I use AI to help me write — but probably not in the way you think

There it is. The blank page. The blinking cursor. The complete and utter silence of a document that hasn't been started yet. Whether you're a writer staring at chapter one, a manager writing a difficult email to the staff, a marketing manager creating a presentation, a developer starting the design of an app, a student facing a 3,000-word assignment, or someone like me — writing yet another blog post — the white page has the ability to make all of us feel completely stuck. And yet, here's what I've found: AI has helped me to overcome the blank page and getting a lot more done. Not because it writes for me. But because it helps me to get started.

Why the blank page is so terrifying

The fear of the blank page isn't new, and it isn't irrational. It has a name — scriptophobia in its more extreme form — and psychologists have traced it back to some very human instincts. The core of it is perfectionism under pressure. The moment you open a new document, the implicit demand is: produce something worth reading. Immediately. Without warm-up. That pressure triggers anxiety, and anxiety triggers avoidance. There's also what researchers call the paralysis of possibility. A blank page contains endless potential, which may sound like a gift but often functions as a psychological freeze. When everything is possible, nothing feels like the right place to start. And then there's the missing first sentence. Most people who struggle with the blank page don't actually lack ideas — they have plenty. But the mind freezes at the threshold, and the cursor blinks, and somehow the blinking cursor becomes more active than the brain. Before it could take me ages to get started, I recognize all the feelings and challenges about a blank page. And I notice that I am not alone in this.

Writers have always had the fear of the blank page

Years ago I wrote a book when on maternity leave with my youngest son. I researched on how to be most effective when writing and almost all came to the same conclusion: Avoid the blank page. Never close the evening concluding a chapter, never finish editing your work of the day or as Ernst Hemmingway said "don't empty yourself out" when he guided on how to avoid starting the day with an empty mind. Even Vincent van Gogh struggled with the blank canvas as he thought it said to him: "you can't do anything." I have thus been aware of the blank page challenges for years and notice it whether it is an email, a presentation, a new project, a book, a blog, an assignment at school (yes I study)... it is all about gettings started.

So AI can help us overcome the blank page

So just to be clear: I'm not using AI to write for me. When I sit down to get something done whether a blog post, a proposal, a presentation, a webapp, a workshop script — I'm the one who has the perspective, the experience, the opinion. AI doesn't know what I think. It doesn't know my clients, my voice, or what I actually want to say. If I handed the whole thing over to an AI, I'd end up with something that sounds like it was written by... well, an AI. It will be hollow and lack perspectives. But what AI can do is help me get past the blankness.

Here's what it looks like for me in practice:

I start by talking it out. I'll open a chat and just describe what I'm trying to write. "I need to write a blog post for my consultancy. It's about how people fear starting things. I have some notes but I don't know where to begin. Guide me on what it could contain". That alone helps. Putting the task into words, often loosely, moves it from a vague thought into something more concrete.

Then I ask for a frame. Not a draft — a structure. "What are some ways I could open this?" or "What's the most interesting angle on this topic?", "What have others said about this". AI is genuinely good at generating options. I might get five suggestions and think they're all wrong, but in the process of rejecting them, I figure out what I actually think and I continue from here to do my analyse - often jumping between tools: Claude, Perplexity, Google Scholar, Figma, Lovable, Beautiful.ai... broading my knowledge, testing my ideas and getting my mind sorted. Then I sparre with AI on where to get started.

Sometimes I write something terrible and paste it in. A messy paragraph, a half-formed thought, a bullet list that doesn't connect. And I ask: "Can you help me see what I'm trying to say here?" The AI reflects it back, sometimes in a way that makes sense, others not, and most often I rewrite the whole thing — but now I know what I'm rewriting toward.

The back-and-forth matters. It's not a one-shot transaction. It's more like thinking out loud with someone who is always available and tend to say "Great idea...". You write something, it responds, you change direction, you start over, you find the thread. The blank page gets replaced by a messy working draft, and a messy working draft is something you can actually work with.

And yes — I let it help me with grammar. Not because I can't spell, but because when I'm in the middle of getting ideas down, stopping to fix errors breaks the flow. Once I have something worth reading, I'll run it through and clean it up. Do my sentences make sense, check for grammar and for longer presentations checking against not having counter arguments.

The key thing is that the voice — the perspective, the argument, the examples — is mine. AI helps me get to the page. What happens on the page is still the work I need to do.

A few of my tips that might get you started

1. Lower the stakes by starting badly on purpose. Give yourself explicit permission to write a terrible first version. A deliberately bad draft is still a draft. As Jodi Picoult observed, "you can't edit nothing". Write one bad paragraph, just to have something on the page — then improve it.

2. Use AI as a warm-up conversation, not a writing machine. Before you write anything, describe what you're trying to do - use the AI to bounce of ideas on your thoughts and if possible where you want to end up. Ask it what it finds interesting about the topic, or what questions a reader might have. You're not looking for answers — you're warming up your own thinking.

3. Write without correcting. For the first hour or more, don't fix anything. No spell-check, no restructuring, no deleting. Just get words down. You can clean it up once there's something to clean. The goal at the start is quantity, not quality.

The blank page has been a challenge for many for a long time. It probably always will. But the tools available for pushing past that first moment can be a game changer - and AI, used well, is one of them. Not as a replacement for your voice. As a way to find it.

At AILY, we help organisations and individuals build practical AI skills — not just access to tools, but the ability to use them well. If you're curious about how AI can fit into your working day in ways that actually make sense, get in touch.