Give my creation life!

The problem with your AI-generated book isn’t the em-dashes or the endless “It’s not this, it’s that” constructions. It’s not even the flood of questionable metaphors or the dull and even tone, although those are definitely problems.

The problem is that it’s lifeless.

People have a tell. They’re idiosyncratic, they use weird syntax, they tell wacky stories and they make logical leaps. They’re passionate. They care.

AI doesn’t care. If you try to tell it to care, the result has all the charm of a paid cheerleader who’d switch teams for a dollar.

The only way to fix this is to lean into your humanity.

How to give your creation life

Luckily, all it takes to make your writing human is to be human. All the things that make you human are what you need to give your creation life.

You had experiences. You remember how they made you feel. They were funny. Or sad. Or weird. Or enlightening. Tell us the story of what happened to you. That’s something no machine can ever do.

You had an insight no one has had before. Now everything that’s ever happened to you, everything you read, everyone you talk to is a chance to gather evidence for that insight. That collection of evidence has never been assembled in one place before, because it supports an idea no one had thought of. Write about that with both logic and passion, and you won’t sound like a machine.

You are in a position to conduct original research. You could field a survey. You could interview two dozen people who face the same problem as your audience. You could generate not just statistics no one has ever seen, but verbatim comments from real human beings, curated exclusively by you. LLMs don’t do primary research, but you can.

You can use “I” to talk about your own experience, “we” to talk about your company or your community, and “you” to talk about your audience. That will orient your prose in a very direct and prescriptive way. AI can use those words, but it just doesn’t sound the same.

You can be bold and counterintuitive and maybe wrong. AI-generated prose isn’t very good at thinking what no one has thought before.

This is easier than you think

When my children were teenagers, I taught a homeschool writing class to them and some of their friends. These were writers who’d never been trained in soulless and formulaic forms like the five-paragraph theme. They were great writers. Oh, sure, they made lots of mistakes, and I helped guide them, but their passionate human spirit was undiminished.

If a 14-year-old can do this, so can you.

Write like you mean it.

Write things that only you can.

Freewrite with abandon, then pluck the best ideas out and revise.

Anyone who can speak and type can do this.

It’s not easy to be a good writer. But it’s easier than you think, because you were born to communicate.

It’s really easy to write soulless prose with an LLM. But nobody will enjoy reading it. Where’s the fun in that?