AI Will Never Beat Writers Who Master This Skill

Copyright 20260730 by K.D. Hooper

I have so much I need to write. I’m revising a second draft. Working on the plot and characters of a new book. I really want to write a review of Backrooms. Plus, everything else I need to do. But what I want to talk about is important for anything I need to write and anything I’ll write from now on. Maybe it is for you too.

I need to put more emotion into my fiction writing. Hell, I need to put more emotion into my nonfiction stuff. Readers love emotion. In fiction, they want to see how a sympathetic character deals with internal and external obstacles. Living vicariously through someone else’s experiences.

But even in pieces like this, where I’m talking directly to you about real-world things, I need to bring more emotion here too. I need to find the guts to let it all hang out.

Why? Well, when it comes to fiction, your ability to show emotion, to move the audience, is vital to crafting a satisfying story.

But there’s another sneaky reason that emotion is so important. Human writers are now competing against AI.

If you’ve ever read what AI spews out, it’s plenty of words, and it’s grammatically correct, but it’s also devoid of purpose and it’s largely absent of emotion. AI is currently unable to hold a thought and direct you through an emotional moment… because it’s just a word machine. And machines don’t feel.

Emotion is a huge competitive advantage for human writers. But you must identify the opportunities, understand how to bring it, and you must have the intestinal fortitude to go there.

Let me give you a good example.

In the first draft of my novel “The Rider Who Fell from Heaven,” I have a chapter where my female lead Eliza is trying to convince my male lead Sera not to go into town and confront the bad guys. She lost her husband a couple of years before, and she’s scared that she’ll lose Sera too.

The first draft left that conversation mostly unsaid. They talk around the subject a bit, and then Sera storms out so he doesn’t have to have the conversation. I wish I could tell you that this was in service of the story, but it wasn’t. Here’s where I admit to you that when I create these characters I get attached to them, and it makes it harder for me to be mean or challenge them. Yes, I know that’s ridiculous. I know that it’s my job to bring hell down on them. But it’s not easy for me.

I’m a rational dude. I know how silly that is.

When I read that chapter, I realized that I skipped a vital emotional moment. I whiffed on a conversation that was imperative for the story, for their relationship, for the characters… and for the readers. I had to have those two characters fight. I rewrote the chapter to bring out as much emotion as possible.

The new chapter made me feel bad. It was a terrible moment for those characters. But it became one of the most important chapters in the book. It forced them both to question their own motivations and what they meant to each other.

Pushing the emotion made the chapter much better, and it will make the overall book better too. It’s so important.

But I must remind myself that my inclination is for my characters to get along. And that’s no good. I must identify when that happens, and I need to work harder to find conflict the first time. Conflict makes for a tantalizing story.

As a writer, am I alone on this? Or do other writers deal with this too? How do you catch when you’re avoiding conflict? How do you bring more emotion to your work?

Naming the problem is the first step. Owning it and putting it out there is the second. But I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to infuse more conflict and emotion into my writing from now on.