Magnus Robot Fighter Fights Robots!
“If
someone can write a book in a day with AI, and it takes me a year to write one,
how can I possibly compete?”
I’m
increasingly seeing comments like this on social media from writers who, if
they’re not panicking yet, sound as if they’re on the verge of it. And who can
blame them? AI is being hyped to the skies by companies desperate to be the
leader in AI as well as tech-forward types who believe the Next Great Machine
will make the world a perfect place (while also making them hella rich).
Businesses and schools are rushing to adopt AI without any notion of what it
really is or what it can do. The college where I teach created the AI Institute
of Excellence – and is that name trying way too hard, or what? – but I couldn’t
tell you anything about it other than its name since I never read the emails
they send. No one has tried to force me to incorporate AI into my classes yet,
and since I talk to my students about the ethical and environmental issues of
using AI, I’ve already incorporated it as much as I want to.
And it’s
not like the majority of students haven’t already incorporated AI into their education
to at least some degree, and many surely use it to “write” their essays for
them. I can’t really fault them, though. They’ve grown up in a world where
technology does almost everything for them. Why shouldn’t it think for them as
well? I’m so glad I can retire from teaching in two years. Once I’m out, if I
ever teach again, I’ll do so without looking at a single word of a student
essay.
I’m
also starting to see people post that it doesn’t matter if a book was written
by AI or not. Here are some comments I saw during the online uproar over Shy
Girl. (If you’re not aware of the controversy, read this: https://slate.com/culture/2026/03/shy-girl-mia-ballard-novel-a-i-book-horror-reddit-hachette-canceled.html)
“I do
not know whether a particular author has used AI to generate their work, but I
can be certain that there is no way for me to know. So if I find the book and
the author enjoyable, I will continue to read their content and promote it.”
“If a
book is bad, it’s bad. If a book is good, it’s good. Period.”
“I
cannot tell if something is written with AI or not, so if I enjoy it, I’ll keep
reading it too!!”
It’s
clear that at least some readers only care about their experience of
reading a book, and they care nothing for its origin.
Stephen
Marche recently wrote an article for The Guardian titled “I Wrote a
Novel Using AI. Writers Must Accept Artificial Intelligence – But We Are as
Valuable as Ever.” You can read it here:
(He
also wrote a book called On Writing and Failure: Or, the Peculiar
Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer, which I recommend. Nothing
AI-related in this one.)
People,
who probably only read the article’s headline, took to social media to lambast
Marche and AI in general. But his thesis is that while AI can produce
crappy-but-good-enough writing for some tasks, only humans can produce work of
higher artistic quality. (I wonder if the editors at The Guardian wrote
the headline to purposely make it click-baity.) Here are a few quotes from the
article that I found noteworthy.
“Generative
models are fundamentally cliché machines. If you ask AI to write a film script,
it will produce an average film script masterfully. If you ask it to write an
essay, it will produce an average essay masterfully.”
“Thinking,
creating, understanding – these cannot be replaced, certainly not by artificial
intelligence.”
“Once
upon a time, mastery of the banal was adequate for writers. It was enough to
prove that you were capable of writing. But that skill has no purpose anymore –
it can be automated. Skill will be found in the purpose of the work. What can
you alone make happen with language?”
So if
writers want to compete for readers’ attention in a world filled with AI slop, we
need to write work that’s better than average and continue improving throughout
our careers.
The
following are some ideas on how we can do that. They’re geared to horror
writers, but most of them can work for any fiction writer. (You may have
read/heard me say some of the following before, but this time it’s in service
of out-writing the cliché-machines.)
Read/watch
a LOT of horror so you can avoid clichés.
As a
creative writing teacher, I’m always surprised when a student tells me they
want to write, but they don’t like to read. I guess the equivalent in the AI
age is I want to be a writer, but I don’t want to write. The more horror
you consume, the more you’ll come to recognize common – and average – ideas and
prose, and the more you’ll be able to try to do better.
