, or longer, and I think that's important for us all. I know some people listening have chronic illness, I think periods of chronic illness can have this same impact.
But trusting the process, I guess why I keep wanting to talk about this creative confidence topic is because people will say to me, oh, you are so confident, and I've certainly felt that with you. I've known you more than a decade now, and when I met you, I was like, oh my goodness, Orna's just so experienced and confident. It's quite funny to me that people now say things to me in the same way.
If people don't have that daily practice, like you, or don't have the sort of publishing history, and that's what I lean on. I don't have a daily writing practice like you, but I look at what I did a few months ago or last week or whatever, and I'm like, yeah, I know this will come round again. Like it's a creative cycle and I just have the confidence that it will come back.
So, if people listening, they're like, yeah, but I'm not as experienced, I don't have the years of that. Do you think that starting on that kind of daily practice, or how do people get over that initial sense of confidence?
The Importance of a Daily Practice
Orna Ross: I definitely feel that the practice is needed and helpful at every stage, but particularly when you're starting out.
What blocks you or stops you moving forward is some kind of disconnection from either yourself or your normal routine. So, when you're starting out as a writer, there are loads of things you don't know about yourself that you need to know to write with confidence, about your values and what matters to you, all of that.
I think a writing practice, and I also have a meditation practice, I think those two things for me are very core to staying connected no matter what's going on.
The other part that I think is really important, and we can forget about it because it doesn't seem relevant, is the self-care thing.
When we're tired, when we're stressed, if we're neglecting our physical needs, that cuts off creative flow. There is no doubt about that.
The other thing is limiting beliefs and habitual thoughts and ideas and concepts that we carry about ourselves or the job in hand that stop us from being able to tackle it with confidence.
All of those, to my mind, are eased or dissolved completely by a creative practice that keeps you in touch with your own creative flow, which is a deeper thing.
The thing is that the more you want to get on and write the book, the less you want to do these things, and the more irrelevant they can feel, but from my own experience and my observation, there are certain kinds of writers who really benefit from creative practice to an extraordinary extent, and I've never seen anyone who doesn't benefit to some degree.
Joanna Penn: I think my creative practice is writing books, and I do journal. I have a journal right next to me. I binge write and when I need to journal, I will go and I will journal, and I will write pages and pages, rather than the kind of everyday thing. So, I have that kind of practice.
Orna Ross: You also walk.
Joanna Penn: Yes, that's my meditation, I think.
Orna Ross: And we all have that experience, with aerobic physical activity, of the ideas coming to us. So, creative practice doesn't necessarily have to mean something that looks creative. It's more what generates your own creative flow.
I do think it's useful to separate our creative work, which might be writing the book, or it might be some publishing tasks or whatever is the thing that you're trying to do at the moment. To separate that from a creative practice that is done for no other reason other than to do it.
The box is ticked once you've done it. It's not about quality or it's not about achieving something. It's disconnected from that achiever mind. That's what I mean by practice, just as clarity.
Joanna Penn: I guess for people listening as well, obviously, we are quite different, and so that's important. Whatever you, the listener, find useful.
But I feel like sometimes, the indie movement as such, we can focus sometimes on the output, the sort of market pressures, the expectations, and I sometimes feel like people lose creative confidence when maybe they're trying to write to market when it doesn't suit them, or they're comparing themselves with authors who've done things in a certain way, and they're like, oh, I'm not that good, and so we're always comparing things that make us feel less confident, and then we get the fear of criticism as well, and always thinking of what other people think of us.
I feel like I definitely had that a lot more when I was starting out. I have that less now, although I still do. There were years when I didn't really talk about my obsession with Memento Mori and death culture, and my kind of gothic interests that I thought people would think I was a weirdo, and now I don't really mind. There's a lot of authors who are weirdos anyway.
Orna Ross: I think that's a really good point. I think whenever we are being creative and throwing that ball out there and trying to catch up with it, it's going to feel that way. You feel that sense of exposure and rawness, and that can stop us.
