How to create content when you hate writing
Every list on this topic gives you the same five outs: hire a ghostwriter, repost other people’s stuff with commentary, make videos instead, batch it all on Sundays, or push through with discipline. Here’s how each one actually goes, and then the option those lists were written before.
Hire a ghostwriter. Works if you have $1,500–4,000 a month and the patience to explain your thinking to someone every week (which is its own content-creation job). Good ghostwriters, notably, mostly work by interviewing you and transcribing it. Remember that; it matters in a minute.
Curate instead of create. Sharing other people’s work with a line of commentary keeps your account alive, but the person who gets hired is the one with the take, not the one who reposts. As a supplement, fine. As a strategy, it outsources the only part that was valuable. The version that works keeps your take and drops the repost: react to what you watched with a point of your own.
Make videos instead. If you’re comfortable on camera this is real. But notice what most people find when they try: the hard part wasn’t the camera, it was knowing what to say. Video doesn’t remove the blank page; it points a lens at it.
Batch on Sundays. Now you hate writing and your Sundays. Batching works for people who already write easily. For everyone else it concentrates the dread.
Discipline. You’ve tried this one.
The diagnosis the lists skip
You explain your work fluently every day — to clients, on calls, over coffee. Zero blank-page dread. So the problem was never having ideas or articulating them. You don’t hate writing. You hate typing first drafts. Those are different problems, and the second one is solvable.
It’s also why handing the job to an AI writer tends to disappoint: a thin prompt gives you generic prose, because the tool has none of your specifics. Those specifics are exactly what talking gets out of you.
You speak at 130–150 words a minute; you type a careful first draft at a fraction of that, while a critic in your head edits every sentence before it lands. Talking outruns the critic.
Talk the first draft
The ghostwriter model, minus the ghostwriter: get interviewed, keep the transcript, shape it. Xtraktr runs the interview — you say a rough idea out loud and it asks one question at a time about what you said, the way a good interviewer draws out a take. Your answers become the draft: ask for an outline or a summary and the skeleton of the post is assembled from your own sentences.
What that looks like in practice:
- The idea from this morning’s client call becomes a LinkedIn post before lunch.
- The commute home becomes a working session instead of a podcast you won’t remember.
- The thing you keep explaining to every new client becomes a newsletter issue — said once, published once, linked forever.
One caveat: you still edit. A talking session produces a draft, not a finished piece, and your judgment on the final pass is the part that can’t be delegated. But editing a page of your own spoken words is a different activity than staring down a blank one, and nobody ever quit content over editing.
