Writing is Hell...unless you have a story AI can't tell.

Also, July workshop details

The bad news is that AI is winning - literally winning literary awards. The good news is…well, is there good news?

Several recent news stories have sent shockwaves across the literary world.

Firstly, Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk apparently used AI to write her latest novel, according to Lithub and others. Tokarczuk sparked a fierce literary debate when she revealed that she uses premium AI chatbots to assist with preliminary research, fact-checking, and brainstorming creative ideas. Although she claims she did not use AI to literally write her novels - she won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature for her ‘imaginative’ and ‘boundary-crossing’ storytelling - her revelation sets a concerning precedent, and the fallout settles over the rest of us, the thick grey ash of what are any of us really doing here anymore?

The second recent controversy was that of this year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which was won by Jamir Nazir for his story Serpent in the Grove and is to be published by Grant. The Guardian Newspaper reported ‘obvious markers’ of AI, and the story quickly went viral, with many saying the story was incomprehensible in a very AI way and asking what the hell the judges were thinking? Nazir denies using AI, and Granta said that since it can’t be proven conclusively, they will still publish it.

However you feel about the above stories, they have screamed what most writers have been muttering for a while - that AI writing is here to stay and it represents an existential crisis for the literary world, because what’s the point even trying to write in this age of AI which scrapes thousands if not millions of books and then in response to a few prompts can write a publishable story in the time it takes for you to pick up a pen? Although there’s a certain off-putting AI weirdness to these stories, some have been engaging enough to secure book deals and become bestsellers, and it is becoming scarily undetectable. The truth is, we’re actually all being influenced by AI-writing. The more it proliferates, the more we normalize it as readers and writers. AI may be useful tool as Tokarczuk says, but if AI models can already write Toni Morrison better than Toni Morrison, the question is, why does the world need your writing?

But there is still hope for those of you who don’t want to use AI, who want to write authentic stories with your own blood, sweat, and tears. The truth is, there are 8.3 billion people in the world, and we all have a unique fingerprint. The same is true of our lives. Everyone has a different story to tell. You may have walked the same streets as millions of others, at the same time, with the same result, but how you see and feel about that walk is always going to be unique in some way. Our POV is our fingerprint. This is all we have now.

I could also have asked ‘What’s the point?” when I started out writing. As a Black teen in London during the nineties, looking for something to read in WH Smith, there was plenty of Enid Blyton and Judy Blume and Francine Pascale, but nothing by Black authors in the UK then, and nothing with characters who looked like me, or lived the kind of life my friends and I lived. I decided to write a book for girls like myself, not for money, not because I knew anything about publishing, but that was simply the book I wanted to read at the time. That book was Rude Girls, and incredibly, it was picked up by Pan Macmillan and published as I turned 18. I then wrote Best Things in Life, about two girls trying to break into the music industry and maintain their friendship (I had been in a rap group with my best friend) I went off and wrote plays, a commissioned non-fiction book, and worked in media before coming back to novel-writing with The Lagos Wife, based on my years in Nigeria as a Nigerwife. That book again was not written for money; it was a very specific story about a subset of foreign women like myself who were resident in Nigeria and called Nigerwives. Writing that book was cathartic, a message in a bottle, a way of explaining a life through a fictional story that was very strange to me. That book was bought by Simon & Schuster (Atria) in the US and Penguin Randomhouse (Hutchinson Heinemann) in the UK. It was a Good Morning America Book Club pick and was optioned by HBO (the option has since lapsed).

I’ve never had a novel die on submission. This is not down to the wonder of my prose or only partly, but I believe more due to writing an authentic story, from the heart, a very specific story only I could tell. Not even AI could have told any of my stories before I had written them because no one had written stories like that before. It would have had nothing to scrape from. We will always need stories like this.

What is a story only you can tell?

What makes you different from someone else?

How do you reveal your authentic self on the page, no matter the genre or form?

Where do you start?

Start with my Writing A Story Only You Can Tell, 4-part online workshop with The Center For Fiction, which uses writing exercises and collaborative discussion to interrogate your story and get it onto the page.

Through independent writing that surprises one on the page, participants will learn the art of freewriting—writing without stakes or an agenda—to open themselves up emotionally. There will be opportunities to share and discuss our work, and to give and receive positive feedback on our writing from other participants. Additionally, each session will explore a different aspect of the authentic, vulnerable story. By examining illustrative texts from authors like Zora Neale Hurston and Tim O’Brien, participants will gain perspective on how to dig deeper into memory and vulnerability to develop confidence and uncover truth in our writing.

The workshop takes place on Mondays from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM, July 13 through to August 3rd. $345.

Take heart, AI is not the end. Let’s keep going!