I think the more you do it, the more you realize that's part of it. I think confidence and resilience are very connected in that way. There is a whole side of this, that you can only do it by doing it and you can't be an experienced creative until you actually have done quite a bit of creating. That's just the way it is.
So, some of this can't be dealt with. You will feel it, you will experience it, you will go through it and you keep going, and then eventually you get to a point where, yes, you still feel it, but not as often or not as intensely, or even if you do feel it very intensely, I've felt this before, I’ve come out of it, it's not going to kill me, do my writing.
Joanna Penn: Yeah, it will come back.
Finding and Embracing Your Author Voice
Joanna Penn: Let's then talk about author voice, because I absolutely remember, I was in Australia and I was going to these writing conferences, mostly peopled by literary writers doing talks, and this sort of, you must find your author voice, and I would always write notes going, how do I do that?
This was before I'd written anything, so I was going to all the conferences and trying to learn about how to do it. But exactly what you've just said, you only can find your author voice by actually writing. I feel like maybe I found it with my book, Desecration, which was my fifth novel, and then eventually I actually went back and rewrote the first couple and that actually helped because I felt it deepened my voice, but why does voice matter? Like why is author voice something that we obsess with in this industry or in all creative industries, perhaps?
Orna Ross: Yeah, all creative industries, I think, and it's such an unhelpful term because at the beginning you're asking, what even is it? How will I know? How do I recognize it? How do I improve it?
But it does matter, and it's one of those indefinable creative things that's really hard to explain, but it does make you stand out. It's what your reader is attracted to, even if they don't understand that. It makes your books consistent across different books and even across different genre and format, certainly, and writers with a strong voice are writers who make more money and sell more books and attract more readers.
Also, I think for us, ourselves, there's this whole idea of the more we have expressed ourselves, the more “creative” we have been, the more pride we can take in our work. We have done that thing, that exposing, brave thing of putting ourselves out there, of expressing ourselves.
So, I think it is really important, but I know none of that helps us to find it.
Joanna Penn: Yeah, and it's funny because I also think I had this, I won't call it a block, but I had a bit of a wall perhaps around thinking that every book we wrote, there has to be something new in it. Oh, I can't write about another crypt or another storm in my fiction, because I've done that before.
Then I started to understand that these same themes, the same images and settings and types of characters, they are part of our author voice.
You just said, part of the voice is what the reader is attracted to in our writing, but it's also what we are attracted to. We are only writing about things that we are attracted to. So, I have storms in almost every book, some kind of storm. I have strong female characters who fight for family, often child free, because I'm child free, and sisters in particular come up over and over again. I have two sisters. Religious themes and settings. Although, as I'm not a Christian, I'm obsessed with religion, so I've got religious relics and catacombs and religious organizations and places, and I relaxed around not repeating myself and realized that those elements that I love are also elements that my readers love.
So, if I suddenly started doing completely different things, maybe I will at some point, but returning to the things we love is also part of our voice. So, what are some of your things?
Orna Ross: Yeah, definitely. I think of them as my obsessions; mini and minor and major. So, for me, it has to be said in the past or I'm just not inspired. So, I will never write sci-fi. If it isn't happening in the past, it just doesn't seem to engage me.
I realized after a long time that was also about memory and how we remember and what we remember, and how different people remember things differently and all of that. That's really rich territory for me and comes up again and again.
I write about death, but from a viewpoint of resurrection, what comes after the killing and the war, and I'm really interested in intimate war. So, I have one novel that's very obviously about civil war, but I think of all my fiction and lots of my poetry, as well, as being about that. I'm very interested in the layers of character and relationships, so I'm less interested in action, though I do like to do a twist and a fairly tightly plotted piece. I love the movement of the story, but if it doesn't happen with layered sort of relationships and twists and turns of a psychological and character nature, then I'm not interested really.
