Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash

Today’s post is by SaaS copywriter Alexander Lewis (@alexander-j-lewis).

I must have been 11. I sat alone on our upstairs couch reading a thriller novel. In it, a kid my age wandered through a dark forest. Something, some nameless creature, stalked him in the night. Noises fluttered from the surrounding brush. Shadows moved in the corner of his eye. I found myself wishing that these sounds and motions would relent and that the boy’s father would emerge from the darkness.

I turned the page. The gothic scene continued. I pulled my feet onto the couch, and then I noticed I’d done so. I looked up from the book and turned it over in my hand. I laughed at myself for being afraid. How did the author do that?

Ever since I was a child, I couldn’t just read a book for the story within. I interrogated the page for clues about how to tell stories. No one taught me to read this way, paying attention to syntax and word choices. I paid attention because I loved writing and wanted to improve.

I aspired to do good work.

The shortcut

My niece loves to write. She’s written many stories and is always devouring new books. Writing has become a subject we bond over almost every time we’re together.

A few times, our conversations about writing have been interrupted by conversations about AI. Like many writers working in tech, I’m split here. AI for me can be both magical and a buzzkill all at once.

But in the context of talking to children who love writing as much as I did at their age, the topic of AI makes me sad and angry. Maybe irrationally so, even if I never show it.

I know the boring effort it takes to learn this craft. How many hours you can spend fiddling with a single paragraph before it clicks like a puzzle into place. How you don’t know or care because you’ve been lost in the creative process.

I grew up in the nineties and wrote from a computer that wasn’t connected to the internet. There was a forced focus: Me and the Word doc. If AI had been in the next tab, how many times as a child would I have fallen for the shortcut? It scares me even to imagine.

I don’t relay this to my niece. I don’t have to. Because she has another quality that I think is stronger than the temptations: The fun of learning writing trumps the ease of shortcutting it.

Inner fire

David Perell asked the author Yann Martel if he’d experimented with AI in his writing process.

“No. Why would I? It’d be like hiring someone to have sex for you.”

It’s easy to get nihilistic and pessimistic when thinking about the arts and AI. What snaps me back to my natural, optimistic disposition is the simple idea of play. Writing has been a business for me for ten years. But the only reason I can make a living today is that writing has been a hobby since childhood.

The people who are inclined to write will continue writing. Because writing is fun.

In recent years, the career advice “follow your passion” has been dragged through the mud. Careerists love to point out that people aren’t passionate about practical things. Most of us have no passions at all. So “follow your passion” is just advice from people who have already made their fortune.

Maybe that’s true in broad terms. I call bullshit on the writing front. Writing is the exception. In writing, passion results in practice, which produces quality, which bolsters your passion, and eventually, you become good enough to make a decent living.

The ceiling and the floor

One of the lucky breaks of my life was having parents and teachers who actively encouraged me to write. It’s rare to have so many people cheer for you as you try new things.

But I think the superpower of writers is their own inner critic. If you aspire to develop a craft, no one will hold you to a higher standard than yourself. Even great teachers and bosses will only provide feedback to the point of being good enough. They don’t want to hurt your feelings or waste their time.

The same is true of AI. The best way to describe what AI has done for writing is that it has raised the floor. The minimum acceptable threshold for decent prose is higher today than at any time before in history. And that’s largely thanks to AI tools.

What AI has failed to do is push the boundaries of writing quality.

That’s the point of this, isn’t it? Most of my friends hate writing. ChatGPT is good for them because it reduces the work they hate.

My writing friends aren’t driven merely by the end product of completed prose. We’re motivated by a carefully built high standard of excellence. We want to push the bounds and see the limits of our own abilities.

This morning, I read a few pages of a Cormac McCarthy novel. I finished a page and then returned to the top of it again. I just wanted to admire for a moment what I’d just read. How did he do that?

I put the book down and began to write.