This is the time to get beyond my fears and go for broke. It is time to act and do instead of being wrought by indecision. I am but I don’t think I am alone in that. It is time to stop hiding and do the hard work of writing. To put it out there even if it fails.
That’s the starting line, the mountain we must climb. Even in this age of AI, no one is born as a great anything. We all must work for it. Maybe AI will take many of our jobs but we are not there yet. Even if that happens could we ever allow companies to replace people without harming to society as a whole?
AI might be a shortcut to ensure whatever you are putting out there is grammatically correct if you are writing but it will impact the white-collar worker immensely in so many ways we can’t yet know. I think that in part because of that, there is a need for original works. How many hero journey stories have you read? These are stories that have been myths and legends to what you find in books or TV? There are books about story formulas like the hero’s journey that define the stories we read every day. Soon AI will be creating stories instead of people.
That’s a world I don’t want to live in because LLMs are not creative, they don’t have intent and don’t understand the work it takes to create. They reconstruct concepts and ideas based on what information they have taken in and what you request. In that way what an LLM creates is not transformative but generic being less than what it has taken from because it is using everything, to become less than the sum of what it pulled from. It takes the person asking to provide that context but can an AI do it justice if the person using it isn’t willing to work for it themselves?
In some ways, it feels like the beginning of the end for the need for a writer. While it is a process that will take years, it is happening. I think it will take less time to get from 90% to 95% where you cannot tell the difference but that final few percentage points might take decades or longer. It might take a new technological innovation that the scientists and researchers have yet to conceive to get there but that feels like the aim of Open AI and many of these companies pouring billions into the AI space. These companies want to get rich even if it means they have to sacrifice the people to do it.
I am a nobody so I don’t have to worry about what anyone will think because who the hell is going to find it? Who will bother taking their time to read it? It is harder today because of all the noise, and the focus on audio, video and image to get anyone to read. Social media and the online echo chamber shape and frame our shortening attention spans. None of that is good but it is what it is, and we must work within those constraints.
I already have a universe; a sci-fi world that I started creating more than a decade ago. It has hundreds of pages of material for how the world works but I don’t have a specific story to tell within it. I am looking for something that makes sense and that is unique. My world takes place in humanity’s evolution to a space-faring society.
That’s done to give it juice but I don’t know how to do it in a way that is grounded. I don’t want extra-terrestrial life in a way that feels unrealistic, where you can go to the next star system and there they are. I’ve made my world where although we can travel across the stars, it isn’t without risk or cost. Even at the point where human civilization is in my sci-fi universe space travel is brutal and deadly on a regular basis.
This means that intelligent life is rarer still and not around the corner but maybe in a few distant spots around the galaxy. How do I reconcile that with the want and need for aliens like we are so used to seeing and reading in books and media?
The goal and the Mission from this day on with this being the first day of writing for day 1. What I am thinking of doing is writing on here and or on Medium a scene every day. It could be long, or it could be short and putting it out there for the arrows to strike it down.
I want to do it to learn and improve. To take the hits and arrows but instead of seeing that process as negative, take it as constructive feedback. I have a scene for today but I don’t know if I will get it done. If I don’t I’ll post it tomorrow and then write the next scene, any scene and try and see if I can keep it up.
I’ll spend 20 minutes thinking of a scene and then just write out the scene and put it out there. I know no one will read anything but it isn’t about that. It is about the words and learning how to use them and not be afraid for it to be seen. I have wasted enough time, and I owe it to my parents and myself more than anyone to get started.
How do I find that space where I can tell a story that doesn’t feel derivative and or generic? How do I make the world feel like it could exist? So when a reader or audience experiences the story, the leap to suspend their disbelief is a small jump, not an enormous leap.
I might not necessarily tell a scene within that world, but I know it will happen. Every writer has to take care with doing that because I don’t want my world out there in a way that could be scrapped by AI or stolen even if I have a better chance to win the lottery than that happening.
Writing scenes in this world to test the waters but not give enough about the world risks what I have created but it is a risk that every writer early on has to accept. I can just write any scene, take a scenario and see what is possible, what can happen to the characters if only to learn how to balance action, dialogue and description.
Regardless let’s write on 🙂