AI Writing as a "Good Fire"
Sometimes a hellish inferno purges the brush to the benefit of the forest
If there’s one thing I think we can all agree on is that there are too many hot takes on AI writing—which really doesn’t seem to be affecting our daily lives as much as the initial bombastic claims of last year.
Sure, my professor mom is forcing her medical school students to handwrite essays in-class due to several students trying to pass AI essays as their own. Medical. Students. Future doctors. What a pack of dangerous losers, amirite? Let’s not allow those of such low character and inability to do basic research stand over us with the surgeon’s knife, agreed?
And yes, there are little AI chatbots and editors popping up on LinkedIn or Quora or wherever you digitally roam. Is anybody really using these things? Impossible to tell.
But friends and associates have shared with me AI creative writing resulting from prompts. A post-apocalyptic fantasy prompt led to a story about a plucky female protagonist and her trained falcon resisting an evil warlord. An essay using the John Henry versus mechanized steam drill fable as an allegory for human versus AI writing framework was quite coherent and straightforward—with all the syntax, point-counterpoint pattern, and grammar the high school grading rubrics love. AI even massaged the scattered bits of a recalled potent dream into a coherent narrative as an interpretation.
The simple fact remains that I—as a guy who writes creatively for a living—have yet to be impressed or threatened by any AI writing I’ve encountered. But I do think AI writing represents a direct threat to those who profit from or are wed to the ruthlessly dominate writing philosophy of my lifetime, i.e., ”writing as a craft”.
Writing as Craft versus Magic
“Writing as a craft” is inarguably the dominate ideology across the developed world in sectors public and private, academic and business. More than any literary style or genre or philosophical perspective, the clearly natural sciences-inspired idea that we can marshal reductive reasoning, pattern recognition, and structural purity to completely master and understand writing and story is the idea of this literary age.
Writing as craft has been pounded into my brain as the only way to think about books my entire life. There is a structure. There is utility, as the writing will go to work for some profitable venture after all: good grade, business report, socio-political ammunition, sales, etc. Most keynote speeches from bestselling authors I’ve attended laud writing as a craft. Andre Dubus III, a literal carpenter, notably leaned in hard.
But, hear me out… what if craftsman writing is not the only way to view the creative writing experience?
What if, rather than this modern innovation being a liberating and enlightening path to full mastery of the human experience, we’ve narrowed our minds and potential in an unprecedented way? For the sake of argument, let’s imagine the antithesis of a technical, craftsman approach to writing steeped in the methods of contemporary natural sciences and reductive, material reasoning. Forget the formula for a hypothetical alternative.
The antithesis I come up with is magical writing, magic simply meaning as the Merriam-Webster dictionary states, “an extraordinary power or influence seemingly from a supernatural source.” I feel the disdain from a certain person as I write the words. Unease. Superiority. The defenses are up. But I appeal for a moment of indulgence.
An example of magical writing is the Hindu epic Ramayana, categorized as such in-part due to the methodology of the marijuana-smoking Vedic monks who dreamed up the Indian saga from a sacred space. I love the Ramayana and, yes!, for its prose. So often we examine texts in the scholarly sense, but so rarely for enjoyment. But there’s a demon king attempting to seduce a princess. A gigantic monkey carries a mountain. There’s a man, Guho, whose spiritual power is so great he cannot leave his forest or else the entire world will spin off its axis. A banished prince awakening his inner self as an incarnation of a god (Krishna). The most epic archer v. archer showdown in all of story. There’s no shortage of interesting and amazing visuals and concepts. This stuff shouldn’t be homework, it should be in the Marvel cinematic universe.
Simply put, there is a more expansive and original imagination with, yes!, nuanced and layered themes in the Ramayana than the majority of books published this century that I’ve picked up. How is this possible?! We have the formula! We are the master craftsman, soberly whittling our sticks! How could these pot-smoking Vedic monks from millennia past dream up this incredible stuff while we collectively are struggling to make a worthy Rings of Power Season 2—even with over a billion dollars invested?
Perhaps we’ve allowed a certain writing, and by extension storytelling, method to become overly dominate. It is this craftsman writing, much like how the artisan craftsman faces automated manufacturing machines, that AI is revealing with its effortless mastery.