Then just physical things that turn up, Ireland obviously, a lot of my work is set there, and the sea is almost always there, or certainly a body of water in some shape or form.
Joanna Penn: This is important because you mentioned Ireland there, so if people don't know, you are Irish. They might not know, what is that funny accent you have? You are Irish, but you don't live in Ireland, and you haven't lived in Ireland for a long time, and I almost find that in itself, your worldview is different to an Irish person who stayed in Ireland, and in the same way I left for what, 12 years or whatever and have worked all over the place, and have come back to England and actually at the moment, really delving into what home means.
I was born in Somerset where I live now, and I'm back in Somerset, and it brings up a lot of kind of complicated things. So, I'm really exploring that too. So, I feel like the places that form our unique voice, neither of us could write the other person's thing.
I might write a story that has something Irish in at some point because I go there as a tourist, and you could write something set in Somerset or whatever, but it's never going to be that, and that's part of our voice too, isn't it? Really leaning into what makes us, us.
Orna Ross: Yeah, definitely, and very often for a lot of writers, it's the childhood stuff in some shape or form that's still obsessing us in later life, and that happens over and over.
I think there are things that come along as well once you're writing that help you to develop your voice and maybe even find it, but certainly develop it. For me, I started off writing as a journalist, and that teaches you to think about your editor and what they want, the audience, what they want, being useful, all those kinds of things, which are really important in writing, but you lean very heavily into that.
When I came to writing fiction, I had to unlearn a lot of that and trust myself, and I found the poetry really helped me to do that because in a poem you can follow the images and the rhythm and sensation, because it's small the stakes are lower and what I really learned from poetry was that the voice of individual poems, the images you use in those can be really quite different. So, the opposite to what we were talking about a minute ago, the stuff that turns up all the time. You can in a short poem, go places that you wouldn't be able to go if you were thinking about writing a long book, and it really helped me to understand that different parts of me have different voices and I knew that and was expressing that through genre, but that each of those genres needed a slightly different voice.
Still me, but obviously if I'm speaking as a poet, I'm not going to use quite the same word choices as I'm speaking as director of ALLi, it's going to be different.
We're both multi-passionate creatives who do lots of different things and so then it's the same voice, but it's also a little bit different, in a subtle way.
Joanna Penn: It's really interesting, you said there about being a journalist and having to unlearn things. I was thinking about back when I was a business consultant, so for people who don't know, for 11 years I used to implement accounts payable systems into corporate. That's what I did, and it's crazy because I used to write technical specifications. That was a lot of my job. So, I would be the person in between the business and the programmers. So, all the writing I did was technical.
Then when I started to get into creative writing and, I was like, I have a lot to unlearn.
So, it's really interesting that we had to unlearn things, and at this point I think we're way beyond having to unlearn stuff and we're more about learning new skills, but I learned to relax. I call it relaxing because I feel like my writing was uptight, because everything I did with technical writing, and probably with journalism, was cutting out any voice or any opinion or anything that was me, and I learned to relax through blogging and podcasting and I think if people go back and listen to me back in 2009, 2010, or look at my early YouTube videos, which are still there, I am so uptight.
It's so crazy to think that now, but I feel like part of finding your voice is almost relaxing.
What do you think?
Orna Ross: Yeah, I definitely do think so. Unlearning, I suppose, is part of that. Still, I feel sometimes, that there are things I need to let go, which is part of the same thing.
So, I suppose your voice gets clearer, depending on all the things that you let go, and also your sensitivity to language and words, specific words, there.
I remember doing an exercise by Donald Mass. The agent, but he's also a brilliant writing teacher. He's really fantastic. He did this amazing exercise where we picked a word and then we had to rewrite that word in the characters in five or six or 10 different characters, voices, what word would they use under these circumstances?
That was really great in terms of also understanding my own voice.
So, the editing process I think is where that part of writing, that deepening and editing, clarifying what you mean is very key for voice, I think.
