by Jenna Kalinsky, Founding Director, One Lit Place
Since my recent outbound flight from Toronto to LA had been delayed 5 hours, when prepping for the return, I packed two sandwiches, two giant bottles of water, enough trail mix for 4 adults, and to keep busy, downloaded Middlemarch by George Eliot, Splinters by Leslie Jamison, and because it popped up on my e-reader and I believe you should keep your enemies close, an e-book called, Write Fiction in 10 Easy Steps with ChatGPT by Tim O’Brien.
It was that last one that annoyed/fascinated me most. It is an understatement to say I am not this book’s target reader. The significant environmental impact of ChatGPT terrifies me, to start. I also have children, so modelling using my brain (for better or for worse) is a priority. Lastly, well, let’s just say I don’t like where things are heading. I think I called it when Stephen Witt, author of The Thinking Machine was asked in a New Yorker interview, “Is AI going to destroy the planet?” and he answered plainly, “Yes.”
Furthermore, and equally as important, while writing fiction with ChatGPT seems easy, it is not and not on a much broader scale. ChatGPT feels like (and is) an encroaching enemy to literature. The idea behind fiction is that stories are created to reflect the human experience from the human experience.
Certainly it is fascinating to see what literary feats can be performed by technology—also a human creation—but the output of machine fiction is a step removed and therefore missing what most human beings crave from stories, which is to identify ourselves in the work and to marvel at what we can make of ourselves and all that has shaped us as people.
If at some point we can fool ourselves or let ourselves be fooled we’re not there yet. Fiction generated by ChatGPT has the same jerky feeling one gets when learning to drive stick shift.
Yet during the flight, curiosity, the kind that makes people gawk at car accidents, got hold of me, and I opened O’Brien’s book.
In the introduction, the author says about writing fiction: “The key word is easy.” Only a page in, and if it hadn’t been on my e-reader, sweetly gifted to me from a longtime client who felt I needed to read more (thanks, John!), I’d have lobbed the book across the plane.
We don’t write fiction because it’s easy. We write it because it’s hard. In hardship, you show up differently. You access your creative center at level 10, simultaneously pushing through the possible and the impossible, and make necessary messes along the way. The hard makes you work to share stories that are important and moving, to impart information that will be meaningful. In the difficulty, your humanity rises to the surface and suffuses the work.
"From those first hand-scrawled sentences to the final dementing rearrangement of commas, my books are very humanly made: proudly, imperfectly, with difficulty and with tremendous care. They are felt as they are composed, painfully, joyously, cellularly—and they are designed for other biological beings to experience, to connect with, to be animated, provoked and moved by."
~ Sarah Hall, author of Helm, and the first person to put a “Human Written” Maker’s Mark on her book’s cover
“You do not need to know everything about writing before you begin. You only need a method that helps you move forward without getting lost.” (Italics mine).
Getting lost while writing is half of the creative process. When you’re lost, you pay attention with heightened senses. When you’re lost, you look for solutions: to help yourself get un-lost or to find another way forward. Sometimes, there’s a relinquishment of the familiar as you give over to your new reality, knowing you may end up in a new place. The magic of writing fiction is that it’s a perfect echo of the human experience.
Literature is at its core a conversation between two people, not one person curling up with a cup of tea to give themselves over in heart and mind to the antiseptic output of a machine. ChatGPT may be able to do what some books can do on the surface, but it will never be able to do what books do at their core, which is bring two humans into a closed-loop conversation.
But this book, like the AI it was likely written with, isn’t about helping people write literature. It’s about giving a new writer a false sense of personal accomplishment. Sure, you can “write” fiction using ChatGPT, but you’re orchestrating, not writing.
“It will not replace your creativity. It will amplify it.”
Learning how to prompt or guide to get an effective result is certainly its own kind of creative. Like a coach or teacher, shifting, dancing, and trying various techniques to get the most out of someone (or in this case, something) requires you to be present and mentally and emotionally flexible.
It is one thing to teach another so they can perform at their best; it is another to be the performer.
Writing is doing: you learn, apply, and wend your way through the shadows to come to the light. That makes a writer the practitioner and the student in one.
Ghostwriting has been around since Ancient Greece when political figures would hire scribes to write their achievements for them. Through today, ghostwriting remains the act of hiring someone to write a short or long-form work for a person that they publish as theirs.
Largely used by name people (celebrities, political leaders, and community figureheads), ghostwriting is a means to an end: a way for someone, who otherwise could not, to share their own story, provide a recitation of their life’s accomplishments, or set a public record that enhances and deepens or solidifies their reputation by curating private details and fusing them to their public image.
Where a ghostwriter interviews their subject and writes the book to their subject’s direction, a person using ChatGPT to write fiction is an even greater step removed. They only need to prompt the system, and it will furnish the situation, setting, characters, and stakes on its own.
Anyone who uses ChatGPT to write fiction is not going to end up with a public reputation they’ll be proud of. They will have a weak saleable commodity at best. Any credit they take is cosmically paper thin. They wrote a book in a way that made it “easy”—but to what end?
Some find ChatGPT useful as a supplemental resource when writing fiction. It can aid in research, answer logistical questions, or fix grammar.
For nonfiction, it can sort statistics or format a page of citations in seconds, which used to take hours or days. It can help you during your writing process as well by helping you organize your material. And so on.
Some may also use ChatGPT to create process-based work that is not reliant on the presence of a human spirit or voice, such as a “how-to” guide or an instruction manual draft that helps the user see gaps and holes they can then fill in themselves.
It is important to be vigilant so you don’t cross over (purposefully or accidentally) from using ChatGPT for support to allowing it to generate content for you. If your goal is to get published, no traditional publisher will touch a book that has even a single line of AI-generated text in it (they (ironically) use detection software).