Worshipping Christ vs. Becoming Christ-like
I read Knut Hamsun’s Hunger the other week. Published in Norwegian in 1921, it was Hamsun’s debut and is one of those works educated folks point to as the beginning of the modern novel as we know it. If the prevailing narratives are to be believed, Hemingway himself looked to Hamsun’s writing as inspiration (and after reading Hunger, I see the lineage). I tried the just-over-one-hundred-page read about ten years ago and just didn’t connect to the thing. This time around I could barely put it down and have been thinking about it nonstop.
Why does this little novel about a Norwegian bum have such staying power? Is it the fine craftsmanship and adherence to our exhaustively studied formulas? Was it tailored perfectly with a target demographic in mind, backed up by a killer marketing strategy? No! Hamsun’s writing, and his semi-autobiographical protagonist, is batshit insane. There’s no sterile, surgeon-like approach going on here. He’s whipped himself into a divine frenzy not unlike the shamans of old going on three-day fasts before dropping peyote in the sweat lodge.
As a taster, there is a scene that literally raised my heart rate. Our bitter, wretched, but endearing Norwegian bum has been pining after a local woman with whom he’s had a few positive but fleeting interactions with in public. He doesn’t even know her name, but deems her Ylajali. The mirage of her in his mind is one of the few positive aspects of his life.
As he is kicked from crappy living situation to crappy living situation due to his inability to pay rent, his mind increasingly becomes unmoored due to starvation and crippling shame. He’s always lying to people about his station, even as he pawns the jacket off his back. His very life depends on whether or not he can secure and complete writing assignments for local papers. Often his mind is too foggy from hunger to do so.
In the depths of his woes, Ylajali agrees to meet with him for a date and not only finds him charming but invites him into her flat. The steamy, blush inducing sequence is abruptly interrupted when she concludes that he is not a charming rogue, but rather insane. For her, his presence shifts from delightful to frightening in an instant. As she covers up and he reels, he launches into a rant that fills an entire page:
As a reader of our time, I was taken aback. If ever I tried anything so bold as to launch into a mad, page-long, lusty, emotive rant like this in any school writing assignment or magazine article or short story, I’d get red ink. I could rattle off an endless list of incidents where I tried something original or cheeky and was rewarded with swift, stern rebuke by the craftsman writer. The formula master.
But… Hamsun…! I may protest.
You’re no Hamsun, is the inevitable rebuttal. Yes, the magic is reserved for the lauded dead whom with the benefit of hindsight we can forgive. The Marquezes with their disorienting magic surrealism and the Vonneguts with time-controlling aliens. Hunter S. Thompsons and their strung out fever dreams. The special dead may indulge. But not we the unremarkable living.
But I disagree. In Christianity, there seems an eternal tension between viewing Jesus as the perfect son of God whom we can only look up to as an example, and those who say the Christ teaches us to live as his peer. So it is with writing. The craftsmen writers view the special dead as idols to study, emulate, and worship, but it is blasphemy to attempt to try out our own hand as peers. Writing as magic practitioners view the Hamsuns as wise encouragers of the way and it’s our lot in life not to pray to them, but to become magic with them.
AI will never write anything like this passage from Hamsun. As someone who has been down to a few bucks and head over heels in love with a woman trying to deduce whether I’m charming or nuts, Hamsun hits the nerve. And within this interaction is infinite layers speaking to the theme of hunger both physical and metaphysical. He does so magically, not structurally. I feel hunger as I read.
I’ll go a step further. To my palette, much of contemporary writing reads as simplistic grunts and growls! We’ve kept the minimalism of Hemingway but stripped away the artistry. The dominate dogma likes this progression. Sentences are to be lean and to the point, always. Like the bleat of a goat, what we’re saying is simple and utilitarian. “Feed me oats!” we bleat. Rarely are we swept into beautiful prose simply for the thrill of it. But we need non-craftsman prose to feel hunger as Hamsun writes it. Magic.
Hell, when was the last time I read beautiful prose?! You’ll not find the beauty of prose high on the priority list of the writing structuralists. Imagine a paragraph in a book written purely for the love of the scene, the author not a goat bleating “Feed me oats!” but rather a songbird belting a tune for no logical reason at all. Such a paragraph will incur a big red X at the first reader. Stet. Cut. No.
