Why You Should Keep Writing Even When it Seems the Robots are Winning

I do a lot of coaching of emerging writers and lately, I've heard from several of them that the proliferation of people using AI to write stories and books make them want to give up their dream of becoming an author. The reasoning? If people can simple use AI to write stories, what’s the point in pouring your heart and soul into your own work?

This breaks my heart for a lot of reasons. And while I can understand the tendency to despair over the idea that soon certain online book sellers might be filled with nothing but machine-made books, I don't think we are in danger of being replaced by robots just yet. 

Here's why:

Nearly every aspect of writing relies on intuition. Writers learn by reading and practicing and going to classes and engaging in the feedback and revision process with other writers or with editors. And all of these things are important when it comes to learning how to craft an engaging story, but ultimately, whether it’s a story I’ve written or one I’m reading, it comes down to how it feels. Does it draw me in? Does it have that nebulous something that engages my spirit? 

When I've written something I love and I want feedback, I turn to a human to read my work. Someone who appreciates my style, but who can also point out places where I've been too opaque or where my character didn't come through enough to make them compelling. And while some of that editing does involve a bit of grammar and spelling correction, the bulk of it comes from human feeling. What does my beta reader or editor *feel* when they read my work? When my publisher, Marion Lougheed of Off Topic Publishing, edited "The Price of Cookies," she read it as a technical editor, yes, but she also read it as a person with a heart. And that meant it was edited with a lean toward ensuring my heart stayed in the book. 

The point is that creatives are having a lot of conversations about AI these days. A lot of writers are using AI to plan their schedules or to help brainstorm their plots or to ask the AI to give feedback on a passage. And maybe that’s all okay.

Meanwhile, other people are using AI to write short stories or poems or entire novels for them. And a lot of us worry that AI is going to be able to eventually write so well that we can't tell the difference between a human writer and an AI writer. 

But writing is based on heart. It's based on intuition. It's based on how we feel about the story. Writing by human writers is rarely technically perfect. We have unusual sentence structures. We write in fragments sometimes. We use too many prepositions. And we fight to keep sentences that might not be grammatically correct because they feel beautiful to us. 

I already know my writing isn't perfect. And I've spent a lot of years aiming for some level of perfection until I realized that I'd rather be compelling. Messy, human, flawed. So, keep being messy, human, and flawed. The world needs your writing and your heart. 

And that's the work I want to read. Your imperfect story that came from your heart. Your book that you think about at night and wake up to write about. A machine can't do that. Only you can.