Posts Tagged creative process

The Jack-in-the-Box Writer

By on February 26, 2026   /   For Teachers, For Writers, Writing   /   Leave a comment

You turn the crank on the side of the colorful box once, then once again, and then wait. 

You turn it slower and slower, rapt in anticipation of that freaky clown’s surprise appearance when the lid springs open. With every turn, your heart beats faster, and your eyes get a little wider. The chime plays its tune, one slow note at a time, as you get closer and closer to the always surprising endgame, and then…

POP!

 

Cristian Bortes from Cluj-Napoca, Romania, via Wikimedia Commons

Developing a story idea is similar to operating a jack-in-the-box. The writer cranks the handle by outlining, drafting, and doing the somewhat shocking writer’s task of actually writing. One word follows another, forming sentences and paragraphs representing the writer’s thoughts and vision. When the time is right, the breakthrough comes, and the story “pops”. The pieces begin to fall in place. The once-scary, freaky clown smiles at your accomplishment.

Creators must go through the process every time. Each new work needs the slow crank of the story’s jack-in-the-box to get through the process of creating a satisfying story from an idea. This is how creative development works. 

You work toward a goal. 

You grind it out day after day to what often seems to be no avail. 

You get frustrated. 

You despair. 

Sometimes, you quit and throw the whole draft across the room in the general direction of the freaky clown hiding in his little, brightly painted box. But to those who keep turning the handle of their story’s jack-in-the-box with grit and determination, success will come. 

Plus, it never hurts to bring in outside eyes to look at the raw story and see it with a fresh perspective. That’s where critique partners and beta readers can help turn the crank handle when one feels stuck. Help is a wonderful thing and, at the very least, builds a friendly support crew.

Find a way to keep cranking the handle by whatever means necessary. You will improve. The story will improve.

It is inevitable.

The story will be forever grateful. 

One of the most important things creators can do is to see the potential in an idea and do the work to help the idea achieve its full potential. Ideas are as numerous as pennies, but a story is a bar of gold. One needs to keep working, researching, and turning their cranks of improvement until their story springs upward and shows itself.

Because if you keep cranking the story handle, it will eventually “POP!” and show itself to you and the world.

Just ask the freaky clown! 

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When the Hammer Builds the House: Grappling with AI in Kidlit

By on November 20, 2025   /   Articles, For Writers, kidlit, News, Op-Ed  

Two years ago I wrote an article about how to utilize AI as a tool in children’s writing. At the time, ChatGPT was still in its first iterations, and many creatives had only the faintest ideas about generative AI. In the middle grade world, authors were mostly just trying to figure out what AI would mean for them, if anything at all. 

I think it’s safe to say things have changed since then, and I wanted to come back to this topic with fresh eyes to see if the undertones of techno-optimism that permeated my first piece on the subject still resonate the way they did back in 2023. There are, after all, some new realities that authors must face head-on.

For one, it’s simply no longer accurate to say that AI writing is cheesy, formulaic, and easy to spot. Large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have become astonishingly good at mimicking human authors in tone, humor, and even complex themes woven through longer pieces. YouTuber and developmental editor Alyssa Matesic recently did a side-by-side of AI writing and short stories written by professional authors, and the two were startlingly difficult to tell apart.

That also begs the question of how AI models have gotten so good. Since 2023, big tech companies have scraped vast libraries of unlicensed and copyrighted material to train their models. It’s a controversial topic, and too intricate to dive into here, but it has forced many authors to divert attention away from the creative process and think carefully about how to protect their work.

Still, the biggest issue probably isn’t about detectability or fair use, but the mere fact that AI writing exists at all. The very possibility of humanlike AI writing has cast a shadow over the legitimate efforts of human writers everywhere. Even the once-loved em dash has become a symbol of AI skepticism, with many authors consciously adjusting their tone and techniques to look less like the AI that used their writing to develop its own voice in the first place. It’s a strangely ironic dance that creators across all fields have been doing since generative AI exploded onto the scene in the last few years. 

So is it really fair to say that AI is “just a tool” the way I described it back in 2023? It would be a bit like a master craftsman returning to his worksite after a lunch break to find that his hammer had come to life and built the rest of the house without him. It sounds nice, but what if the craftsman actually enjoyed building houses? What if he’d spent his whole life learning to do it well? What if everyone then assumed that all his houses – countless hours of work – had been built by the magic hammer? 

So what is a middle grade author to do in this strange new world? Since this post is just around the corner from Thanksgiving, I’m choosing to slant toward gratitude. Even in this weird and sometimes scary landscape of publishing in 2025, there are quite a few things to be thankful for.

 

Authors are fighting back and winning.

A U.S. federal judge gave preliminary approval to a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic PBC and authors who alleged nearly half a million books were pirated to train AI chatbots. It’s a major win for writers wanting more accountability from AI developers.

Readers want human-made books.

As AI writing continues to permeate the book market, consumers are becoming more vocal about their preference for human work. In a recent poll by YouGov, well over half of respondents reported that they’d feel less fulfilled after learning a book they’d read was authored with AI. There are also new projects popping up like the “Human Authored” initiative from the Authors Guild. It’s a promising sign that readers are rediscovering the incredible value of human connection and contribution.

