Unlocking the Writer Within: Exploring Legacy Writing, AI, and Overcoming Fears 

Unlocking the Writer Within: Exploring Legacy Writing, AI, and Overcoming Fears

In this webinar, participants discuss their writing experiences and challenges, particularly those related to legacy writing and memoirs.

Key topics include the impact of storytelling, differences between memoirs and autobiographies, strategies for stimulating creativity, and the role of AI in writing.

The conversation also covers the psychological barriers writers face, the evolving publishing industry, and various personal anecdotes about the writing process.

Experts share insights on leveraging AI tools, outlining legacy writing courses, and the therapeutic benefits of journaling.

00:00 Introduction and Greetings

00:11 Early Writing Experiences

01:23 Multi-Author Books and Publishing

02:46 Personal Writing Journeys

05:08 Legacy Writing and Family Stories

12:56 Fears and Challenges in Writing

15:58 The Importance of Storytelling

19:49 Preferences in Reading Formats

24:38 Left Brain vs. Right Brain in Writing

32:51 Rediscovering a Classic: The Road

33:46 Personal Journeys in Writing

35:55 Memoirs vs. Autobiographies

39:11 The Art of Journaling

49:44 AI in Writing: A Double-Edged Sword

01:00:45 Connecting and Learning: Writing Courses and Coaching

01:03:21 Final Thoughts and Farewells

To connect with Micah Schwader and learn more about how to create your legacy life story, visit:

https://inspiredlifepublications.com/your-legacy-life-story/

Transcription:

 Here we go. Welcome everybody. Welcome Tim and William. Hey there. This is a very informal. If you have questions along the way, we're just going to chat, but it was like 2001, maybe 2002. I signed up to write a chapter of one of your books. And it's wow, talk about time flying. A lot has happened in the last 20 some years for both of us.

Several lifetimes, I believe, actually. Yeah that's definitely true. For sure. Yeah. When I got certified as a coach, he said, best way to get speaking engagements is to write a book. And the best way to get clients is to write a book and speak at events. I knew nothing about it. And somehow I came across Mika.

And signed up to write one of the chapters of your books. I don't even remember what the book was, but I knew nothing about writing a book. Was it self esteem? There were 10 of them, and you were early on. So it was either self esteem, achieving abundance, or clear, compelling vision. I think one of those.

Those, I didn't look it up. They're in my archives now. That's a little bit, I think they're still on Amazon, but probably not for sale anymore. I got a few in my garage, probably. Probably. I got a lot of books in my garage. I tell you, those books are awesome because, and they're still a thing. I still work for a publishing company that does multi author books as an editor.

And it's launched quite a few people. Laura Langemeyer was on that first book too. She became a bestseller in her industry as well. She was a financial coach. And then several other people that launched there. Both publishing and speaking careers through those series. And I've done actually 17 of those books.

Now I did 10 in my series that you were in, and then two more in the equine facilitated learning and coaching industry called horses teacher. Those have actually been the best sellers and they continually sell. I still get royalties 15 years later from those books. All of the books actually. And then I did another one for what was her name?

Her dad is her dad was a famous speaker, motivational speaker, Dr. Ono Ona. She did one and hired me to do the coaching and then I did, I've done another one and then two more since then for this new publishing company. Yeah, so there's still a thing it's a, it's an art and there's, and a lot of people have, taken it and done a lot with it, it's been very helpful for many people.

Yeah. And myself, I learned a lot during the process in how to coach people to be better writers as well. I like to get those royalty checks. I just go in the other day, it's still coming in. It is so nice to have that passive income coming in and every day, every beginning of every month, go, Oh, let's see how much made today.

So how many people here have written a book? I know Tim, you've written a few books if you want to unmute and tell us about your books. Am I unmuted? He's unmuted. Yeah. So yeah, I've written three similar books and then one I, it was called thoughts from the soul and it was just when I was going through some turmoil I wrote down my thoughts, put it to photos, but the last one I just written it was a children's book, family book for ski families and it was called the What was it called?

Geez, I forgot the name of it already.

Don't worry. I've done the same thing. What is my book called? But it was something like the, hang on a second, it's gonna bother me if I don't, I think it actually bought a copy off of Amazon and that's here somewhere around me. . There it is. It's the Legend of Lake Placid. There we go. And. It's a family book I wrote when I'm a skier, when our families go out together.

And my niece and nephew and I were on a ski lift one day and some very pointed questions came up about the Mardi Gras tree at the bottom of the Mogul Run. And so that, that started the whole story. Interesting. Interesting. Very cool. It's awesome. It's awesome to have written. A story, a family story.

Now, was it a fictional account of that or was it the actual event? It's a fictional account of it. Okay. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. The preface starts off about the nonfiction part of it, but then it rolls right into a fictional story. So there's so many ways to actually write. I was I wrote to Ted earlier today.

There's a lot of ways to do legacy writing. You can do fictionalized, you can do nonfiction, you can do memoirs, you can do books specifically for families. My history actually in the legacy writing is back in, it's going to go way back in 1978 when I was a senior in high school, I I was asked to do a family book for my family.

I have a very large family. My mom is one of 13 children and I'm one of 61 first cousins. And so we so I did that and that was literally the paste and cut, cut out the text, type it up, cut it out. Put it on there and then take it all to a printer, big binder, and then they would print it. So we did that about 300 copies and everybody loved it.

