AI and the Time Factor: Why Fast Feedback Transforms You as a Writer
Forget working smarter. The real AI revolution is about time. For writers who want to get better, that means one thing: instant feedback. With a writing coach, you wait days or weeks for feedback. With AI, you get it within seconds. The result: you learn faster, take bigger steps, and achieve in months what would otherwise take years.
Why Time Is Everything
No, money isn’t the scarcest resource for the average person. Time is: you’re born, you die, and you can fill the time in between in an infinite number of ways. Want to reach your goals? Then you’re dealing with processes that take time, sometimes even years.
Thanks to AI, you can now take processes that normally last hours, or even longer (days, weeks), and shrink them down to minutes or even seconds. The impact of that is hard to overstate. Because you need much less time for the same result, you can start on the next step almost immediately. And sure: if you use AI for that step too, you save time once again.
AI vs. the Human Writing Coach
An AI or large language model (LLM) lets you get instant feedback on your writing, or on a specific writing question. Got questions about a particular passage? About point of view, about show, don’t tell, about anything at all? AI can answer them up to a point.
An example?
“The chemistry test gets extensive, vivid treatment, with tension and resolution, but crucial moments like the conversation with Mom stay superficial. ‘She wasn’t even angry’ and ‘I said nothing’ feel passive compared to the detailed test scene. Why doesn’t this life-defining conversation get the same emotional depth as the school scene?”
This came straight from AI. That’s something you can work with. Do you need a human for this? No, you don’t.
Granted, a good human writing coach will probably give you even better feedback than AI. A human coach can assess elements of your writing that are impossible for an AI to judge: cultural elements, frame of reference, knowledge of society, understanding and assessing emotions.
But with a writing coach, you have to wait. Even if your coach is sitting right next to you, they first have to read the piece and then think through their comments before you actually get something you can use. At best, that takes a few minutes, and often it takes (much) longer. With AI, you get your feedback almost immediately.
When you’re in the middle of writing and you’re unsure about something, it’s nice to know right away: Am I actually doing this right? Is this the right direction? And if it isn’t: What am I doing wrong, and how can I improve it?
With instant feedback, you can keep going right away. And, maybe even more important: you keep your momentum and you’ve gotten a little wiser. The rest of your text, story, or manuscript will probably be just a little better thanks to that feedback.
Instant Learning: The Accelerated Learning Curve
Picture this: you put a whole lot of time into developing your writing skills. You work on them every day. And two or three times every day, you get feedback on what you write. That’s two or three lessons a day that you can apply right away.
So you know almost immediately what you’re doing “wrong” and how to improve it. And why that’s better. The logical result is that you progress much faster as a writer. In other words, you reach the level you’re aiming for much faster.
Achieve More in Less Time
Faster feedback means faster growth. And faster growth means writing that publishable manuscript sooner. Getting that book deal sooner. Maybe even a writing career that otherwise never would have happened. Or a lot more time to market the book you’re self-publishing.
Sure, more coaching in much less time still doesn’t guarantee success, but the more time you have left over, the more you can achieve in your life. The faster you get feedback, the more time you have to write at a higher level.
Instead of ten novels in your lifetime, maybe you’ll write fifteen. And on average, they’ll probably be of much higher quality.
Either way, time is finite. What you do with it isn’t. The question isn’t whether you’ll use AI for feedback. The question is how much time you want to waste before you start.
