The whole point

(and the failings of AI)

I recently had to add a bullet point to my introductory editorial calls: If you used generative AI to compose your memoir/essay/novel, I am not the editor for you. I probably should have added that to the conversation a long time ago, but frankly it didn’t occur to me that anyone would want to pay a writing coach/developmental editor a chunk of money to help them with writing that they didn’t actually write.

Author R.O. Kwon recently posted a note on Substack that said: “It seems to me & to so many writer friends that the writing, the process, is the point. The long, long, hard struggle is itself the end result…” Which got me thinking about who I am when I’m absorbed in the writing of a book.

I started writing Ready for Air when Stella was about six months old. I needed to get it all down on the page before the specifics evaporated right out of my sleep-deprived brain. I needed to process the trauma of my severe pre-eclampsia and Stella’s premature birth. I needed to make sense of it all. I also knew I needed to turn in a thesis the following year when I returned to school. So I wrote my way into these questions: How has motherhood changed me? How can I learn to live with uncertainty? What and who have buoyed me in my darkest times?

That spring, when Stella was still so tiny, my dear dad would come over for two hours, two mornings a week to babysit while I went to the Blue Moon coffee shop near our house to get as many details down as possible. And over the next year, I lived two lives: the one in real time, playing with and feeding my baby, changing diapers, being a friend and spouse, going to classes, and teaching; and the one in the book, living inside those memories, scenes, questions. I worked on the manuscript at the coffee shop, of course, but also on my runs and in my sleep.

There is nothing like the high of figuring out a narrative problem, experiencing the jolt of an original idea, or suddenly making a connection that hadn’t been clear before while my feet pound the pavement or the dirt trail along the Mississippi River. There is nothing like waking up at 5:30 am knowing what scene must come next.

Last year, I was in that deep creative space again as I wrote my first rom-com, cranking out two chapters a week, consumed by the characters and the story in the most delicious way. It wasn’t always easy—sometimes I’d get stuck, unsure how to get the characters to the next physical or emotional place—but I just kept writing and mulling until it worked out.

I was nearing the end of the first draft over 4th of July week while we were in northern Minnesota with a cabin full of family. Each morning I woke early with scenes or dialogue in my head, so I’d get up to write in the kitchen. When others started spilling out of bedrooms, I’d take off for the coffee shop in town. In the late afternoon, I’d sequester with my laptop and a glass of wine in the back bedroom. I’m sure I wasn’t much fun to be around, but god was I happy—existing in an almost perpetual flow state. When I typed the last words of the last chapter, I burst into tears, so proud of what I created, so grateful for the journey I’d been on that year.

I am my best self when I am writing, when I am in the thick of creating a world on the page, a world rooted inside my head. I see connections and possibilities everywhere. And it changes who I am, how I think, what I believe possible. That is the point. That is, to quote R. O. Kwon again, “the end result.” That magic—because as challenging as it can be, it is magic—cannot be replicated by AI. Those highs and lows do not exist if your “writing” is actually regurgitated (harrumph, stolen) material. So no, I am not the editor for that content. Send me instead the messy first drafts that have lived in your minds, kept you awake at night, challenged your understanding of yourself. Bring me that flawed, beautiful, human magic!

And tell me about your struggles, how working through something (on or off the page) has changed you, made you more the person you are meant to be?

---

The first quarterly Zoom gathering for paid subscribers is tomorrow, 6/10, at 6 pm CT. (This is totally optional. Marge, I see you!) We’ll talk a little craft and have a conversation, I’ll share a short reading and a writing prompt, and we will spend a little time writing together. This will be on Zoom rather than Substack Live so that we can interact. If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll get the Zoom link via email. If you’d like to join and aren’t a paid subscriber, simply upgrade before 6 pm CT tomorrow night.