What A.I. Can Never Steal from a Writer

In Stephen King's memoir and writing guide, On Writing, he explains why he writes. Not for money or success. King says:

"I did it for the buzz."

Every year I read portions of King's memoir. Not for the writing tips, or to remember the timeline of his career. I read it to remember why we write. In an age when a machine can write a passable chapter in seconds, I keep coming back to King's answer. King wrote for the buzz, and I'm sure most of us do the same. There is a universal, dare I say, spiritual principle running underneath his words.

Nobody in their right mind believes writing is going to make them rich or famous. Most well-known authors are unicorns and have names like King, Patterson, Child, Kinney, Collins, and Clear. The average blue-collar author works a day job.

But if you were to ask any author, from the uber-famous to the under-the-radar indie writer, they'd say they write because of some version of "the buzz." They write because it lights them up. It's a mystery why a person would get up at 4 AM to get a few words in before the family wakes. But we do it.

Any reasonable person would say that spending two hours before bed to move a thriller along is poor time management. But we do it.

The great existential question is why anyone would spend so much time stringing sentences together for an audience smaller than a JV basketball team. Is this a great way to spend your one and only precious life? And yet, most writers will say: I see no better way to spend my days.

The buzz.

I wrote my first novel after a friend suggested I participate in National Novel Writing Month (RIP). Every November, brave souls attempted to write a 50,000-word rough draft of a novel in a month. My first attempt failed. I hit 20,000 words and apparently lost the buzz. But I finished the following November.

My novel, Hired Gun, is forever free on Amazon. It will not be in the American Canon of Literary Letters. But I wrote it, labored to make it readable, and had it edited. I'm proud of it because it's mine. After many failed attempts, I'd finally written a full-length novel. It also inspired me to take on the challenge many more years, and now I have multiple books in the world.

You see, I wrote that book in 2009 to deal with the death of our daughter. My opening line is death and rain mingled together. It opens with a scene at a funeral, a scene true to life. When our friend did a small graveside memorial for our daughter, it began to rain.

My novel is a thriller and has nothing to do with grieving parents, but it does. The main character, Dexter, is dealing with the loss of his daughter, and he expresses it by making the world a more just place. A world where kids have a shot.

I wrote the novel for the buzz of dealing with loss. Sometimes the buzz is for survival. Sometimes it's the only way through.

Some reviewers liked it, and some didn't. You can read it and decide for yourself. I leave it out in the wild as a marker of who I was, because I'm not the same person I was 17 years ago. I've gotten better at the craft with each new project, whether fiction or writing on church leadership. But I don't write to please the crowds. I write for the buzz.

Most of my work is for the buzz. Most of my life is lived for the buzz of being alive. I don't live for platform or clicks or pay. I've had a few moments of those things, and they're not as satisfying as they look. It's about the stories we must tell, the truths we express, our angles on living life under the sun. Writing is like nothing else, and it means little until it gets on the page.

The buzz.

Fame is fleeting. But the buzz is where it’s at. The Preacher said it well in Ecclesiastes 3:22:

"So I saw that there is nothing better for a person than to enjoy their work, because that is their lot. For who can bring them to see what will happen after them?"

The buzz is the joy of doing the work. Nothing is better than finishing a job with your own hands, or in our case, typing The End on a manuscript. That's the buzz.

I'm sure we're all tempted by the buzz of clicks and profits and platform. I'm sure you have a million reasons you write, create, or build your thing. But the buzz is underrated and undefeated.

It keeps you going after the rejection slip, and on the days when the word well runs dry. The buzz will get you up early, or keep you up late when you must discover where the story is headed, when your headlights show just enough road to keep going.

Which brings me to the newest temptation. AI is a genuinely useful tool. It can spark an idea, untangle a muddy thought, and catch the clumsy sentence I missed at 4 AM. I'm not against it.

But the buzz is what AI can never give us. We are the masters of our words. We chisel, craft, and arrange these sentences to be what they need to be. If we hand that work over, we lose the reason we write. We lose a little of ourselves.

We lose... the buzz.