Joanna Penn: Actually, that's a good point around editors, because I feel like good editors do not crush your voice. They make your manuscript better, but they don't turn those things into just generic language. I'm very grateful to have had very good editors, and I've never had this experience, but I hear from some people where they work with an editor who just tries to polish off all the rough bits and make it so it's not even their voice anymore.
So, is part of creative confidence knowing who to work with as well? To be strong enough in your author voice to say, this person might not be the best person for me, or to just hold onto what's truly you, but also allow professionals to help you improve.
Orna Ross: Yeah, exactly. It's getting that balance and voice is very much about balance. Specifically, when we're talking about voice, I think in the more literal sense, editors obviously, but our book design and stuff, that's all part of our voice, our voice and our brand are very linked.
So, now we're getting into sort of creative publishing and confidence around being a good creative publisher. I think those kinds of decisions, again, learning by doing, growing as you go and getting better at it and more confident in it. So, when you start out, you're playing safe because you need to. You have a lot to learn and you're looking at other people in your genre and to some degree you're copying them, stealing like an artist, all around you. Then there comes a point where you just want to break out of that, it begins to feel confining, and I think that's when you realize you've found your voice as a publisher.
Joanna Penn: Anything else on writing voice, because I wanted to talk about actual “voice” voice.
Orna Ross: Yeah, literally, audio voice.
Joanna Penn: Yes, audio voice.
Voice Cloning and AI in Indie Publishing
Joanna Penn: So, a part of our shows now is you and I talking about what's going on with us, and I have done the Kickstarter for Death Valley, which is a standalone thriller.
As part of that Kickstarter, I also have done my very first audiobook narrated by my voice clone through ElevenLabs.
Now, I've talked about doing a voice clone for years, and I've tried all kinds of different tools and or they've all been terrible, frankly terrible. Not terrible, but just a tiny percentage of meat.
Now, this is amazing. It really is amazing, and I love it, and I proofed it, and it was a very strange experience to proof a book where I wrote the words, but I did not speak the words, and yet I was listening to myself speaking the words. So, it was my actual voice by my voice clone. Although I didn't read it, I did train it with my recordings, so it is me. But I guess I'm trying to say that I have thought for many years now that as soon as I could clone my voice, I would license it and I would have it out there as an employee making money for me, and I could do that right now. I could license my voice and anyone could use it.
But in the process of proofing this book, I was like, oh my goodness, I don't want to do that. This is my actual voice, and I need to keep it just for me. So, you can do that on ElevenLabs, create a voice clone and then not license it. You can just use it for yourself.
So, I found this very interesting and I'm confident doing narration. I've narrated lots of nonfiction, short stories, but a full novel is a lot of work. So, I wanted to ask you what you thought about this.
Orna Ross: First of all, to say that's fascinating, because I've been listening to you talking about the cloning and licensing thing, and being disappointed across the years when things weren't technologically there. So, how interesting that when they are there you don't want to do it.
Joanna Penn: Yeah, but that's good. We can change our minds, can't we?
Orna Ross: Oh, totally. 100%. For me, you've always been all in on audio and audio's always been more of a secondary thing for me. I was interested, even in the notes for this, you said, you have a voice brand, and I'm thinking, have I?
I just don't think of myself, even though I've been podcasting practically weekly for over a decade.
But yeah, I've been waiting for the tech to improve on this. I had started getting my novels narrated and they're good enough, is how I describe it, but I'm certainly not over the moon about them. So, I've been waiting for this moment myself. I haven't had a chance to get stuck in there. I need to dive more deeply into what I actually feel about voice cloning now that has become a thing, a real thing, that I will explore and see what I want to do with it.
I know that I love AI as a way to extend my reach and make work more accessible and all of that, and save energy and do tasks that I wouldn't do, or do them better or whatever.
But I have questions at this point because I haven't gone there yet about the cloned voice, voice is tone and pronunciation and obviously all of that.