It was great. My grandmother signed a bunch and then, it was really good, but that was just a genealogical history with pictures. History, each one of the siblings, the 13 siblings wrote a little, usually a couple paragraphs of what their family was, where they lived or something like that, but it wasn't a story.

And so then 20 year in 2000, they came back to me. And by this time, I was working online full time. I was a remote worker, one of the very first. Digital nomads, I had the big old clunker 25 pound Macintosh lap book and would dial up modem. And I was traveling around and they asked me if I would take that project on again.

And this time now we've expanded from basically a database of 300 people to over 700 people, but now I had the tools to actually do that. So what I did was in the third of the book was stories that I wrote about my family. Third were other people that wrote stories about the family and then the genealogy piece of it.

We printed about 700 of those books and they all sold out. So you know, there's a lot of different ways that you can do legacy writing. Memoir is another one. You just gave me a good idea. It's like years ago, my mother interviewed my grandfather and recorded it all like hours and hours. And he was telling stories about in, when he grew up in Greece, the war was going on and they're like on trains running, evacuating from the bombs and he just incredible stories.

That it's so eight hours of them just having a conversation. What a treasure trove. That would be an incredible source of information and probably a lot of fun stories to write as well out of that. Yeah. You should get those transcribed. And that's a way to do it. That's what we've done in my family too, is we recorded my grand, I still have this cassette tape of my grandmother's both sides.

and my mom and dad talking and then we did a lot of video of them as well. And we've done a lot of videos since then of us remembering stories. Because that is such a, it's such a loss when you don't have that opportunity to leave that history for people. And to be able to go and have that eight hours, my gosh, that's a lot of just stories, I'm sure that would be great to listen to again.

Actually cassette tapes. That's what I have. It's that might be the only problem is finding something to play that on. But but yeah that's a big one. I just recently finished my memoir and the, it took a while, about 15 years, cause I'm like the carpenter that never got their house built.

Cause they're always helping other people publish their works. But I finally finished it after 15 years. And that feeling while writing it of having that. Reflective process, like seeing yourself and understanding yourself differently because you've written about yourself.

And even going back and reading it again, cause I'm doing the audio book now and reading it as I'm literally speaking, it is quite an experience it's like bringing all kinds. It brings all kinds of emotions up, but also really what happened was when I first wrote it, the first draft of it.

back 15 years ago. I set it aside, didn't touch it for a couple of years. And then I picked it up after a couple of years and I was reading and it was like, Oh my gosh, I don't even like the character. I was such a victim in my own memoir. It was like, I have everybody else's fault for what was happening in my life.

And and I also wasn't was telling it versus showing it. I did this, I did that, I did this, I did that, they did this, it was very telling versus stories. And and I was just at that time, really doing non fiction storytelling, I call it creative non fiction, in my coaching. Because the early books were all, in fact, the, That was one of the things that the multi author books taught me.

After the first three books, I had all the authors of those three books read each other's books and give me feedback on them. And the singular thing that they said was, it was very clear, was the ones that were telling stories were the ones that they remembered. And that shifted my coaching because this was nonfiction writing.

So telling was You know, part of nonfiction writing. And so that shifted my coaching into I'd come from a technical writing background, so not a creative writing background. And so I had to learn how to become a better storyteller in order to coach my people, my, my clients on how to become better storytellers.

And so that was a huge shift for me in how to present. Nonfiction work. And then there was a whole move about the same time this reporter from Portland in the Oregonian. I'm lived in Portland for 20 years. He won a Pulitzer Prize for writing stories around the news. And that just opened up journalism to the story of story type writing of journalism versus just, I'm going to tell you the news.

And so that was a huge time. And then about, what was it? 10 years ago, maybe eight or 10 years ago, it hit the marketing world and storytelling and marketing became a big thing. Like you don't just tell about the course, but you tell a story about your course. And so I've seen the storytelling throughout my career.

Really becoming on becoming more and more important. And then right now I'm 64. So now I'm looking at what's next in people's lives. And I'm hearing it all the time. Ted, you have Epic Encore. My sister has one for women, it's this hers is leave your legacy, live your legacy before you leave your legacy, and I'm doing legacy writing courses because this is a time of life where you look at and you say, okay, this is something that I've always wanted to do.

Why am I not doing it? And most people tell me it's because they don't have the time to do it. A lot of people do have time at this time in their life, although time, I was, I've talked with Ted about this before, time is an excuse, not it is an excuse because you can find the time if you really want to do it and if it's important to you.

But what really came through in my coaching over the years was that writers tended to have one of six fears, at least some have all of them, but they still want to write, you're still compelled to write. So the six fears are there's, and these relate. If you can identify the fear in the writing process, typically it's the same fear that keeps you from other parts of your life, the business or the life part.

Because the same fear will show up. And so the first fear that always comes up and it's come up and even seasoned writers like me, I still have these fears at times they come up. So the first one is, what will people think about what I write? So that's a content oriented thing. Is it going to offend somebody?

Is somebody going to get mad and sue me? What is the content piece of it? Second one is what is, what will people think about how I write? So it's a style thing. So it's more am I going to use words that dazzle, am I going to need to have a dialogue? There's the style piece of it, the voice piece of it.