AI as “Good Fire”
Writing as a system has won out, especially in the 21st Century to which I’ve come of age. The one big problem, the glaring Death Star exhaust port weakness, is that it’s become such a system—purged of magic—that machines without souls can replicate the vast majority of it with ease. As our relationship to the word has become more and more utilitarian—the journalism more partisan PR spin, the books more written to target demographics for profit or influence, the words on social media less earnest opinion and more attention economy product—so too has what we’ve been expressing become simpler to replicate via automated program that can draw from our work as a metadata set.
As the Ramayana and Hunger show, a major part of writing has been shamanic in nature. A communion to our dreaming world, a place one enters by kneeling before the awesomeness of the universe itself. When I write, I seek to give myself goosebumps or inspire the hint of a tear to well in my eye. I sip tequila and, in the wee hours of the morning and in complete privacy, dance about my apartment to music or do pull ups as sort of a physical outburst I can’t restrain.
I’m drawn to writing not because I’m a sober, stoic craftsperson building a chair. I experience a sort of full body high. An orgasm. One really feels like they’ve received the perfect answer to an earnest prayer. The knock on the door from the lover you invited over but didn’t think would arrive. It’s like running your stout little sailboat over wild waters, the chaotic and potentially dangerous environment becomes the elements that propel you forward.
Critically, each writer doing this has the potential to go places that humanity has never quite been to, or maybe been to but never perfectly expressed in words. This is the creative fuel which cannot be replicated from a metadata set. The hope from me is that AI will force the writing world into writing as magic once again, which I believe would be positive even if many of them go there as displaced refugees. Writing as a system will be ruthlessly rooted out by the sleepless machine, the only human writing left standing too damn creative or original to replicate. Magic.
Humanity would benefit from this evolutionary pressure. Frank Herbert touches on this theme in his Dune universe where human beings have been forced to push their latent potentials in the wake of a “thinking machine” ban after a brutal war. In his world, humans—with the aide of drugs, extreme discipline, religion, and multigenerational societies—unlock the abilities to become computers, hospital machines, lie detectors, and even gods.
In ecology, the “good fire” burns out the undergrowth and dead trees, the overly rationalized, formulaic, craftsman writing in this metaphor. But the good fire also brings nutrients, germinates seeds, and benefits the survivors of the blaze. The writing that persists could be more original, creative, and legitimately a human evolution on par with the technology itself. But if the past is our guide, our hands often need to be forced. Bring on the blaze, I say. I don’t see the dominate dogma changing any other way.
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Why do you separate art and craft?
I think you do a disservice to craftsmen. People who craft, whether it be building a chair, hand sewing a quilt or fashioning exquisite jewelry, might still have a transcendent experience as they work. Craftsmanship is not just about following a formula or creating something utilitarian; it can be just as magical as what you describe as “writing as magic.”
You wrote " The craftsmen writers view the special dead as idols to study, emulate, and worship, but it is blasphemy to attempt to try out our own hand as peers."
Who says it is blasphemy? Scholars and critics? Or everyday readers? For whom do you write? Yourself, readers, critics, awards.
The school of craft in writing has come about by studying myth, religious texts, preliterate story, and what human beings hunger for in stories. I have studied craft because above all else, I want to be read. I want to write stories that will transport people into the world I create. Craft helps me reach them, but the magic comes in the emotional connection.
As I see it, every book is a shared experience between writer and reader. I write the book, but the reader will bring to it all his or her lifetime of experience, and so each reader has a different experience with the book. That is magic. Thus not every book is for every reader. The passage you shared from Hunger, for example, didn’t resonate with me in the same way it did with you. I see that as part of the reader’s unique interaction with the text, where their own experiences come into play.
When photography was first invented, the fine art painters feared it and claimed that photography could never be considered art because all the human had to do was push the button. After a few years, it became clear that choosing what was in the frame, choosing the settings, and working in the darkroom were all human endeavors that were a part of photography and were the creativity that determined the end work. A camera was simply a tool, and the human magic determined the quality of the craft/art work.
AI writing is not some good fire that is going to cleanse the work of the stodgy craftsmen writers and bring back the artful magic. AI is simply another tool in the writer/craftsman’s toolbox. In the end, it’s not about rejecting craft for magic or vice versa. It’s about embracing both, knowing that craft can elevate magic, and magic can give craft its soul.