What needs to happen before you can be a "good author"

Hi from the Netherlands. I’m on vacation this week, so I’m re-running a post from 2021. (Well, to be more precise, I’m running a version of it that I’ve just spent an hour obsessively rewriting here in my AirBNB, because it’s raining and I’m a lunatic and—who’d have thought!—my writing has improved with five years of additional practice.)

I thought of this post after reading “The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI,” Eve Fairbanks’ latest for The Atlantic. On the importance of thinking while writing—and the exasperation one denies oneself the moment one lunges for ChatGPT—she writes:

When writing is hard, it’s often not just because we are tired, underfed, or inefficient but because our mind is trying to tell us crucial things. How many draft texts to colleagues or family members have we all stared at in frustration, wondering why they don’t feel quite right—until we finally realize that they need to be rethought completely, or not sent at all?

…Ten years ago I composed a reconciliatory email to a boyfriend but never sent it, because I couldn’t get the phrasing right. Only much later did I realize I simply didn’t mean what I’d been trying to write. If I’d had an AI program to help me get over the hump, I’d be married to a different person. A much less suitable one.

She’s pinpointed perhaps the greatest tragedy of creative dependence on AI: it prevents you from happening to yourself, from mining the depths of your own potential. Mature genius is like gold in a pan full of Alaskan riverbed crap; it emerges from the subconscious through agitation, one mote at a time. If you never stand there shaking, you’ll die without realizing gold was ever in the river at all.

Once you recognize this truth, it becomes ever more obvious with time. The older I get, the more I realize that people’s genius is not so much a function of their age as the extent to which they’ve happened to themselves, facing hard things head-on and wrestling with horrible feelings instead of walling them off inside anxiety, avoidance, projection, or addiction.

People who haven’t done this sort of work are at best sort of boring—or derivative, or both. So’s their writing, no matter how polished it looks on the surface. In fact, theoretically polished prose that is still mysteriously boring is a telltale sign of a writer who doesn’t understand some crucial aspect of their nature. Their gold is still lost in the muck of other people’s thoughts, feelings, and expectations.

One doesn’t need AI to hide from oneself this way, but AI certainly makes it easier. And as long as you’re in hiding—or whenever you’re in hiding, if it’s intermittent—you’ll miss out on insight that you and you alone are capable of bringing into the world.

Please don’t deny yourself your own potential—at least not anymore. Put the sand back in your rock tumbler.

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Originally published January 25, 2021

Writers express anxieties like this to me all the time:

• “Nothing much has happened to me. Why would anyone be interested in what I have to say?”

• “I guess interesting stuff happened to me, but I don’t think about it that much. It’s my normal. Why include it in the book?”

• “I wish I had firsthand experience in this subject. My interest feels fraudulent without it.”

• “I can’t believe I have a book deal and I’m feeling empty and anxious rather than elated. Is something wrong with the deal? Is something wrong with me?”

• “I’m so upset I’m getting so many rejections. Can I pull the submission and totally rewrite it before anyone else says no?”

• “Why is my proposal still not ready after I’ve spent so much time on it? What still needs to happen?”

These questions are all nominally focused on different scenarios in a publishing career, but I see them as interrelated. They’re the questions of someone who doubts whether they’re “doing it right”—someone who feels something “off” about the external circumstances into which they are writing but can’t quite pinpoint why. They’re asked by someone who thinks something needs to happen to them before they can ever relax into their career.

If this all sounds familiar to you, I have some validating news: you’re correct! Something IS missing, and it’s significant. Something DOES need to happen to you before you can have a fulfilling, meaningful career as an author or write in a way people will still admire long after you’re dead.

It’s you.

The questions above are all the kind people ask when they are alienated from themselves. They don’t understand their perspective because they don’t know what their perspective even is. They feel like a fraud because, well, they kind of are; their conscious thought and self-esteem are entirely made up of other people’s emotions, opinions, and judgments.

Somewhere, for some reason—probably something to do with a childhood caregiver or other influential authority figure—they’ve learned to self-regulate through external validation. Meanwhile, they treat their own feelings and opinions like Montresor treats Fortunato in “The Cask of Amontillado”: insane contempt, cellar, chains, cement, brick wall, eventual smothering.

Have you pulled a Fortunato on your own authority? Your pride in what makes you unique? Your rage, fear, and sorrow about any trauma, large or small, that might’ve occurred in your past? Your ability to figure out what you truly need and then ask for it in words? To feel deserving of what you need?

If so: that’s what you’re missing. That’s what’ll make all the difference between a career that leaves you feeling fulfilled and grounded vs. one that feels unfulfilling, confusing, triggering, and anxiety-provoking. That’s what’ll make your writing unforgettable. Not someone else’s approval. Not every last thing going “right.” Not having “deep” or “dramatic” experiences. You.

YOU NEED TO HAPPEN TO YOU.