 

As a tool, AI is only getting better.

In its rightful place, AI continues to be a transformative technology that can untether creators and allow them to make and explore more than ever before. As a research tool, for example, AI cites its sources with more accuracy than it did back in 2023, and it can also summarize and synthesize material extraordinarily well. Even for this piece, which is admittedly a bit skeptical of AI’s prevalence overall, I used AI tools to find sources and make connections. I just had to keep that hammer locked up in the toolbox when it came time to write, design the art, etc. Many have equated this dynamic with letting AI “do the dishes”. Artificial Intelligence can handle the chores so creatives can do the fun stuff (although not all the time, as we learned from NEO — skip to 2:55 for a good laugh).

 

So have I changed my mind about AI over the last two years? Should you? These are questions worth exploring, but let’s not spend too much time perseverating on a dynamic that changes almost daily. 

After all, we’ve got writing to do.

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Hop Down the Rabbit Hole

By on September 21, 2022   /   Articles, For Kids, For Parents, For Teachers, For Writers, Writing  

Writing is tough.

Writing is tough. At any level. From learning to put one word after another (and in order!) to construct one meaningful sentence to the classic high school essay to writing award-winning books, it isn’t easy. It’s a rewarding kind of tough, though. Challenging but rewarding as most creative ventures tend to be.

The blank page can be a fearsome opponent. The nothingness intimidates. One of the magical rewards of writing is overcoming the mountain of blank space with a word or an idea. The breakthrough lets the creative gears fall in place and allows the river to flow. 

Perhaps as daunting as the blank page is a second barrier to writing. Its roots lie in the way we are taught to write from day one in elementary school. It’s constrained, tightly-focused writing. The expectation a well-written sentence has to come out of the gate and hit the center target with great precision using a minimum of words. Don’t get me wrong, focus is an absolute in teaching beginning writers. What would written communication be like if we all wrote exactly like your favorite five-year-old breathlessly telling the story of how the clown at the birthday party tripped and popped the balloon elephant he was making which scared the magician’s rabbit who escaped and pooped while hopping across the birthday cake? 

So, out of necessity, we are taught to write tight from the beginning. We are taught we must not take a false step off the path or else, like in Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder, we crush a butterfly and scramble the entire space-time continuum. But what happens when we’re ready to take a step and can’t see even a hint of a path? Like with the blank page, we can get stuck. Paralysis by analysis. 

See? Writing is tough.

So, what’s the remedy?

Well, we first need to loosen the thumbscrews of the deeply ingrained idea of user-focused writing. We need a distraction to help us step back and attack the blank page and/or the paralysis of a constrictive focus. Pull back and give yourself some space. That’s what drafting is. It’s finding your way but on a wide and sometimes rambling path.

(Psst, come closer. I don’t want the writing police or your high school English teacher to hear this.) There are also rabbit holes! Yes! The dreaded rabbit hole can help your writing in more ways than you think if you use them with discipline and measure. 

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 640px-Down_the_Rabbit_Hole.png

John Tenniel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The rabbit hole of research is one of my personal favorite places to hang out as a writer. It’s part of what brings me joy as an ever-curious 58-year-old writer. I used to feel guilty about this research rabbit hole obsession until I discovered that, while the rabbit hole can be a distraction if entered unchecked, it was creating path after path after path for my writing. Paths forward, new paths, paths that veered away from dead ends on discarded writing projects. What has always been considered a waste of time and focus became a great creative tool for me. 

The rabbit hole has become a way to fight through blank page syndrome and break the shackles of tight, and often restrictive, focus that is still ingrained in my brain from elementary school. It’s an idea generator, a brainstorming tool, and a source of necessary or (often at the time) obscure facts which may worm their way into future stories. Out of chaos comes order.

Chaos into order.

The tricks to making the rabbit hole work for you as a writer are simple but can be difficult in execution. The first trick is to stay the master of the rabbit hole, whether it’s the internet, the library, a stack of articles, or books. You can’t turn yourself over completely to it and tumble endlessly from researching what kids might have eaten on the banks of the Nile in the Old Kingdom period to find yourself 45 minutes later checking out the latest Beyonce videos and fashions. 

The second trick is a very useful skill. The beauty of a skill is it can be learned, practiced, and mastered. It’s the ability to look at the chaos, organize it into a fashion that makes sense to you, and store the organized pieces for later. It’s like being a sculptor. Take a block of stone, wood, or clay and remove the pieces that don’t belong in the composition. The skill is the ability to manage information. The skill to find the gold hidden deep within the rabbit hole and then establish order from chaos.

As you can see, rabbit holes can be a writer’s friend and a valuable tool in the writer’s toolbox. Writing is tough. Any tools we acquire to help us over the hills and humps that stand in our way are more valuable than gold. Because, in the end, the most important thing in writing is writing that next word and building our stories one word at a time, brick by brick.

The moral of the story.

Find what works for you. 

Find what brings you joy in doing creative things. 

Do those things. 

Repeat.

 

Alex Lehner, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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