Also,
read every subgenre of horror, so you can avoid all clichés. Plus, you might be
an extreme horror writer who, after checking out cozy horror, may find that
genre calls to you more strongly than any other.
A while
back, I wrote a blog entry listing 61 horror clichés and how to make them fresh
again. You can find it here:
https://writinginthedarktw.blogspot.com/2023/11/61-horror-cliches-and-how-to-make-them.html
Writer’s
Digest published
an article I wrote about avoiding clichés when writing horror:
https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/done-to-death
Seek
out current, excellent, and innovative work.
If you
want to write above-average work, you need to read above-average work. You can
Google “best contemporary horror writers” and “innovative horror writers of the
21st century.” You’ll find plenty of results. Check out a number of
lists, though, since each one will likely be at least slightly different.
Here’s a
list to get you started:
If you
come across work that’s very unlike anything you’ve read before, and you’re
struggling to get through it, don’t give up on it right away. You may need some
time to adjust. As one of my professors in grad school once said, “Great books
teach us how to read them.”
Avoid
or rework familiar tropes.
Tropes
have power, but overused tropes don’t. Try to find the essence of a trope and
then embody it in a new way. Take the trope of the Grim Reaper. As its core,
it’s the Bringer of Death. A great example of a different way to handle this
trope is the movie Radius (2017). In this film, after surviving a car
crash, a man finds that anyone who comes within fifty feet of him dies.
Your
dreams.
I don’t
remember my dreams much anymore, and when I do, they’re like the dream I had
last night, where I’m in the back yard picking up dog poop. But my wife has
extremely vivid dreams, many of which turn into nightmares. Just this morning,
she told me of a dream she had that featured faceless men with red stripes over
their featureless skin. A faceless person is a horror cliché, but the red
stripes add an interesting touch. And if you can find a way to make the stripes
meaningful to the being in a way that shapes your story, you might end up with
something truly different. Maybe the men’s skins are chalk white, and the stripes
are because the men are made out of candy canes. The Candy Cane Men sounds weird
and scary, doesn’t it? My wife may have been the only person in human history
to dream of that exact image, and there’s an excellent chance your dreams will
also be a source of original ideas and images (unlike mine).
Write
about what you – and only you – see and hear.
To hell
with vampires and werewolves. I love classic horror tropes, but I almost never
use them. I try to stay observant throughout the day, and I write down any
weird things I see or hear. Often, they’re mistakes in perception, the result
of my horror writer’s mind interpreting something normal in a sinister way. For
example, the last time I flew home after a convention, I saw an ad on a wall in
the Dayton airport for The Gaping Void Design Group. I did a double-take,
thinking I’d misread the sign, but I didn’t. I wondered who the hell would
choose that name for their business? How many people who even noticed the name
on the ad thought twice about it? I’m likely the only horror writer who saw
that sign, noticed the name, and thought those thoughts. I wouldn’t want to use
the exact name in a story, but I might swap design for another word.
Maybe Gaping Void Logistics. Another example: One day, when I looked out
the window, I saw a kid kicking a round, plant-like soccer-ball-sized object
down the street. Again, I was probably the only person who saw that, thought it
was really strange, and wrote it down as possible story material. You can do
the same.
Read
horror from writers in other countries.
And watch
horror movies made in other countries. This way, you’ll expose yourself to
different horror images, concepts, and narrative styles. The publishers of
Valancourt Books have done an excellent job of making translations of horror
fiction available, and I highly recommend you check them out.
The
Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories Vol. 1 and Vol 2 Edited by James D. Jenkins and Ryan
Cagle
https://www.valancourtbooks.com/the-valancourt-book-of-world-horror-stories-vol-1.html
Use as
many of your personal experiences as possible.
AI can
draw on other people’s experiences that are in its database, but it can never
live and reflect on those experiences. Drawing on your own experiences brings
an authenticity that AI can’t replicate. You don’t need to write strict
autobiography, but your experiences can add realism and emotional depth to your
stories.
Write
with a deep point of view.