If you say it's great, I know it is great because I know you've been waiting, and I know you wouldn't say it was great if it wasn't. I'm just wondering about, will it feel like me, to me?
It certainly felt like you to that degree.
That whole thing of the energy behind the words, I feel like I'll definitely want to do my own poetry, with the human voice, and then probably do some voice cloning for nonfiction teachings and stuff like that, because I haven't done any of that.
Then fiction, we'll see in between. You can always get another voice to read your fiction anyway, and I think people are used to that and there's some attraction to maybe having a novel read by the author but read by the author's clone isn't going to possibly have the same attraction. So, I'm not sure these are the things I need to think about.
Joanna Penn: Yeah, it's interesting to come up against things where we thought we knew what we thought and then we don't. So, I would just encourage people there as well, because Orna actually said the words there, I love AI.
Orna Ross: Did I?
Joanna Penn: Yeah, you did.
Orna Ross: Oh, no. You know what that means?
Joanna Penn: People are going to quote you and just put it all over the internet.
But no, you said to extend your reach, and you used it for specific things, and I'm the same, and I think changing our minds around what we're happy with in terms of AI usage is really important. Especially with how good the tools are now, I've been using the o3 model, which is just fantastic.
But like I said, the voices are brilliant, and I think I had 120 people buy the audiobook on Kickstarter, and that will be out everywhere and on Spotify and on all these places in June, along with the eBook and the paperback and all that. So, that's part of my launch process.
The Future of Audio and AI Tools
Joanna Penn: I guess just as a side note, in terms of things that are happening in audio, Spotify just announced that they're changing Findaway Voices to InAudio, and then there'll be Spotify for Authors. So, I see that as them really expanding the possibilities for what we can do with audio. The other thing that's happened is the ElevenLabs, Eleven Reader, authors have started earning from Eleven Reader now, where you put the epub into Reader and then you can use any voice to narrate it, including famous actors and actresses, and I've talked about this too.
Do you remember me saying this? When I was like, why do I have to listen to a business book in an American male voice? Why can't I change the voice of the audiobook like I can change the voice of my Google Maps or my Siri, or whatever, I can change the voice. Why can't we do that with audiobooks?
And this is the app. This is the app that can do that. So, you choose whatever you want to read. Some of them are books and you can pay for a subscription, and then it will change the voice depending on what you want it to be. That's the first time we've had it, and so I feel like things are really changing in audio, and authors need to be aware that if you sign exclusive contracts or if you have signed your audio rights, you can't take advantage of these new things.
So, we really have to start pushing, I think, for stratification of audio rights, for really thinking about what audio rights mean in this kind of world.
Also, I don't know if I told you this, but I signed my first traditional publishing audio contract for AI narration. So, that is also happening.
Orna Ross: Interesting. Yeah, and I think we also, just on the side note around Spotify and Findaway, we are, at ALLi, investigating exactly what that means in terms of terms and conditions because Spotify hasn't been brilliant for musicians and we're not sure of the detail of that yet, and we will be having a podcast with Scott Curry from InAudio in the next week or two.
Joanna Penn: I think that's actually the point.
In 2014, I think was my first audiobook with ACX. That was the only choice we had in 2014, and I was signing, and many people signed royalty split deals with multi-year things, and many people have signed these contracts that lock them away with audio. Now, for example, I'm now making more money on YouTube for some of my audio books than I am through these other platforms.
So, with audio, my recommendation for people is to really try and be aware of how many ways you can make money with your audio. As you say, be very careful about locking yourself into any particular platform.
Orna Ross: Exactly, non-exclusivity here as elsewhere. Also note that audio is where all the growth is happening at the moment in publishing. So, not being in there means missing out on probably one of the easiest ways to find readers and develop a following.
Joanna Penn: Yeah, exactly.