And then the third one is. Who am I to write this book? I haven't really done anything in my life. Some people might say I might have interesting stories, but I haven't really accomplished anything, or I don't have the credentials or whatever. It's a I'm not good enough fear, basically. And then the fourth one is usually around scarcity of time and money.

Time or money could be either one. What is it going to take to get it edited? What is it going to take to get it published? What are the, what ifs, or if I take time away from my business and write, what, how's that going to affect my business? Or if I take time away from my family and write, how's that going to affect my relationships?

So those are all in that same category. Fifth one is around one is about time. The fifth, fourth is about time. The fifth is about money. The sixth is, and this is a big one is, and it relates a little bit to the who am I to write this? And that is, is my message important enough? Is what I have to say important enough to spend my time writing it, publishing it, promoting it.

And that's probably the biggest one that stops most people. Which is ironic because all of us have great stories, especially for legacy writing, where you just, you may just be writing it for your own family. It's okay, what is, why is that? Why are those things stopping me? But what I've also found from my clients is that.

It comes back to that comfort zone. We can live in our comfort zones for a long time. Eventually something will come along and bring up a fear because that's what moving out of your comfort zone will do. And so it can be a little fear, a big fear. And if you want it bad enough, you're going to step outside your comfort zone and you're going to do it.

And you expand your comfort zone, you get over the fear, but then, you know what, you go down the life path again. And pretty soon you find another thing that you're going to fear. So you can keep Fearing the writing, or you can just move into it and say, okay what, even in the writing process, discover what your fears are, which is the most amazing part of the writing process is.

is using it as a reflective tool for how you want to live the next part of your life or how you want to live the current life that you're living. We judge ourselves so much when we worry about all these things, but it's like Tim did, he just wrote the books. Just do it. People like them, they like them.

If not, it's okay. We got it out. Exactly. And. It's just like anything else, the more you do it, because that's a big thing right now is writing series short book series on Amazon, because you can only, you only have to promote one book, but you got 10 books in a series. That's a big thing right now.

You write your first couple books and get that out of the way, you get your jitters out of the way and stuff like that, maybe not even publish them. But you've written them, you can say you've got them done. You've got them on paper. And then you write the one that starts the series and you get people to be on the edge of their seats.

And this can be nonfiction too, but fiction or nonfiction, keep them wanting more. So it's like the first one in a nonfiction, you get them into the why and the, the purpose of doing it. And then the next book is about the how, then, you can do on and on. And you can.

You can give them pieces of information in a series and these can be in just ebook form. You don't even have to get them printed, it's just, there's a lot of, there's a lot of interesting developments in the publishing world right now because of the people's attention spans, if nothing else, they're just not into reading 100 or 250 page book, it's it's not they will listen to it.

And that's the other thing is audio books right now are the hottest thing in, because once you get it recorded, there's no printing costs. Whatever Amazon takes their cut, the rest is profit in an audio book. Especially if you can do it in your own voice, anyway, gotten way off traffic, I could talk about something there.

I had never read a Stephen King book, so I took one out of the library when I was on vacation this summer, and I got the Kindle version. I'm reading and reading and reading. Like, how is it goes by? There's like a 500 page book. I only got like halfway through it. Will I? How is his? I've never read any of his books.

I'm not a horror fan. It just kept going in different threads and oh my God. I was like, this could have been five books, . And I realized that myself. That's that, once I finished my memoir, I realized I could have broken it down into segments because it continues. I'm not done with my life.

There's still more, but it did feel important for me to get it in that form out to the world. Finally. Yeah. I got a question quick survey. Ted mentioned, Kendall, all the books that I've ever published are paperback. I see. Mark has a book. a bunch of paper, a bunch of books behind him. I like to really grab a book and feel the cover, feel the paper, and read.

Ted, you said, you mentioned Kettle. How many on the call, what's your preference for reading? I actually go back and forth. I like to hold the book too. But then with the Kindle, you can make the font bigger. So I'm torn on that. And for me, if I'm not sure about the book, I'll get it on audible first.

And I'll read, I'll listen to it while I'm walking and it'll either make the, make the cut or it won't. If I do like it, then I'll buy the Kindle version. If I really like Then it ends up in the stack back there, but that's generally not the first by that's usually the second or the third.

Interesting. And I struggle to get through fiction books. Ted. So yeah, I get it. It's like they're all like, that thick and then you should maybe be that thick. I want the Dr. Seuss version. One murder, two murder, red murder, blue murder. I I would say audiobooks. Perfection eBooks for nonfiction. And then like you, if they were really like, I want to mark this up and, in the margins and I'll get the print version.

One of the reasons for me years ago that I switched to Kindle predominantly is because I travel a lot. And so it was just easier to have the digital version right there, and I can pull it up anytime. I used to have thousands of books in my library, and when I had to move a couple of times, I decided, it's really nice to have a digital version of all these books, but I still have the special ones that I just can't let go.

I do love to open a book and smell it, and write in the margins and stuff like that, or highlight it. But but for, it just, it really depends on the situation anymore. But what I've heard in the industry is that there was initially when eBooks first came out, we swung over to eBooks were the, Oh, it's going to be the biggest rage, but then I always kept hearing that thing of I like to pick it up and just read it.