AI’s
writing never gets below the surface, because all it knows are words (and it
doesn’t really know them the way humans can). When you write with a
close attachment to a character’s point of view and aren’t afraid to go deeper,
you’ll create fiction that readers will respond strongly to. I tell students
that this is the greatest strength of fiction because, right now, no other
technology can put us in the mind of a character. Plus, deep point of view
allows for stronger horror. I tell students to imagine that your viewpoint
character is wearing a GoPro camera that records what he or she sees and hears.
But imagine the camera has a cable that’s embedded into the back of the
character’s head, recording their thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations.
The more you can depict a character’s full experience (without getting so
bogged down in detail that the story grinds to a halt), the more your fiction
will stand apart from AI slop.
Write
vivid description.
The
paragraph above covers most of this. I suspect a description that contains an
emotional component or causes a character to have an emotional reaction will
stand out strongly from AI writing. Also, use distinct similes and metaphors
(without overusing them). The more original they are, the better. For example,
I once saw a sketch on a comedy show (whose name I can’t recall). The sketch
featured a mom and dad who were berating their teenage son about something, but
the entire family spoke in bizarrely original similes. When the son got fed up,
he started yelling at his parents, and at one point, he describes his dad
falling out of a boat on a lake. “He flopped over the side like a soiled mattress
and sank like a sack of batteries.” I saw this sketch decades ago, but those
similes have stuck in my mind ever since. When you come across effective
similes and metaphors in your reading, pause and ask yourself what makes them
so effective for you. As an exercise, you can write your own similes and
metaphors describing the same concept as in the story. So if a writer describes
a messy rest stop restroom as “looking like Tijuana Mike’s shitter after
All-You-Can-Eat Burrito Night,” you can try to write a different, but equally
colorful metaphor for a filthy rest stop bathroom.
Include
subtext.
Simply
defined, subtext is the true but unexpressed meaning behind words or actions.
For example, if you ask your spouse what’s wrong, and he or she says,
“Nothing,” in a cold tone, you damn well know something is wrong, and you were
likely the cause of it.
AI can’t
do subtext, but humans can. Machines are literal, and subtext is about the
unspoken and unrevealed. It’s abstract and requires an understanding of human
psychology, interaction, and communication. Take advantage of this in your
writing.
Here’s an
article about subtext in fiction: https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/how-to-use-subtext-and-the-art-of-dramatic-tension-in-fiction
And
here’s one about subtext in horror by Lindy Ryan: https://janefriedman.com/what-isnt-said-still-screams-writing-subtext-in-horror-fiction/
Create
complex characters.
Writing
with a deep point of view will help you create well-developed characters, but
you need to go beyond that. Make them eccentric, idiosyncratic, downright
fucking weird… Give them weaknesses, contradictions, moral ambiguities… Let
them be unlikable sometimes, let them fuck up and make a mess of things. Make
them as deeply human as you can. This is one of the most important
aspects of writing fiction that AI can’t replicate because this aspect doesn’t
lie in any one word or sentence. It lies in the cumulation of them, of a
thousand small details that the reader, with their experience of being human,
can put together in a way a machine can’t, to get a complex picture of a
complex person.
Experiment
to develop a distinctive voice…because AI will never have one.
Voice
is everything about you as a writer – content, use of language (vocabulary,
sentence length and complexity, paragraph length, scene length, chapter length,
etc.), structure (linear, nonlinear), story length, and on and on. While we can
make conscious choices about voice, much – if not most – of it develops over
time, the result of small unconscious choices we make. So experiment. Short
stories are excellent laboratories for developing and honing your voice. Set
creative challenges for yourself. Write a story with an omniscient viewpoint or
one with no characters. Try formalism, using a different form of writing, like
a newspaper article, to tell your story. Pay attention to reader response. If
you write a story in first person present tense, and readers love it, maybe
think about using that technique for more stories. Don’t drive yourself crazy
searching for your voice, though. It’ll come in time.
