You can’t polish a turd

How I lean on humans and robots in my writing process

Writing is hard.

It’s basically making thousands of micro-decisions per second. And for a former perfectionist like me (or so I like to claim), that’s especially hard. Brutal.

So when I started seriously writing and publishing, I recruited all the help I could get.

From humans and robots.

Hocus pocus

When ChatGPT first dropped, it felt surreal.

Suddenly, I could just ‘talk to someone.’ No more crafting the perfect Google search. No more digging through blog posts just to get one straight answer. I could just throw in a half-baked, typo-ridden thought, and it would totally get it.

Magical.

I tried it on everything—figuring out the history of the alphabet, tracking down children’s book authors that don’t suck, and untangling some finance jargon I should’ve understood years ago. Sure, the mileage varied depending on the task but still, it was fast, cohesive, and impressive.

So why not try it for writing?

Well, because the more I used it and the more I expected it to do for me, the more I got disappointed.

The same words and phrases kept showing up. The language was predictable, unimaginative, and formulaic (I used ChatGPT to find that third adjective…). I mean, I still loved it for finding a quote from someone when I could only remember half of it, and it was fine for finding quick answers.

But I wouldn’t let it write things for me.

It’s fine

When you let ChatGPT write for you, it’s fine. Like the epitome of the word fine.

Like beige, boring, and bland had a weird, regrettable threesome and somehow birthed an even less remarkable lovechild.

Or like when you were a kid and mixed all your colors of paint together, hoping for a magical ‘new’ color, but you just got that familiar shade of shit-brown.

Nothing sticks out. Nothing is recognizable. It has absolutely no character.

Even if it’s pulling from the words of a million brilliant thinkers, it’s still averaging them down into a homogenized soup of ‘meh’.

I know this because I tried. Many times.

But whenever I tried to make it work for writing essays, I could never get it to sound like me or produce anything that I would dare put out.

Usually, I couldn’t even read past the first paragraph before making an actual ‘ugh’ sound, like out loud. The anatomy of an essay was undeniably there, but the soul was clearly missing.

I should have known better than to keep trying, I'd made this mistake before.

You can’t fix it in post

In music production, a good mix can do a lot. But it can’t save a bad recording.

In a previous career as a music producer, I’ve spent many hours trying to salvage weak recordings—cleaning up the sound, adjusting levels, adding effects to hide mistakes. And yes, with a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, I could make a song passable.

But it always felt like bluffing my way through a high school test, hoping the teacher wouldn’t notice I was full of shit. No amount of tweaking ever turned a red-marked mess into an A+.

The best producers know this. They don’t fix things in post.

They pick the right space. They get the mic placement right. They make sure the artist feels comfortable. And they capture something real.

Because no matter how much studio magic you throw at it, you can’t turn a flat, lifeless take into a performance that grabs you.

Too many bad recordings later, I finally got what my teachers and mentors had been saying all along: ‘You can’t polish a turd.’

I eventually realized the same rule applied to writing.

And no matter how advanced AI gets, it can only work with what you give it. You have to capture something worth mixing before you ever hit record.

Sparring: the pre-production of writing

For me, the best way to ruin an essay is to sit down and start typing.

Staring at a blank page, waiting for a masterpiece to write itself, is like recording your 6-year-old nephew’s violin practice on your phone and expecting Mozart.

Great writing, like great music, starts way before recording.

That’s why before I write a single word, I spar (basically thinking out loud with my writing friends). But it wasn’t always like that.

In the writing community that I’m in, we were already actively swapping drafts, giving feedback, and refining each other’s work. But that was all after writing a draft. I realized I needed to talk to people before I started my writing process.

I essentially stole this idea from coaching, where instead of thinking for people, you help them untangle their own thoughts. By asking questions, encouraging them to see new angles, and helping them think out loud, they can start recognizing what actually makes sense to them.

So, I started doing the same thing with my writing crew. Instead of waiting until we had drafts, we’d meet up and talk through our ideas first. We’d take a rough idea, say it out loud, and see where it led. Challenging each other, poking at the weak spots, digging deeper.

Suddenly, instead of wrangling my unruly thoughts into submission and still coming up with a draft that refused to make sense, I had something solid to work with.

This worked so well, I never stopped. And soon, it wasn’t just me. Other writers picked it up, and before long, it was just how we worked together—pushing each other’s thinking further than we ever could on our own.

It’s exactly why AI couldn’t replace this part of the process (yet…).

A chatbot won’t push back. It won’t interrupt, challenge, or make you clarify. It’ll just give you a cleaner version of whatever sloppy idea you feed it.

At first, I thought that meant AI had no place in my writing at all. But eventually, I realized the problem wasn’t AI—it was how I was using it.

Second best

I’ve spent a good chunk of this essay bashing AI, especially ChatGPT.

But the truth is, I’m already quite dependent on it.

At first, I thought ChatGPT was just a very polite, overconfident, slightly stupid assistant. And while that might be true, turns out I’m the the stupid one.

The problem isn’t AI, but how I was using it.

I suck at structuring essays, so after sparring, when I have solid ideas but no clear outline, I throw my notes into AI. Not to write for me, but to help me see the skeleton and go from there.

Look, I’d rather have human sparring partners on call 24/7—but that would be cruel and expensive. So ChatGPT really is the second-best thing.

But when I skip the sparring step?

Well. Time to break out the polish, I guess.