Yeah. And then audio books came out. So then there was a kind of a pause to it. And now there's a big swing back to print books, actually. Interestingly. eBooks will always be popular because the young younger folks coming up aren't used to reading print books. But the boomer age right now the boomers moving into that the twilight years is the seems to be an uptick in books in printed books.

I know records are on their way back. Same thing. Yes. It's like that. We call them memories.

So anybody else have any other questions? That's a good question. William, do any of your clients want to write legacy books? I have a friend that actually does video versions of that for people who want to tell their story and leave it. He does, he videos them and asks them questions. Yeah. Ted knows I'm an estate planning attorney.

No, they tend to want to get the paper in place and then leave this alone. They don't. I've, I thought when I got into the business that people would want the full service of how do I organize all my materials and write things for my grandchildren and all that. They don't want that. Give me a will, give me a trust, give me the living will, sign it, done.

Okay. I'll stick it in the file. There isn't a real push to do anything more than that. But at the same time, when they're done with that, at least half the people will say, you'll see the shoulders go, I am so glad this is done. It's such a relief to get the paperwork done and say, okay, if there are any problems, they belong to my descendants, I'm done.

But there isn't a lot of. I have to tell my kids the story I lived. I think, and I would say that there's a reason for that because what you're doing is, and this is one of the things that I. Talk about a lot in my coaching, and that is how, and this isn't scientific as much as, I mean there is science, some science to it, but how the left brain and the right brain work together in the writing or creative process and the work that you're doing is a very linear thing.

It's very get all your ducks in a row, get all your finances, it's a very linear thought process and that's a very left brain thing. Writing your story is a right brain emphasis. The right brain is the, where the creative, the imagination, the, the kind of, it's not very clear a lot of the times initially.

It's the left brain that makes the, makes this stuff clear. So in my writing process, what I do is I have people do director or stream of consciousness writing, because that's accessing your the creative aspects of your brain, and it's just get it down on the paper. It doesn't matter. That's it's structured.

Doesn't matter that it's even got punctuation or the right grammar or anything, it's getting that creative process, thought process out on paper as you do that. One, two things happen. One is you get clearer, so your right brain is getting clearer in what it's processing through the writing. And at the same time, your left brain is going, I want to organize this.

I want to put some structure around this. There needs to be some sort of way that this makes sense. It's this left brain, right brain thing going on all the time with us. This is in every creative endeavor. Whether it's building a business, Whether it's painting or sculpture or writing, whatever it is, this is the same process.

So you're then once you get the left brain and the right brain working together, then that's when the storytelling becomes just beautiful because, and as an editor, I can tell you, the editing stops when you're getting those two to work together, what happens because we are, especially in the U S a very left brain dominant society or culture.

is that the emphasis is on writing from this side. So we're taught in school, I was taught in school, I was a technical writer, I was taught in school, write a, write an outline first. Sometimes I didn't know what, would I even have an outline because I didn't know what I wanted to write about. But no, we had to start with an outline.

And that was throughout college, I had no fun as, even though my degree is in writing, I had no fun writing. Because it was left brain process and left brain is, you struggle when you write from that place. Even if you're writing about technical things. It's a struggle to write from this place because that's not as it's not where it comes from this.

So I would say that's a big reason. Now, I would say if you went back to your clients a month later, even two, six weeks later and say, Hey, have you ever thought about writing your life story and come from a more creative or imaginative or what this could do in terms of leaving a legacy for your family?

I think they'd have a different answer. Because it's a very different thought process of getting your will in place, and then writing your life story. Yeah. For sure. You got somebody knocking on my door persistently, I better shut the f up. But yeah, I would say that's a big reason. And I think that's one of the reasons why I see more women authors than men as well.

It's because men tend to be in that linear space more than the right brain. In fact, there's a great TED talk I saw, I can't remember his name, but he was writing about the difference, he was talking about the differences, he was a brain I think he was a neurosurgeon, about the differences in men and women's brain.

He was making fun of it, but he was saying, okay, imagine a man's brain is you A series of drawers and what happens is they'll open one drawer and say, okay, what's in this drawer? And they'll, work with this one drawer, but they can't, open any more than one drawer. What doesn't happen?

He said, now a woman's brain. Is like a bunch of copper wires all mixed together and there's things going on all over the place. And they've got, they're multitasking and they're doing this and they're doing that and they can think of a million things and they got lists going and, they can move from topic to topic with no problem.

And he said but meanwhile the man is just one drawer at a time. And when I was describing this to my sister and brother in law and they were like that is so true. That's all, my brother in law Rodney, he would only be able to focus on one thing. And so we come from, so changing that and going in and doing stream of consciousness, is a way to really engage your right brain.

What that also does then is it brings up all those fears, because, you're going into an area of things that you're not used to being in. And so it's like scary to sit down and it can be very messy in the initial stages of writing anything. Yeah. And that's scary to a lot of people.

And there are women that are afraid of that too. So it's not just men, but women that are afraid to go into that creative space. Because they've been told not to for so long. So all the books I've written are like the technical books. I had this I got these, I was supposed to co write the books with Perry Marshall.

And signed the deal and he goes, I don't even have a LinkedIn account. So you just write that book. I'm like, holy crap. And then there was a Twitter book was the other one. He goes, I am on Twitter, but I don't see any value. And I'm too busy. I'll just, I'll write the forward for that. So I had never written.

