University of Kwazulu-Natal

How Can Ai Help Writing Professionals Who Write Their Own First Drafts

Bonisiwe Shabane
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how can ai help writing professionals who write their own first drafts

If you believe in the power of your own writing without the help of AI, then you are not alone! Writing helps you to think. By starting with your own idea, your own outline and your own first draft, you can often produce your best work. While AI may promise faster results, the quality often falls short.. And the creative process isn’t quite the same. AI advocates might argue that it’s all about your choice of prompts.

It isn’t! What they fail to recognize is that professional writers often excel at drafting compared to AI. However, that doesn’t mean that AI has no role to play in the writing process. Writing is inherently a thoughtful and creative for anyone. But for writing professionals? It’s a superpower.

It’s a journey on which words and ideas seamlessly flow and intertwine at once in a process refined through a lifetime of experience and practice. While AI can generate content at lightning speed, it’s the quality that truly matters, especially in an era when anyone can harness AI. A single thoughtful, captivating, engaging piece, written in the author’s unique style, holds more value than a hundred mediocre documents. Essays Exploring Craft and the Writing Life “Shitty first drafts,” says Anne Lamott, “are how writers end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts.” Alexandra O’Connell calls it the Ugly Duckling Draft.

Austin Kleon, The Down Draft (just get it down). In Seven Drafts, I call it The Vomit Draft, but also quote Jenny Elder Moke, “y’all quit calling your first drafts garbage. What you’ve got there is a Grocery Draft. Put everything you bought on the counter and figure out what’s for dinner.” My own writing process doesn’t involve an entire shitty first draft, because I don’t write to the end before I go back and fix. Each day I work on a novel, I start by revising what I wrote the day before, cleaning up that scene and feeling the rhythm for the next one.

At the end of a writing session, I leave rough notes for the next scene—scraps of dialogue, action details, character development that must happen. Yesterday’s writing is the springboard to a better draft. When I sit down to those notes and fragments, Yesterday-Me has left a glorious gift for Today-Me: the gift of knowing where to start. Like that Dutch thing where they abandon their children in the woods in the middle of the night to make them find their way home (not kidding!), but with a compass. How will people compose text moving forward, now that every author working with a digital word processor and internet access can use generative AI? Many will likely opt to write traditionally as they did before, but some will use AI in partnership to draft.

At this point, the methods a writer uses to develop a first draft feel like a dealer’s choice dilemma—ask AI to generate the draft for you, or bring some of your writing to the... If students use AI in their drafting process, I’m increasingly drawn toward advocating for the latter method. I don’t like the idea of students going to AI and prompting a first draft. I know some have argued that this could be a helpful method to fight the blank-page anxiety most writers feel. Others view this as helping maturing writers by giving them a template or outline to help them organize and scaffold their ideas. I think there may be some value in those approaches, especially in terms of helping struggling students who might otherwise balk at writing, but all of these approaches assume a maturing writer will then...

Those of us who’ve taught first-year writing likely raised a questioning eyebrow at that idea. Students struggle quite a bit when writing. For many, that struggle is a productive one, helping them exercise habits of thinking and self-inquiry, testing ideas, taking creative risks, and often failing. Anne Lamott’s Shitty First Drafts lays bare this process with frank elegance. I wish developers of LLMs would read it because as Lamott puts it, there’s a profound disconnect in how many fail to divorce the reality of the writing process from the end product: People tend to look at successful writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million...

But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. That fantasy of the uninitiated doesn’t see the often maddening process that goes into shaping and forming the words and sentences on the page. Lamott does a wonderful job of articulating this struggle and demystifying it: Rekha Thomas, Principal at Path Forward Marketing, advises high-growth companies on GTM strategy and provides fractional CMO services. "AI for first drafts" has rapidly become one of the most frequently touted use cases by marketers for B2B content workflows. Marketers often point to saving time as a value prop of using AI, but this messaging oversimplifies the benefit.

After all, not all content serves the same purpose. With the right inputs (messaging and positioning docs, brand and style guides), AI can quickly generate first drafts of product data sheets, proposals and technical assets to save significant time. Coupling these primary sources with prescriptive prompting about audience and channel empowers marketers to automate content creation at scale. While AI excels at speeding up drafts in these examples, it falls short when content demands originality, nuance and authenticity. Abraham Verghese, author of The Covenant of Water and Cutting for Stone, spoke on the Writing Excuses podcast about the idea of muddling through as part of his creative process, saying: "I think we... You just can't adopt someone else's method and have it work for you.

It doesn't always happen that way." AI is fast. Humans are smart. The magic happens when you combine both. Startups today are moving fast. Building things.

Testing ideas. Raising money. The last thing most founders want to do is slow down to write a perfect draft—whether it’s a pitch deck, a product description, or a patent application. When it comes to writing for your business—whether it’s a technical doc, a go-to-market pitch, or an early-stage patent—the hardest part isn’t writing. It’s organizing everything you already know in a way that’s clear, useful, and fast to produce. Most of the key ideas are already in your head, your meetings, your whiteboard sketches.

What slows you down is getting those thoughts onto the page in a usable form. That’s where starting with what you already know is so powerful. It gives your content a strong, grounded foundation. And when you bring AI into that process—after you’ve laid down the core facts, thoughts, and direction—you move faster, with less friction, and more precision. This one shift helped me write faster without losing my voice. I used to open ChatGPT, dump in my idea, and wait.

It gave me perfect grammar. Clean structure. But something felt off. The draft sounded like a LinkedIn ghostwriter and a textbook had a baby. No spice. No weird.

No me. AI didn’t kill my creativity I did, by outsourcing my voice too early. “AI is a time-saver. Just prompt it and polish the output.” In this episode, explore why generative AI excels at creating first drafts. You’ll discover the key difference between first and final drafts in the writing process.

You’ll understand why AI’s creative, probabilistic nature makes it ideal for getting initial ideas down. You’ll learn how to leverage AI for the messy “ugly first draft,” saving you time and effort. You’ll find out how to best integrate AI into your writing workflow for maximum efficiency. Watch now to master AI-assisted writing! Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here.

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for watching the video. In today’s episode, let’s talk about writing, first drafts, and final drafts. Why is AI better at the first draft than the final draft? It’s not because AI can’t write. We know it can.

Properly prompted, it does an amazing job. If it’s not, then it’s time to improve the prompts. Starting a new writing project can be a daunting task, especially when faced with the dreaded writer's block. Staring at a blank page, struggling to find the right words, and feeling overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work ahead can be discouraging. However, with the advent of AI-powered writing tools, crafting engaging first drafts has become more accessible and efficient than ever before. In recent years, AI writing tools have gained significant popularity among students, writers, and businesses alike.

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