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AnonymousMarch 30, 2026 • 6 min read
Hard. Difficult. Painful. Excruciating. Soul-crushing. What’s the word—laborious? Worse. Sisyphean? Closer. Wait. There’s a better one. Right there, on the tip of my…
See? That. The tiny, maddening reach for the exact word you can almost taste but can’t quite catch. That’s writing—not the polished sentence at the end, but the reaching. The gap between what you feel and what language can carry.
For all its misery, it’s also one of the quiet joys of being alive. There’s a strange pleasure in hunting for a word and finding, not the perfect one, but the one that’s perfectly imperfect for this sentence, this speaker, this mood. The slightly crooked word. The unexpectedly plain one. The word that shows more of who you are because it carries your limits with it. A human sentence is often beautiful for that reason: it still has the fingerprints of whoever fought to make it.
People talk about writing as if the hard part were just an inconvenience between them and the result. I don’t buy it. The hard part is the process. It’s where you discover what you mean—where a vague feeling becomes a clean sentence, a clean sentence becomes a point of view, and that point of view, slowly, becomes a voice.
Writing is supposed to be difficult, but not in the dull way taxes are difficult or furniture assembly is difficult. It’s difficult the way a long run is, or learning an instrument. The effort isn’t separate from the result. The effort is the result.
The paragraph you delete four times. The half hour you spend deciding whether a character says “I’m sorry” or nothing at all. The sentence that looks fine until you notice it’s too clever, too cold, too eager to impress. None of that is waste. That’s the work. That’s where the mind sharpens and the emotional truth of a piece slowly shows itself. Sometimes it’s infuriating. Sometimes it’s ecstatic. Usually it’s both.
Somewhere along the way, the tech industry decided this was a problem.
Every week now brings another promise to “remove friction from the creative process.” As if friction were a design flaw. As if the blank page were a bug. As if the real dream of writing were not to think more clearly or feel more precisely, but to produce more words, faster.
The logos change. The fantasy doesn’t. Whether the pitch comes wrapped in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Sudowrite, NovelAI, or whatever lands next Tuesday, the offer is the same: skip the lonely part, the doubtful part, the apprenticeship—the years of sounding mediocre on your way to sounding like yourself. Underneath it all is the same seduction: write the chapter in a minute, draft the book by the weekend, let the machine spare you the humiliation of being a beginner.
And it isn’t just writing. More and more, the spirit of the age seems to say that if you’re struggling, you’re doing life wrong. Don’t sit with the problem. Don’t wrestle with the sentence, the sketch, the melody, the argument, the code, the question—just ask ChatGPT, just get the answer, just remove the pause in which you might actually become someone. We’re being trained to treat effort as embarrassment and uncertainty as inefficiency.
I tried one of these tools once. I gave it a scene: two sisters fighting over a family inheritance. It returned three competent paragraphs in seconds. Clean grammar. Acceptable pacing. Dialogue that sounded like dialogue.
And the whole thing was dead.
Not because it was awkward—because it was too smooth. It gave me the generic outline of conflict without the private history that makes conflict matter. It knew the shape of an argument, not the pressure beneath it. It could imitate emotional language, but it couldn’t arrive at emotion through choice, memory, hesitation, resentment, vanity, shame, tenderness—the human mess that gives a scene weight.
That’s what people miss when they talk about AI-generated prose. The problem isn’t only that it can be bland. The deeper issue is that it sidesteps the struggle by which meaning gets made. If the machine hands you the sentence before you’ve earned it, the sentence may still work, but it doesn’t belong to you in the same way. Form without discovery.
Blend every color together and you don’t get richness—you get mud. So much generated prose feels like that to me: taste, memory, and specificity flattened into something statistically plausible and emotionally thin.
Writers aren’t imagining this discomfort in private. It’s out in the open. On Reddit, even playful amateur communities draw hard lines: r/WritingPrompts explicitly bans AI-generated prompt responses. In 2024, NaNoWriMo tore open its own community after defending AI writing tools, prompting outrage from writers and the resignation of author Daniel Jose Older from its writers board. That backlash mattered to me. Beneath the hype, a lot of people still know the difference between being helped and being replaced.
This isn’t only a literary purity argument—it’s a trust argument. In 2025, the Chicago Sun-Times distributed an AI-generated summer guide that included fake books and invented experts. The same year, Wired, Business Insider, and other outlets removed work tied to a fake freelancer after questions about whether the stories were essentially AI-written fiction. When the machine impersonates reportage, the damage isn’t just aesthetic. It’s civic.
I’ve been writing fiction for fifteen years. My world-building lives across spreadsheets, sticky notes, loose paper, and a notebook I’m mildly convinced will one day vanish. I have a magic system with seventeen rules. I have a tavern with a blue door in chapter three that I once accidentally called red in chapter twelve. My editor caught it. I didn’t.
That’s why I don’t want a machine to write for me. I want software to remember for me.
I want something that can hold the shape of a world while I stay inside the sentence. Something that knows “Kael’thas” is a character name, not a typo. Something that can tell me I’ve contradicted myself, lost a thread, or forgotten that a side character already has a brother. Something that can surface notes, patterns, and questions at the right moment—not flood the page with fake inspiration.
A tool and a substitute are not the same thing. A good tool clears administrative debris so I can face the blank page honestly. A substitute tries to spare me that confrontation. But the confrontation is the point. I don’t write because I enjoy having content. I write because I want to make something true, and truth usually doesn’t arrive on demand.
So yes—I want help. Memory. Continuity. Better search, better recall, better organization, better ways to hold a large fictional world in my head without drowning in bookkeeping.
But I don’t want the sentence unless it’s mine.
Recently, for the first time in a long time, I opened a piece of writing software and didn’t feel the familiar dread that now trails behind the word “AI.” For a moment it felt as if someone had understood the distinction. The machine was there to support the work, not perform it. To remember, not replace. To ask, not author.
That difference is small on a product page and enormous on the page itself.
Maybe that’s where a little hope lives. Maybe the more culture fills up with frictionless, synthetic, instantly generated language, the more people will crave the opposite: a real reading, a real voice, a real performance—someone standing in front of them who actually meant what they said. Maybe the AI era won’t only flood the zone with imitation. Maybe it’ll remind people what presence feels like.
I think about theatre when I think about that. In a year supposedly defined by automation, Broadway’s 2024-2025 season drew 14.7 million attendances and $1.89 billion in grosses, the highest-grossing season in its history. That doesn’t prove a grand cultural reversal. It does suggest that even now, people still leave the house for something live, embodied, unrepeatable. They still want to be in the room.
I hope it holds.
— Anonymous