So I have to sign contract with huge advances, a deadline for both books. My mother's sick, ready to pass away and I'm working full time. So I'm like, Oh my God, what am I going to do? So the Twitter book, there were no other Twitter books out there yet at the time. So I just went through Twitter, the interface and the help and just piece together stuff.

And they wanted 300 pages Oh my God, there's no way I can write 300 pages about Twitter at the time. So I came, something just came to me. I said why don't I just, I'm following some people on Twitter that are just doing really well. I interviewed them and transcribed it and added it as bonus sections in the end.

And the LinkedIn book was like, there was a lot of LinkedIn books. So I got went through Amazon, looked at the top 10 selling Amazon books, looked at the table of contents, mapped it out. So I created my outline, but I said, here's what they're all talking about. And here's some gaps I could fill in.

And then I wrote from there, but it was all left brain stuff. That, not a lot of creativity in there. It's more click here, do this. So it's very interesting. So I'd love to write a fiction book, but so I'm trying to read more fiction books. But like Mark said, I'm struggling with fiction books.

What is your struggle? I don't know. I've been in the tech world for the whole life. Fix a computer, set up a computer network. It's like very factual, very binary. I have to get bored with them. Yeah. But it was funny. I read the road years ago and it was a depressing read and this morning I came across a quote in my read wise that was from the road.

I wonder what he has to say about this. So I Googled him and I found a video where he was talking about the book and why'd you write such a depressing book? And he says, that's not a depressing book. It's about the love of a father and a son. The whole book is about that. And he said, if I had not had a son, there's no way in hell I could have written that book.

Completely transformed the view of that book and the comment that was in my read wise was when they're in the they're on the walk when they're doing their trip down the road, they have limited supplies and they've agreed that they're going to share the supplies equally. And it doesn't matter that the kid's little and the dad's big.

They're just going to share everything 50 50. And apparently one morning, the dad gave the kid more hot chocolate than he was supposed to. And dad, and he says, the kid says to the dad, if you won't keep the little promises, you're not going to keep the big one either. Wow. Brought home the guys, the author's comment, but yeah, it was cool.

Yeah. I'm probably like a lot of you. I've been in the technology field my whole life. So I've written manuals and things like that, but, and I've always been In the analytical details all the time, so I ran across Richard Bach and I've read every book of Richard Bach because when I was traveling, I needed to escape for a while from my normal life.

So I would read his books and all his were pretty much non pretty much fiction. John Grisham books. And Sheldon Siegel is a good friend of ours. Our sons grew up together and he's written like the San Francisco version of the John Grisham books. He's written like 20 now, I think. Are any of you writing a book right now?

No. I'm just getting ready. It's like a memoir, but it's not. It's my pilot log. I've been a pilot for 50 years. And I'm taking all my notes in my pilot log of all my experiences and starting to assimilate some type of a story. As a memoir, be great. Airport reading.

Exactly. You would know where to promote your book, Tim. Some saved somebody's life Tim? Yeah. Yeah. I, when I say pilot, I was a pri private pilot, so in technology I actually, I got the ha brainin scheme when I was in sales and consulting and technology in my early years. I I bought a plane. I became a pilot, got my instrument ratings and everything, and I used that for my travel.

And yeah, short story, long, long story short, I was flying over Washington D. C. and a distress call came out, and I had to talk a young girl down that only had five hours of flight time, and her instructor went unconscious. Oh, wow.

That'd be a great story. And I wanted to actually, that was one thing that comes up a lot is what is the difference between a memoir and an autobiography? And really what the difference is that an autobiography is usually the more the linear version of a full lifespan. So it's more historically accurate, it's the, it's may still be in story form but may not be as well.

Yeah. It's more of a telling of a person's life, whereas a memoir can be even one day in a person's life. It's one significant or a series of significant events, and there's a message within that, those events. So the memoir is, for some reason, either inspiring or a guidance of some sort or both.

So that's the difference between a memoir. For example Maya Angelou wrote three separate memoirs. The first memoir was really only between the age of 12 and 20, Caged Bird Sings. So that was her early life. And then she wrote another one later. They were, her writing was such that they could have been fiction even, but they were her life stories.

Can just. Do one where it's a full on, here's my life in all of its detail. Or these are my memoirs. I think that's one of the reasons why it's these are my memories versus are these really factual. And yes, they're your memories, and they may be factual and they may not, because they're your memories, because you can be in a room with someone and they see the same thing completely different.

And and then the other thing about a memoir that you can do with not complete license, but for example, in my memoir, there were several instances, it's I have studied shamanism for 25 years. I have a doctorate in shamanism. And so I, this the book is, A large part of it is about shamanism and it's like the it was a point I was going to make there.

Oh, some, there's years and years I have of journals of my shamanic. Journeys, they call them, and my shamanic ceremonies that I participated in and various things, rituals and healings. And so if I had written all of those things, it would have been maybe not a bad idea, four or five books. And so sometimes I would condense several of the journeys into one journey or, several of the dreams into one dream.

Like I was getting pieces of the information, but they weren't always in the same dream. But if I told 10 different dreams to get the same message. It would just, it's just too much. People wouldn't want to read that. So I would condense it. Condense a lot of dreams down into one dream. That kind of thing.

So you can have a little bit more license in your memoir. You can, oh, this is what my memory of the dialogue was. It may not be word for word. That's okay. It's again, your memories. That would be my grandfather's story. He told my mother through the interviews, his memories of growing up and it was Greece at the time.

