It’s become something of a cliche that true writers write because they can’t not write, but as with so many other stereotypes and cliches, there’s a kernel of truth in it. I’ve been writing on and off since the 8th grade, and even during periods of my life when I wasn’t able to focus on writing, the writing itch would still come for me, and I would have to sit down and sketch out something, even if I never did anything with it.
Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty good at telling whether I’ve done enough to satisfy that creative urge that drives me to write, and whether that urge has been left unsatisfied. Yesterday, I realized that something felt off because that creative urge had not been satisfied—which is strange, because after only two weeks of working on this AI-assisted novel project, I’m already halfway done with the first draft. Indeed, yesterday I “wrote” (if that’s the right word for it) a little over 4.5k AI-assisted words.
Now, this should go without saying, but the point of writing professionally is not how good the creative process makes you feel, but how well and how quickly you produce a quality finished product. But I do think there’s a correlation between the two: that you are more likely to create a quality finished work the better your creative process satisfies your creative urges.
In the last three months of writing with AI, I’ve had some writing days that were better than almost any I’ve had in years. I’ve also had some very meh days, which is to be expected… but what isn’t so expected is this feeling of being creatively unsatisfied, which I usually don’t feel unless it’s been two or three weeks since I’ve done any writing. Something weird is going on.
How much of this feeling of creative dissatisfaction is due to the fact that I’m outsourcing a significant portion of the creative work to an AI, and how much of it is simply to be expected from trying to master a new and unfamiliar skill, which has kept me from satisfying that urge in the same way as I have in the past? At this point, it’s difficult to say. Probably a little of both.
Having worked on this for a while now, though, I think that the writers (and other creative types) who are going to succeed the most with AI-assisted creative work are the ones who figure out how to integrate the human element of their process with the AI element of their process, such that each one complements and enhances the other. Right now, everyone’s talking about how AI will replace us, but that’s really the wrong way to think about it if you want to learn how to master these tools.
I suspect that the way to master AI-assisted writing is not to try to get the AI to “do the hard stuff,” or replace some aspect of the creative process, but to integrate it within your creative process such that it enhances and magnifies your own, very human efforts. For that reason, I’m changing the way that I count my daily words so that I no longer make a distinction between words that I “write” myself, and words that the AI “writes” or generates, because the AI can’t generate words unless I give it enough to work with. Often, that means that I write a little, then generate a little, then tweak what the AI generates and write a little more. When the process is working well, it’s very difficult to say which parts were purely AI “written,” and which parts were purely human “written.”
But it’s still going to take a while to figure out exactly how to integrate AI into my writing process. As I continue to do that, I’m going to pay close attention to how it satisfies—or fails to satisfy—my creative urge to write, not because that is the end goal, but because I suspect that if my creative urge is not being satisfied, the AI-assisted stuff that I’m producing probably isn’t very good. It may not be very good even if my creative urges are satisfied, but if something about the process is missing, then something about the final product probably is missing as well.
Anyhow, those are some more of my random thoughts as I continue to experiment with AI-assisted writing. I was hoping to finish the rough/AI draft of The Riches of Xulthar before the end of the month, but I’m almost out of AI words for this billing cycle, so I’ll probably move on to the “humanizing” phase for what I’ve already written, which is where I retype the AI-generated stuff in order to pass it through what I like to call “the human filter.” Hopefully that helps to give the story a little more of my personal voice and style, and not read like something that could have been AI generated by anyone. But I’m still working out and experimenting with that part of the process, just like all the others.