I guess I also wanted to talk a bit more about AI usage. Again, why I am quite obsessed about this is people are worried. I have people email me and they say, aren't you worried that the AI will, I don't know, change your voice or the AI will impact the way that you want to create. Or if anybody is using AI to output the finished words, that those words won't be your voice. This is why I keep coming back to creative confidence. I know what is me. I know and I love my AI tools, and I can work with them, and they can amplify me, and I can become more creative.
But because I know what is me and what is the machine, I know when we work together on things that I still know what is me. I actually find it so much purer in terms of my voice than when I've co-written things, and you and I have worked together before. We are so different in our approaches that we literally have to separate timings.
So, Jo gets to do this time block and Orna gets to do this time block because we are so different. It's like we know exactly what we do, and I feel the same with the AI. I don't need to worry about that because I know what is me, and even if it gives me 20 ideas about something that I ask it, what are 20 plot ideas for this, my choice reveals my voice.
I think that's why I'm confident. What about you?
Orna Ross: Yeah, I think similar and when I was thinking about this question, I was trying to think about why I feel also that beginners are not in great danger here, and it came to me that creativity is never about a particular tool. A tool can never make you “creative” and it can't take your creativity away from you. Your creativity is innate, and it's resilient, and it's always renewing itself.
So, there is nothing to worry about there unless we absent ourselves through laziness or lack of care. Tools don't block flow, but misalignment does and it's understanding that I think, then you're fine.
Creative discernment is what you need to develop. It's a bit like in schools now, I don't know why they're still teaching facts and stuff to kids who can just look them up. What kids need so much is to be taught creative and critical skills, and they're not getting that in conventional education. Again, it's about unlearning a lot of our conventional education and cultivating our creative discernment. That ability to choose, when you can get a hundred ideas in a minute and a hundred more in the next minute, discernment becomes very important.
So, cultivating your inner compass when you're starting out, I think is done just as easily with AI tools around you as without. So, at the beginning of any project, you start with you, and in the middle you, you let the tools support your creative instincts, not replace, support, and in the end, you finish with you.
I don't just mean at the beginning, middle, and end of a project, but to each stage so that, for example, when brainstorming, you begin with your own ideas, then you ask the AI, then between the two of you, you finalize your conclusions. Very likely and very often, I certainly find that I come up with some mix of the two.
Rather than saying AI is a voice killer every step of the way, each step of the way asking, is it flattening my voice here or is it amplifying it?
So, the other thing I would like to say about this, and I know that a lot of authors are saying, don't say that you work with AI because the second you do you just unleash a load of hate.
But I actually think it's important that we are not ashamed of using these tools. I think it helps us all if we're open about it. It's about sharing your work and how you do your work, and if you have used it in an authentic way, a creative way, you'll be proud of what you've done.
Also, I think, knowing that you're going to be truthful about it can challenge us to make more creative effort along the way as we use the tools.
That's just my opinion there, because I know that a lot of AI-positive people are saying to me, I'm not going to tell anybody because basically I'm scared of what everybody's going to say.
Joanna Penn: Yeah, I understand that. I've had my share of AI hate since I have been vocally pro-AI since 2016. It's crazy that it's almost a decade since I've been talking about this on my podcast, and it's funny how I remember back and how people were saying I was completely crazy and what the hell was I talking about, and now look where we are.
It was actually two years ago when I put out my post on the AI-assisted Artisan author. That was two years ago. So, I'm absolutely with you. I talk about this all the time, and I love it, and it helps me do amazing things. Yeah, I don't have a problem with that.
I did also want to talk about real voice, because due to all these things going on, I recently also rebooted my Books and Travel podcast after a two-year break.
There are a few episodes up already, so there's almost a hundred episodes now, and in fact, Orna has talked about Intimate War and Ireland on my Books and Travel podcast wherever you're listening to this.
I wanted to come back to the podcast because for me, that show, it really is my obsessions, as we said earlier, it is my voice because I am doing it for real. I'm also doing videos which are going on my JF Penn Author YouTube channel, in order to the double down on being human, to really just lean into those things that underpin my fiction and also my memoir. So, a lot more stuff on Pilgrimage and all of that kind of thing, and this idea of home, which probably will be my next memoir.