And now it's Turkey. So the Greeks and the Turks were fighting. So it was all his memories. I'd love to listen to those and I don't even, I'm not in your family, but I'm sure a great amount of stories. So anybody else writing anything right now? Any, Mark, are you writing? Masterclass. com, they have a lot of authors that teach how they come up with their ideas.

David Sedaris, how he researches something, he just observes stuff and writes it down. And then somehow he pulls it all together into a funny article. So it's I do that every day I go for walks, I've wrote almost my entire book by the water, either by the ocean or by the river, a river and rivers.

And I go into nature a lot. That seems to be a really good place to stimulate creativity, is to engage in nature. Because for, I think a couple of reasons, it brings you into the present. Because a lot of times our thoughts are on regret or anxiety instead of just being present. And when you access that presence, that's when you get a lot more inspiration and imagination coming in.

It's like all of a sudden, it's like when you're. I get a lot of ideas in the shower. I don't know why. Same with walking or driving. Sometimes I get a lot of ideas because you're letting go of the thoughts because you're doing something else. And then all of a sudden you're in the moment and you go, Oh, that that makes sense.

Oh, that's a great idea. Yeah. What was that? Thomas Edison and all the big inventors, Einstein, they carried a notebook. So when these ideas came to them, they would write them all down. So they had notebooks full of ideas because by the time you get home to write it down, you forget. Exactly. But I started recording it on a voice memo on my phone now.

I don't have one handy, but I have these, I get them by the box full. They're tiny journals. I like with no lines in it, but they're thin journals, six, five by seven, I think. And and then I write on the outside because what ended up happening, I have all these really nice journals and I would write for a little while and then I would misplace it and then I couldn't find it.

And I buy another one. And now I have 10 journals with only five pages written in it. But I did this Few years ago and it works beautifully. And so I get one of these, they're. The paper covers too. And then I write on the outside, okay, this is my journal. This is my manifestation journal. This is my things to do journal.

And then I, depending on where I'm going or what I'm doing, I take one with me and it's so thin that I can just put it almost anywhere. And then I just date them and, File them. And now they don't take up a lot of space either when I file them either. So it's a really good way to, to see.

It's actually, when I moved down here, I went through all my journals and they're sitting somewhere in Portland. It's like the digital thing, it's like they're. They're in Oregon, I'm sorry, but yeah, so there's lots of different techniques that I've learned over the years to make it easier for yourself to write because writing is such a good tool for reflecting on the next stage of your life or the last stage of your life.

Or if you're in transition, the transition part of your life. I have handwriting and is very different for me than typing it too. Yes. Totally different. In fact, they, I said for years that there was a difference in chemistry in your brain and then they, I found a piece of research about four years ago and they actually said that.

The research proved that writing in a, writing with pen and paper stimulates different parts of your brain. Typing is more linear again, writing. So what ends up happening for me, now I write well on the computer now, but what I do is if I come to a place where I. I don't call them blocks.

I just call them stops because they're not really blocks. They're your own, they're your own thought process that just needs to be worked through. But when I came to those points, I would go back to the writing. And I'd sometimes only have to do two or three paragraphs. And then I can go back to the computer is just shift something and it makes it make easier to pour out some more.

I work for a company where the senior officer, Dr Jane Linder, she actually had a pen that she wrote everything down, but the pen stored it digitally. transcribed it for her because she, this was 10 years ago. She said she knew that the brain was more stimulant when you could just put it to paper versus typing it in.

I want a pen like that.

I don't know where she got it, but it was pretty fancy. I'm going to research that. That would be awesome. Seriously. That sounds like a great idea. That would be Yeah, but they used to have them that had a special paper that had little tiny dots on it. And the pen had some kind of reader in it that would figure out and it would transcribe it to a To an app or to a web page that you had to log into.

Pretty soon, they're just going to plug it into your brain and it'll just go right into the I wonder if those tablets do that. What's that one tablet? Remarkable? Yeah. Yeah there's that one and there's, I don't remember what the other one's called, but that's the latest, greatest one, yeah, I'm going to do some research on that because that would be life changing for me.

Just Kindle was life changing in terms of traveling with books. I just can't read my own writing. What if it transcribes it for you so you don't have to ever read it again? I get that way. You can tell where I am in my writing by looking at my handwriting. Because when I'm, it's very neat and orderly, I'm in my left brain.

And when I'm just wildly drawn writing it's I'm in my right brain. I can tell as an editor, when I get people's manuscripts, when they're in their left or right brain, I can tell it two ways. One is it's definitely a change in voice and style usually, but even if there's not a big shift in that the editing starts to get really heavy.

So if there's like rivers of red, it's usually because they're thinking about what they're writing that they're not just writing, they're trying to think and write at the same time, which is a very difficult thing to do. It's why a lot of people don't write. It's so difficult to write, that's because you're writing from this brain, because everybody I've ever worked with, and I've worked with probably 300 authors, 350 authors, published authors, and I think there's only one that's, she finished the first book, she didn't finish the second book but of all those authors, And there were many of them that told me they just couldn't write without an outline.

They were adamant they couldn't write without an outline. And then I would ask them what's, cause it's usually a fear. What fear is it that's keeping you from writing outside of an outline? And it always came back to this is the way I was taught. This is the way I'm comfortable with.

