Category: On Writing

After a bestselling author brand with high ratings and substantial readership rejected my ghostwriting pitch for being “overwritten, meandering, and unmarketable,” I resubmitted with something more… tailored to their audience and brand—written by an LLM (because at that point I was going to tell them to take a hike anyway). “Perfect!” they said. “When can you start?” Which is exactly what I suspected they’d say, proving that the dozens of titles a year written by poverty-wage ghostwriters they churn out are indistinguishable from something an AI can produce for pennies on the dollar in a fraction of the time. I laughed my ass off and walked away from the deal. Partly because their lowball offer was insulting, and mostly because they wouldn’t know quality professional writing if it slapped them across the face (my most recently published novel has a 4.8/5 rating across hundreds of reviews). They do know what sells for their market though, I’ll give them that: competent plot delivery with competent characters doing competent things competently. No pesky character arcs. No nuance. No unique authorial voice. No emotional subtlety. And their sales prove many readers prefer that sort of thing. And that’s perfectly fine. But AI can vomit that slop out all day long without breaking a sweat, so if you write for that market, you’re right to be worried about being replaced by AI. And sooner rather than later. It’s just basic economics. Meanwhile, the rest of us can breathe easy. In this essay I prove why…

I asked Grok to rate my fantasy novel’s opening scene. It gave me 8/10, so I asked it to rewrite for 10/10. It made it objectively worse by replacing distinctive voice with clichés, crude humor with bland description, showed psychology with explained backstory. Then I fed that “perfect” rewrite back to it in a fresh session. Result? 8/10 again. Grok couldn’t recognize its own “masterpiece.” Each “improvement” drifted further toward generic template prose while maintaining the same encouraging-but-short-of-perfection score. AI doesn’t improve writing toward excellence—it pushes innovation toward bland conformity. Scores are arbitrary, feedback is retrofitted justification, and it’s already screening manuscripts for publishers. Innovative creative writing will always fail algorithmic evaluation because AI can’t recognize what it’s never seen before.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ And it sure as hell can’t write it.

Can AI ever write a truly masterful story? I asked Claude—and even the AI admitted its own limitations. “Pattern matching can produce competent genre fiction,” Claude told me. “It cannot produce the purple thread line, because that line doesn’t come from craft—it comes from consciousness shaped by experience.” That moment in my manuscript—where Wulan sees bruise-colored thread and thinks of her dead brother—emerged from empathy, not algorithms. From understanding how grief ambushes you through concrete details. AI can recognize what makes prose emotionally resonant. But creating that resonance? That requires something no training data can provide: a consciousness that’s actually lived. It requires empathy.

Every week, someone on Twitter defends the ultra-prolific indie author pumping out ten novels a year. They invoke “pulp speed” and cite million-word-per-year math. They insist it’s possible if you just work hard enough. They’re selling you productivity courses. Here’s the problem: they’re confusing typing with publishing. I write fast. I’ve banged out 134,000-word first drafts in six weeks. My peak year was 500,000+ words. And I still can’t hit seven published novels annually. Not even close. The bottleneck isn’t typing speed. It’s revision, editing, proofreading—everything that turns a first draft into a finished book. When you account for that work, the math collapses. Which means when someone consistently publishes 7+ novels per year, I’m calling it: they’re using ghostwriters.

I used to call myself an “author of dubious literary merit”—half joke, half truth. I write stories to follow characters through impossible situations and see what choices they’ll make and how they’ll live with them (and hopefully entertain readers in the process). I never set out to explore specific themes or craft philosophical arguments. Then a reviewer recently said my novel “Born in Battle” was “one of the top 5 books I’ve read this year” out of over a hundred novels including “War and Peace,” “Blood Meridian,” and “Crime and Punishment.” She described it as “the only book that, a week later, still makes me get up in the middle of the night with my thoughts about what academics would call enduring themes of human existence.” That made me stop and take a hard look at what I’ve actually been writing over the last few years, and why. Turns out I’ve been in conversation with authors like Lloyd Alexander, Ursula K. Le Guin, and N.K. Jemisin all along.

When I started writing “The Stygian Blades” earlier this year, I was nearly petrified by concerns about being “unique” enough. A grizzled mercenary veteran, an exiled jinn, a frostroot-addicted shadow mage—every fantasy heist story you’ve ever read. I was so paralyzed by the familiar elements that I almost never started writing it. Then I posted a simple tweet: “Nothing is original. Every story has already been told—but it hasn’t been told by you.” Three million views later, the response was clear. This fear is epidemic. But here’s what Avatar, Shakespeare, and Bob Dylan all understand about originality that MFA workshops don’t teach.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

A reader loved my book enough to reread it within a month. She ranked it in her top 10 of the year. Then she gave it three stars. Her reason? My protagonist felt like three completely different people wearing the same name. She was absolutely right. I was fighting myself on every page—code-switching between “proper military fantasy” and the literary voice that kept breaking through whenever the story hit real moral weight. She’d caught me mid-transformation, documenting the messy transition from writing what I thought readers wanted to writing in my actual voice. It took me five books and hundreds or thousands of discarded words to find my true voice. But it was worth it.

Someone on Twitter wished authors could be “mystical” again—writing stories that let readers project their own meanings without accountability. That’s not mysticism. That’s cowardice dressed in artistic pretension. My novels are Rorschach tests, but the inkblot has teeth. They contain explicit moral architecture that forces readers to reveal their relationship to impossible choices: Sacrifice a friend’s soul to save millions? Accept peaceful reform that costs women’s bodies? Choose between your daughter and revolution? How you respond tells me everything about what you actually believe when principles collide with survival. Fiction that interrogates you isn’t mystical. It’s craft.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​