For self-published authors, Amazon KDP requires that any generative AI use in the book be disclosed. Failure to do so may cause your book to be removed from the platform.
In a stealthy move, companies began using authors’ books to train AI without the authors’ consent, citing “fair use.”
In good news, in early 2025, a class action lawsuit was created against Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, and other AI companies for using 7.5 million pirated books as AI training. These companies “needed books for their quality writing, style, expression, and long-form narration and would rather steal them than ask and pay for them as they do for all of the other necessary components of their AI, such as electricity and programming.”
But it is also a case of too little too late. Training sites have proliferated, and the use of authors’ intellectual property to enhance AI’s capabilities continues.
Because of the volume of AI books being published, they are saturating the market and muscling their way to the top of internet searches. (Amazon KDP has had to institute a rule in their Guidelines that you may upload a maximum of 3 books per day to the platform). This volume makes it harder for readers to source books written by people or to accidentally discover new good books at all. When people can’t find what they’re looking for online, they search less often, relegating new authors’ books to the bottom of the pile, making them even less discoverable.
When the books written by new voices are subsumed by ChatGPT-written books, these human authors have a far harder time earning enough—or anything. So much effort, time, and sacrifice go into writing a book, and being remunerated is one small reward (as is being able to eat and pay rent).
It is sadly becoming commonplace that authors —from debut to well-known—are finding their own books under either their own name or under a different name, rewritten by ChatGPT and republished, the sales of which being funneled to a third party.
When ChatGPT-written books that are attributed to existing authors are presented to readers on Amazon and Goodreads, it can be confusing (most readers will not leap to wonder whether the author of a book, whose name is on the cover, in fact wrote it or consider whether it was pirated and falsely attributed).
In 2023, publishing expert Jane Friedman found that books written by ChatGPT were being attributed to her; the headache she had to go through to have them removed from all platforms and the internet at large was substantial. Even now, the books continue to be in circulation, harming the reputation she worked her whole career to build.
Perhaps after being dulled by AI-generated fiction, some readers will adapt to the ChatGPT model, which is flatter, patter, and less lyrically human than a human. In time, some may find it doesn’t matter to them whether human or machine created the story as long as they get a story. In this, with increasing consumption of ChatGPT books, we will lose something of ourselves as well.
The repercussions on the literary landscape and all that contains are many- with more to come.
Why do we go to bookstores and listen to authors reading from their books, covet signed copies of books, and watch author interviews on TV? Because getting to know the creator behind the words is a thrill. Learning about their trials and triumphs, how they came to the story or arrived at the ideas, and how they—seemingly normal mortals with day jobs and families—made it to the point of being published authors is an inspiration and invitation to us that we too can show up better and achieve great things.
As an interesting metaphor, authors’ personal stories, their ups and downs, and the “how” they wrote their books is for readers often as exciting and connective as the books themselves.
As ChatGPT grows stronger, surely it will be able to mimic or even emulate aspects of the human spirit. Perhaps in our lifetime. But most readers value the creation, the process, and the evident personality of the author infusing the narration and characters. One may enjoy a product created by ChatGPT and may marvel at how a bundle of wires can do such incredible things as its own kind of art, but most folks will not be likely to knowingly pick up a book written by a machine and derive the kind of connection they crave from that on-page conversation.
O’Brien says this about writing: “It is not mystery. It is a process.”
For one leaning on a computer to do the thinking for them, this statement is true. For a real writer, however, writing is both mystery and process. That’s where the hardship, the sweat, and the messiness are the real reward.
A hybrid human approach for writing fiction is the best way to go. Why struggle through the writing alone when you could have a generous, skilled person guiding your way, cheering you on, and offering you specific suggestions and strategies that enhance the experience, ease the ambiguity, and offer concrete, practical solutions that you can creatively apply to your work.
The writing coaching and mentorship we offer at One Lit Place is that human partnership, integral to most writer’s processes. The accountability, brainstorming support, and path-clearing is extremely useful- and alleviates you from having to shoulder the full workload, planning, and organizing on your own while still diving in deep with your story and ideas and bringing them to the page.
Personalized writing coaching or a mentored writing program such as one of our 4-month mentored first-draft book programs is the infrastructure that makes being risky, thoughtful, and generative possible. These modes of support ensure you have all the tools you need, shine a light on where to go next, and give you room to explore and the freedom to give rise to your best work.
Writing groups, workshops, and trusted peer writers also enable you to see your work and process through new eyes, learn different solutions and strategies for laying down your words, and have their empathy to lean on as a motivating factor for keeping going.
For most writers, this kind of collaboration is part of the journey, which is part of the writing, and which is what makes the process and the creation of the product better. You maintain all the control, even when you choose to lose it (or losing control chooses you). The book or other works you produce will be the direct outcome of that very human effort.
I can’t begrudge O’Brien for writing a book that taps into the modern avalanche of people seeking an easier way to the finish line. Maybe he’ll make a few dollars. Perhaps some folks will discover something about themselves as fiction writers along the way.
But I am rooting for people who embrace the hard and set about writing something intrinsically human and personally meaningful. Something they are curious about or excited by. Something that doesn’t offer answers but that sends up more questions.
The perfect echo of the human experience is fiction that is written by a person, not ChatGPT. Those are the stories that will endure.
We are here to help you write your best, most interesting work, and to make the process enjoyable and rewarding.
Reach out any time for a free consultation about your writing, and we’ll get you on your way!
Our 4-month Mentored Book Programs, Online Courses, & Writing Coaching and Editing Hours. From November 21-27, 2023