And then the next question I have is, so how has that been working for you? And they are, to a person where, it's not working for me, then why are you still using it? If it's not working for you, if you haven't ever been published, if you never got done with your manuscript, if it's a chore to write, if it's, all of these things, why are you continuing to use that method?

And they don't use, it's just something they know. And a guy asked me, he used to call it playing old tapes. And he asked me once, he says, do you still use the mixed tapes from high school? I'm like, no. He says, why do you still use the lessons you learned in high school that don't apply anymore? That's a good analogy.

Guilty. I like that. That's a great analogy. Yeah. It's a. That player you can borrow.

Yeah, it's it's surpris, it, for me, it's a v it's a release of thoughts too. Sometimes it's just good to get stuff outta your brain and onto paper. Yeah. You don't have to think about it anymore. Yeah. The journaling in the morning is very therapeutic for me. Now, here's a good exercise. Go back in your journals.

Go back 20 years, 30 years, if you've been writing that long, or even a couple of years, or even a couple of months, and read your journals, and you're going to be amazed at how much you continue to do. If I had listened to my advice and, my ruminations in my journals over the years, I'd be enlightened by now.

I would keep. Repeating the same mistakes or looking, why can't I find my purpose in life? That kind of thing. And the same thing, year after year is okay why am I not changing this? Why am I not seeing it? But I'm writing it if I'm actually literally writing it.

And so that was a wake up call. When I, then now what I do is about every three months, I go back and look at my journals and have I made progress, am I still writing about the same stuff different day, then I'm not really heading on, not really looking at what I need to look at.

But one question was, could be a whole separate call. How about AI? People are writing like crazy using AI. What do you think about that? I actually use AI a lot interestingly because I've trained it for my voice and style. And I trained it for marketing, because I despise marketing writing. Doing it.

I'd rather be writing a book. And but I've been using it for that. And I've had a couple of people in the writing industry, we've had conversations about this. I believe that AI has And it may change, but currently AI has some major limitations. First of all, it's not accurate all the time. Grammar, punctuation, that kind of stuff.

Now, Grammarly is a form of AI. Grammarly, G A R M A R L Y. I use that all the time in my editing. It's very helpful, but it is also not always correct. And so you have to know what you're doing in order to, it's like garbage in, garbage out. You have to know how you're prompting it. You have to build its voice and style so it knows you.

There's a relationship you build with the AI. Now, in terms of ethics and morality and writing, more and more like Amazon right now can tell whether it's AI or not, so can Google. It's very easy to detect whether it's AI or not. How I detect it as a reader is it doesn't usually have any dimension.

There's not any dynamics to the storytelling. It's just, whatever you as a writer would have to go back in there and do it. And I'll tell you, I'm testing it right now to write a novel. And it's very interesting. It's it gives you great ideas, but it doesn't give you the depth and the dimension at this point.

It doesn't have the emotional connection to the story. That you would have. So it can give you word after word that works. The words together sound great, but then it could just be like every other story. What's going to set it apart is what you put into it. Derek Doker is a big guy in publishing and he had a video about this just recently.

And he says, look, I it helps me a lot. Like I'll say, give me five reasons on this landing page why this person would be in pain if they don't do this. And it'll give me great, five great ideas. Now I say add a paragraph to each one. Now when you get to that level, then it's a different story.

Then I'm usually going in there and editing and changing around and, making it more my voice. So it's a mixed bag right now. I think it's going to put a lot of really early writers, people who haven't written a long time that I just recently had a conversation with this guy. He wants to do something online.

I'll become a copywriter. Okay, have you ever written before? No, but they make a lot of money. I can be on there, but I have a great ideas and all this kind of stuff. Okay. So it's going to eliminate a lot of those people that don't have a lot of experience in writing. In terms of who want to make a living as a writer.

As a copywriter. And I'm talking mostly right now around the marketing. I think it will help people write books like memoirs and things like that. But again, it's always going to come back to your own story. Now, I just read an article today, this morning about how they believe that AI has reached a plateau.

So where it goes next is anybody's guess, that one thing that's going to happen and it's already happening is if everybody's creating with AI and everybody's using AI to create more content and more stuff out there. It's going to eventually come back to there's no more new ideas within AI.

It's going to come back in on itself because it's, what it really is just a bunch of, it's taught it to put a bunch of words together. At a certain point, if all the words it's creating itself, it's going to come back on itself and not be expansive. So Humans will always have to be putting new information into the AI database in order for it to expand with new ideas.

So there's limitations. It's very interesting. It's fascinating to watch as a writer to, to see, I think where the big money will be is in editing. That if you're an editor if you're writing coach where you can help people write it without AI, those are those are the things that are going to be I think more in demand down the road right now.

Everybody's playing with it. People are writing back to those series on Amazon. They're writing nonfiction and fiction series with it, but You can tell in the first book whether or not that's, going to be an interesting story or it's just AI that put it together, a bunch of words together.

Years ago we used to hire people to write those 300 word articles for us and it's like full of all these different filler words. Exactly. Like I'm a 300. And the fact of the matter is three or 500 word stories are really difficult to write. Think about it. Writing a story under 500 words, almost impossible.

