Are you one of those people who pick up accents? You’re in the middle of chatting with someone who has an accent and all of a sudden you hear yourself speaking and you realize you’ve turned into an Irish, French, English, Newfoundlander?
5 minutes with someone from the UK and I’m complaining about how knackered I am from a late night of snogging with the bloke I stuffed in my boot! All in an English accent!!!
The same goes for my writing. This blog has seen a variety of styles through the years, picked up from reading other blogs or books, where suddenly I’m writing a post and realize my style has adapted to the book/blog I’d just finished reading!
Example… years back when I was reading the “Shopaholic” series of books…my writing style completely changed to reflect the books where every irrational thought, overreaction, and justification was part of my storytelling until eventually, I was less Sophie Kinsella and more Colleen O’Dea and to be honest, I wasn’t all that upset about it. Picking up that “accent” allowed me to be more authentic, vulnerable, and find my voice.
But let me get to the point of this post.
I’VE LOST MY WRITING STYLE!
I don’t know who I am!
I went from being a pretty crappy writer when this blog first began to having tens of thousands of readers with every post to not knowing a thing about how to write or what to say anymore! And the culprit…
CHAT GPT!!!!
Ugh!
The thing is… when it first came out I was completely leary and one of the last it seemed to adapt to the technology as AI kinda creeps me out… but then, I started to run my writing through the system giving a few prompts to “clean things up” and then I went from “yeah… I guess that sounds better” to completely accepting how it altered what I wrote and the next thing you know… even when I was writing things completely on my own without running it through “the machine”… I’ve started sounding more chatgeepeeteey than chatgpt itself cause I’ve picked up the damn AI “accent” and my writing is shit again!!!
This needs to be fixed.
Like, NOW!
So_if you’ve read this far through this ridiculous ramble_here’s the plan… hehehe… see what I did with those em dashes… I’m really more of a dot dot dot girl!!! Anyway… here’s the plan…
I’m bringing back the blog!
I know I’ve said it before over the last few years while I’ve mostly been posting on socials but this time… I HAVE TO! I’ve lost my ability to write. I’ve lost my writing “accent”. I’ve lost my writing confidence and creativeness. I feel like a massive writing imposter and I’ve lost my way.
And really… the only way back… is to practice.
And that starts now… with this little post that hopefully, will sound a little bit better with the next one… and keep sounding better until I get my groove back!
Bare with me… and help me get back to who I am.
PS… I’m trying really hard not to run this through ChatGPT just to see how they’d change it!
Photo Credit: Michelle Doucette Photography… Visit this post to see why I believe that Every Entrepreneur Should Invest in a Brand Photo Shoot.
Keep going Colleen!
And just curious is that Michelle Doucette photographer the one who went to MSVU a long time ago?