So, I wanted to bring that up because it is my actual voice, but also, it's part of the creative confidence and again, coming back to something. Now, when people quit stuff, so I stopped that show two years ago. It was right to stop when I did stop and now it is right to return. So, we can quit things, we can restart things, and I guess that confidence is knowing when to stop and also when to lean back in.
I just had this intuitive sense of; I want to do this again. This fulfils me creatively and also underpins the human themes of my work.
Orna Ross: Yeah, and I'm having quite a similar experience because, again, AI-facilitated the Go Creative series, which I completely put on hold while I focused on poetry and fiction. It has come back to me and again, I'm approaching it through voice for now, just doing a podcast.
I had begun all that process just before my big life event took over, and it was a big change and a big shift at every level really, including social media shutdowns and changing all my autoresponders to reflect the different voices I was talking about earlier, and I'll be picking up that big job now. I definitely feel that the real voice is very important as we go forward with AI.
So, AI in this case is actually facilitating me to talk and use my actual voice. It's not about using AI voice.
Joanna Penn: Yeah, and it's interesting, your GoCreative stuff, when you put that down, I felt as your friend and someone who knew a lot of the work in that, that there was so much you wanted to do.
You had all these book ideas and there were lots of workbooks, and one thing I'm finding with the AI tools, especially o3, is that it is helping me with my chaos. I can give it a load of unstructured thoughts, like I gave it 30,000 words of unstructured thoughts about this idea of home and Somerset and weird stuff, and just said, okay, I'm really lost in this project, what can you wrangle from this, essentially? What insights can you bring?
This being lost in the material, I feel like that's part of the creative experience, but also having a tool to help find a way again, and I might not use the way that it suggested, but it really helped me to put my arms around something that felt too big for my brain. Is that an experience you've had?
Orna Ross: Yes, I have had it with this because the very nature of creativity and how you talk about it, do you talk about it from the self-help, the spiritual, the neuroscience, there's so many different aspects to it, and like that I got lost; I lost my voice in there.
I wasn't sure which voice I wanted to bring through and AI, just in a question-and-answer session with ChatGPT really helped me to work all that through, right down to platforms. I was getting very uncomfortable with Meta and suggesting platforms that will be better for me and more aligned with the people who are likely to be interested and all that kind of stuff.
So, I would not be doing this project now at all, and the big part of it is not for now, it's for later on, but even the bits that I'm doing or bringing it back, it wouldn't be back on my desk if it wasn't for the ability to do these things, for sure.
Joanna Penn: Yeah, absolutely.
Joanna Penn: I guess just to return to the main points, having this creative confidence to try new things. So, to try AI to play with it and to know, this is me, this is not me, or as Orna said, I'm not comfortable with this, or I am comfortable with this. This is all part of just learning and growing and trying things and finding it over time.
Any last thoughts, Orna?
Orna Ross: Again, thinking of the beginners, I'd like to say that it's not that you don't know at the beginning, your creative awareness is there and it manifests itself in what you like, what you're attracted to, what comes easy to you, what you enjoy, the themes that keep recurring for you, your values, all of that. It is there. It's there then at the start, as much as it is later on, as you go through.
But the difference is that at the beginning, doubt can knock you off. So, as you prove yourself to yourself, it gets easier to hold the faith. That's the only thing that gets easier, really, everything else stays difficult. So, at the beginning it's about finding ways to get over the doubt enough to keep going.
Joanna Penn: Absolutely. We hope you found this useful today and, of course, you can leave comments wherever you are listening or on the ALLi blog at selfpublishingadvice.org.
I guess that's it for now, Orna.
Orna Ross: That's it for now. We'll be back again with a new topic next time. Until then, everyone happy writing, happy publishing.
Bye-bye.