Even for a really good writer, because there's just so much to a story arc. Yeah. Even a short story. So yeah. It's gonna be interesting. But I am testing on the novel thing because it has given me some great, it was a, it was an idea I've had for 30 years, so it's not a new idea for me.

It's just what would a idea AI do with this idea? No intention of writing a novel. I've never written fiction. So it wasn't a, I love to read it and I have coached people to write it. I just have never written it myself. And so let's play with it, but you get to a certain point and then all of a sudden it's taken off on its own too.

You got to watch that. It does its own little, Oh, and not tying the pieces together. That was where I was like, wait a sec, it's lost its own storyline. And then it's not the prompts that I'm putting in. It's just that it just goes off and does its own thing. Yeah. And that's another thing that I've heard about ANI.

Yeah. AI is that it just sometimes just gives you crap, so you always have to be checking it. You always have to be making sure that what you have is is gonna work. But does anyone ever read it anyway? , and that's the thing too. It gets back the headlines, , it's the headline for sure.

And you know it, it does, right? AI is everywhere now. Oops. Sorry. Sorry. That's my little dogs. AI like right now I build websites for authors too sometimes. And so I was building on Divi on WordPress and Divi now is you pay a monthly fee, whatever it was, five bucks, and you click it and it creates all the content for a paragraph if you want, or the whole page or the whole website, whatever you just click one, click and it does it all.

And it draws on your entire website. So it goes in, it checks out your entire work and then it creates the I did that for a month, but it just got to be annoying after a while. I just ended the subscription and cause sometimes it hits a lot of times it misses, doesn't capture my voice or doesn't capture the essence of what I wanted to say.

And then you spend more time editing than if you would have just written it from the start. Exactly. Exactly. And I can write really fast now. So there's, for me, again, I think it's a difference between beginning writers. and seasoned writers. The other thing too is, again, getting back to what you put in as a prompt.

So what you're putting into the AI will make a huge difference about what you're getting out. I'll give you an example. So I was editing and writing or helping to rewrite, ghostwrite, I would guess a book on prenatal what did she call herself? Birth doula, right? So she's training doulas.

I was helping her write a training manual, right? And I would, she had written a book before, so she was taking that and updating it. And so I was saying, okay, maintain, I said, keeping the same narrator, the narrator's voice and style, rewrite this into bullet points. For example, this is one example, and it just was gobbledygook, it was not correct.

And it did not sound like her. So then when I rewrote it and said, maintaining the narrator's voice and style the following in bullet points, that was the key. So one word made a huge difference in the output of that AI with this exact same input except for that one word. Yeah. So yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of learning I'm doing on AI and because my authors ask me this all the time, can I use AI?

You can, but here's what you need to know, right? It's not always accurate. It's not always effective. And it's sometimes it's easier to write it yourself. And I think in the long run better because You are also processing your work in a different way. You're processing your information in a different way.

The healing part of it, the reflective part of it. That's what's interesting part of writing. Exactly. And it really is. It's like why write a novel if I don't have the experience of actually writing about the things that I'm interested in writing. If I'm just putting it into AI and it's spitting it out.

Yes. I don't think you're going to get a long lasting audience. Yeah. They might. Dip in and test it, but I don't think it's going to build your authorship record very much. You're not going to be a Stephen King.

So great. So how can people connect with you and get in touch? My website is inspiredlife, inspiredlifepublications. com. We can put that in the chat. That might be good. In fact, I think I have the, and what I'm doing starting in January, I'm teaching a five week course called writing your legacy life story.

It's going to, I'm going to go through the steps of writing. That story, it can be the beginning of a memoir, it can be an actual I'm writing this for my family. It can be that you just want to put it down on paper and it ends there, whatever it is. There's a, it's a five week course. I go through different steps of the writing process.

How to tell a story how to put the stories together, even how to remember the stories. It was a there was a, short story in my memoir about, somebody said, gave me some feedback about putting in more about more relationship based stuff. Didn't think of a story. Couldn't think of anything.

And then something popped up when they mentioned that I hadn't have thought about in 10 years. How do you stimulate your memories from the past? Some of them are going to be. On the tip of your tongue, but some of them might not be and it may fit into the storyline teaching about the story arc teaching all about kind of things like that.

So this is the link to the, oops, there it is. Put it in the chat. This is the link to the, oh, that's your link. Sorry. That's the zoom. Let me go back in here. I've got the Inspired Life publications link to your legacy life story. Oh, you do. Good. Yeah. Okay. And I'm, the price on it is 3. 97 for the five weeks today because it's on the TED call.

If you get in and register, it's 3. 47 and the first five people to sign up are going to Get an extra hour of coaching from me as well. That's at that link that Ted, not mine, but the one that Ted left, if you're interested in writing your story. If you're interested in writing your memoir and getting some coaching along the way, go to Inspired Life Publications and you can sign up for Calendly on a Discovery coaching call.

So there's a lot of information on Inspired Life Publications. About me and my coaching, et cetera. Ted, thanks so much for this. It's been awesome. It's been fun to talk, great to talk about it. But, and I'm looking forward to hearing more about Epic Encore. It's evolving as all things do. Not evolving, even your writing.

What was that Ted? If you're not evolving, you're devolving. Exactly. Exactly. Thanks all for coming on the call. Have a great day. Thanks. Thank you. This was very informative. Take care. Thanks a lot. Thanks everybody. Bye.