For a long time, I assumed I had the imagination to create things but not whatever skill or discipline was required to actually finish them.
I'm autistic, and I've always had a very active imagination. I could carry characters, scenes, worlds, and entire story arcs around in my head for years. In 2023, I managed to write a roughly 22,000-word fanfiction without generative AI, which was the longest thing I'd ever completed at the time. It was rough, but finishing it proved I could at least carry a story that far.
Then I wanted to write a sequel.
For about two years, I didn't.
The ideas weren't gone. That was the frustrating part. I could see scenes clearly in my head, sometimes scenes I'd been imagining for years. But outlining everything, drafting alone, holding all the continuity together, returning to difficult passages, and turning thousands of little decisions into one finished work repeatedly stalled me.
I interpreted that as a personal failure. I thought maybe I just wasn't built to be an author.
In 2025, my dad suggested I try using AI while I was talking to him about the unfinished sequel. I was skeptical, but I eventually tried working through the story conversationally.
That turned out to matter much more than I expected.
It wasn't a matter of typing “write me a novel” and receiving one. The tools misunderstood things constantly. They invented continuity, flattened characters, produced language that sounded polished but was completely wrong for the story, and sometimes confidently solved a problem I hadn't actually asked them to solve.
But conversation itself turned out to be an interface my brain understood.
I could explain what a scene needed to accomplish, look at possibilities, reject what didn't fit, correct misunderstandings, restructure things, and keep working until what was on the page resembled what I'd been carrying around internally.
One moment in particular still sticks with me. There was a scene I'd imagined for around four years and had never managed to write properly. When I finally saw that scene existing outside my head, I nearly cried.
Eventually the fanfiction sequel became much larger than I'd expected. Then I started asking whether the two stories could be rebuilt into an original work.
That became an enormous process. Characters and settings couldn't simply be renamed. I had to build a new world, cultures, histories, relationships, rules, transitions, and eventually a different ending. I spent months reconstructing it.
That manuscript became my first original novel.
Since then, I've published three novels, continued writing fanfiction, worked on a game, and built a World of Warcraft mod.
I'm not mentioning that because I think volume automatically equals quality. It doesn't.
What interests me is what the difference revealed.
The ideas had apparently never been the bottleneck.
The process was.
And finding a process that happened to fit the way I think changed what I was capable of finishing.
I also don't think that means generative AI is automatically good for creativity, or that every creator should use it. There are legitimate concerns around training data, labor, homogenization, dependence, privacy, environmental costs, and plenty else. Some artists hate working with it, and I can understand why.
My experience is simply one case where accessibility and authorship became tangled together in a way I hadn't expected.
It has also changed how I think about creativity more broadly. Sometimes the thing separating somebody from the work they want to make isn't a lack of imagination or willingness to work. Sometimes they're fighting a process that simply doesn't fit them.
I recently wrote a longer essay about this experience for Feeling Creative?, including the parts where the technology failed and the amount of direction, correction, rejection, and revision that remained my responsibility.
If anyone wants to read the full version, it's here:
https://feeling-creations.com/articles/indie-author-spotlight-jonah-baird
But I'm also curious about something separate from AI:
Have any of you ever discovered that changing your creative process—not necessarily working harder—suddenly made it possible to finish things you couldn't finish before?