“Five
Ways to Develop Your Writer’s Voice”: https://janefriedman.com/5-ways-develop-writers-voice/
“How
Do I Find My Voice in Writing?”: https://www.writersdigest.com/be-inspired/how-do-i-find-my-voice-in-writing
Take
your time.
Don’t
be like AI users who want immediate results. Write, read, explore, try
different things. Allow yourself to continue growing as an artist. Generative
AI can’t grow. It can only be fed more words to recombine and spew out. It
might get better at spewing over time, but it will not grow. We can and
should.
Astonish
us.
As
a theater education major in college, I only had to take two years of acting
classes. My professor for my sophomore year in acting was Dr. Jeffrey Huberman,
and at first, he terrified us. Not because he was mean or harsh, but because he
knew we were capable of excellence, and he expected it from us. Whenever we
would perform a scene in class, he would start us off by saying, “Astonish me,”
the admonition that the famous dance impresario Sergei Diaghilev would give to
his performers. It took some time, but we slowly began to believe in ourselves,
and our acting improved dramatically. It’s a lesson that I’ve applied to my
writing over the years. AI-produced fiction can never astonish us. Only work
created by humans can do that.
Only
work created by you.
So
as they say on Letterkenny, “Pitter patter, let's get at 'er.”
Books
that you might find useful:
Method
Acting For Writers: Learn Deep Point Of View Using Emotional Layers by Lisa Hall-Wilson
Writing
for Emotional Impact: Advanced Dramatic Techniques to Attract, Engage, and
Fascinate the Reader from Beginning to End by Karl Iglesias
The
Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot by
Charles Baxter
Word
Painting Revised Edition: The Fine Art of Writing Descriptively by Rebecca Mcclanahan
Experimental
Fiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology by Lawrence Lenhart and Will Cordeiro
The
Art of Character: Creating Memorable Characters for Fiction, Film, and TV by David Corbett
Plot
Versus Character: A Balanced Approach to Writing Great Fiction by Jeff Gerke
DEPARTMENT
OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION
This
time, I’m going to highlight work of mine that will help you battle the
mediocrity of AI.
Writing in the Dark is my Bram Stoker Award-winning book on writing horror. It’s follow-up, Writing in the Dark: The Workbook, also won a Stoker. Both are full of info that will help you take your horror to new levels. Let Me Tell You a Story is about writing short stories. It contains stories from throughout my career, and I write about how I wrote them and what I’d do differently if I wrote them today. You can find all three at the following link:
https://rawdogscreaming.com/author-tag/tim-waggoner/
Kindle
versions are available on Amazon.
I’m
also going to recommend my latest horror/dark fantasy novel, The Face of
Pain. It’s made (like all my original work) from bits of my real life,
images and characters that either don’t follow standard horror tropes or rework
them, and my own surreal/nightmarish style, all of which adds up to my author
voice.
Kindle: https://tinyurl.com/3hzdyjhd
Amazon
Paperback: https://tinyurl.com/44wt2tdw
Barnes
& Noble Paperback: https://tinyurl.com/3h6kkszz
SCHEDULED
APPEARANCES
“The
Art of Suspense” workshop. May 4, 5:30-6:30 p.m. Dayton Metro Library,
Wilmington Stroop Branch. Kettering, Ohio.
StokerCon.
June 4-7. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Shore
Leave 46. July 10-12. Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
GenCon
Writers Seminar. July 30-August 2. Indianapolis, Indiana.
Into
the Springs Writers Workshop. August 7-9. Yellow Springs, Ohio.
Shivercon.
August 14-15. Muncie, Indiana.
WHERE
TO FIND ME ONLINE
Want
to follow me on social media? Here’s where you can find me:
Website:
www.timwaggoner.com
Newsletter
Sign-Up: https://timwaggoner.com/contact.htm
Blog: http://writinginthedarktw.blogspot.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/timwaggonerswritinginthedark
Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/133838.Tim_Waggoner
Instagram:
@tim.waggoner.scribe
Threads:
@tim.waggoner.scribe@threads.net
Bluesky:
@timwaggoner.bsky.social
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/tim.waggoner.9
