The Blank Page Isn’t the Problem Anymore

AI can give us all the words we want, but I’m building the next part of my career around figuring out which ones matter.

A little over a decade ago, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) took a chance on me. On paper, I wasn't an obvious choice to be their new assistant editor of Fraud Magazine. I had writing and editing experience, but I didn't have a strong grasp of AP style, which is a fairly significant gap when you're applying to work on a publication that follows it. I'd also never worked on a print publication.

What I did have was a somewhat unusual collection of experience. I'd worked abroad in Ireland and Gibraltar. I was comfortable with digital communications at a time when publications were still figuring out how print and digital should work together. I also knew basic HTML, which this role used to maintain the magazine’s website. When I interviewed with the team, I was eager to learn everything I didn't already know.

I learned AP style and the rhythms and peculiarities of putting together a print magazine. I learned an enormous amount about fraud, mostly by talking to people who had spent their careers investigating it (I even studied for and passed the Certified Fraud Examiner test, earning me the credential). I learned how to interview someone who knew far more about a subject than I did without pretending otherwise.

I also learned something that has shaped almost everything I've done since: The best part of an interview often comes after you've gotten through the questions you carefully prepared. My subject will explain a technical concept or answer a question they've probably answered a dozen times before, and then they'll wander slightly off course. Their voice might change or they’ll stop sounding like they're being interviewed. They'll tell me what frustrates them, what surprised them, or what they think everyone else gets wrong, and that’s when I start listening more closely.

Over the years, I've learned to listen for those moments because that's usually where the real story is hiding. That skill has shaped my career over the years.

So, why change course now?

I may have started as an editor at Fraud Magazine, but I found my way back to writing, which had always been my first love. After seven years there, I moved into agency life, where my work expanded into content strategy and communications, and I began writing for a broader mix of companies and industries. I've written for and about people in fields I knew almost nothing about when I first encountered them, which meant getting comfortable with being the person in the room who asks, "Will you explain what you mean by that?"

I've also had the enormous benefit of working alongside brilliant colleagues and professional friends who taught me things I didn't know I needed to learn. Some made me a better writer, some made me a more careful editor, and others changed how I think about clients, strategy, leadership, or the business behind the words we put on the page.

Twelve years after the ACFE took that chance on me, I'm still learning. In fact, one of the strange things about reaching this point in my career is realizing that experience doesn't necessarily make you feel finished. For me, it has done almost the opposite.

Like just about everyone in communications, I've spent the past few years trying to understand what AI means for the work I've spent my career learning how to do. I use it, experiment with it, write about it, and now teach other editors how to recognize some of its habits. I've found places where it genuinely makes my work better and others where I spend so much time undoing what it produced that I wonder why I bothered asking.

I don't have a neat prediction for where all this ends, and I'm suspicious of anyone who claims to. What I have noticed is that AI has made producing words remarkably easy, while also making me think much harder about what makes writing worth reading.

Good storytelling feels more important to me now than it did when a blank page took considerably more effort to fill. It's also one reason I've decided this is the right time to go out on my own. I want to work with people who are very good at what they do and help them communicate what they know without stripping away the way they naturally think and speak. I want to find the idea buried in the middle of an interview and build the story around it. I want to help companies make complicated subjects understandable without oversimplifying them. And as AI becomes part of more communications teams' workflows, I want to help them use it without losing the judgment, specificity, and humanity that made their work worth reading in the first place.

I also want to make room for blossoming writers and communications professionals to find their footing. I was fortunate to have people who took the time to teach me what I didn't know, explain why an edit made something better, and trust me with work I hadn't done before. I'd like to return some of that investment by mentoring people who are earlier in their careers, especially now, when they're learning this profession alongside tools that are changing almost as quickly as they can master them.

For all of the anxiety and noise surrounding AI, I don’t look at the communications future and see a profession with less need for good writers and thinkers. I see a profession that’s going to ask different things of them, just as it has asked different things of me over my career.

Going out on my own will require me to learn an entirely new set of things, some of which I probably don't even know enough to be nervous about yet. Some parts of managing myself will feel as foreign to me as print production once did. AI will keep changing the work, communications professionals will keep adapting around it, and I'll adapt, too.

Maybe that's why I've found myself thinking so much lately about the person who walked into the ACFE in 2014. She couldn't have known that the job she was interviewing for would set the course for the next 12 years of her career. She just knew she wanted the opportunity to learn, and someone gave it to her.

I've spent the years since trying to make good on that decision, and I've been lucky enough to keep learning from people who saw something in me, challenged me, trusted me with their stories, and made my work better.

And as I start this next part of my career, I'm hoping a few more people out there are willing to take a chance on me.