Over the last 48 to 72 hours, the “literary world” (for our purposes, everyone I follow on the extremely white social media platform, Bluesky, which I only use because that’s where all the lit mags are now that Twitter/X is terminal psychotic slop city) has been abuzz with AI discourse. There was Rax King’s eloquent scorcher in response to an email titled “dear rax, my writing group kicked me out for using AI,” almost concurrent with the news that Hachette had pulled a forthcoming horror book for its dubious authorship, and now, everyone’s dissection of what led up to and from such a decision.
I don’t super have a lot of opinions on the Shy Girl discourse, but I like these two pieces a lot, because they take a good faith stance on a bad faith situation. What I’m writing from right now is the bemused perspective of someone who has “been” a “writer” for the better part of a decade, having been published in print at age eighteen alongside my heroes, then promptly forgotten in a sea of controversy, pulled into the undertow of Bad Thing after Bad Thing after Bad Thing, yet still, stupidly, reverently pursuing publication of my work like, well, a dog that doesn’t understand he’s being kicked and starved, or maybe a dog who knows he’s being kicked and starved, but also trusts that one day, hopefully soon, someone will want him.
And people do want me! Despite my uphill battle to meet deadlines. Despite my Gmail burying every lede and lead thrown my way. Despite my slacker vibe, balmed only by my personality and the way I can charm. How I weasel my way into and out of things. I still get published. That’s not me trying to fan out a billfold in front of a bunch of poor people, by the way, that’s just a fact. If you look at the billfold I’m fanning out, you’ll see it’s all ones, limp and stained from years of vending machine usage and, I don’t know, strip clubs. Lived-in ones, buddy, that’s what I got to my name.
What I’m working out right now is how someone could reach a point in their life where they actually want to be a writer, which is to say, I’m wondering what the slopwranglers of Rax King’s inbox and Amazon’s growing list of self-published titles think being a writer is. When people ask me how I got published, I just say, you know, I keep an eye on my favorite literary magazines, and I look at what writers are being placed where, and I read a lot, and sometimes, if it seems I’d be a good fit somewhere, I’ll take a chance and submit, and then I stack my rejection letters up in a digital corner and I get really excited when I’m accepted. Because it’s rare. Because it seldom happens, and that’s not a bug, it’s a feature, and a good one. Not everyone should be published! Not all of my pieces should be published! Sometimes something gets rejected and I look at it and know, from my head to my toes, that it was for the best.
But when I tell people this, their eyes glaze over and their mouths go slack. All that work? For, what, a life spent with the lingering anxiety that the editors of Never Whistle at Night Part II: Back for Blood are annoyed at me for dragging my feet and might never ask me back, for anything? What about the fame? The fortune? The legend of the writer, which somehow lives on in the American imagination despite or maybe because of our depreciated literacy? Can’t we just plug our ideas in? We have so many ideas!
That’s the other half of my forked tongue, is, I’m a filmmaker. To find this out gives industry gatekeepers pause, and for good reason. A desperate writer-filmmaker-artist (often called, vaguely, “a creative”) runs the risk of being spread thin and crying about it. Of being burnt out, all the time, which means letting emails go unread, unresponded to. Add to that my status as a full time college student, and oof! But I digress. Being a filmmaker means I go to a lot of events. And at these events, there’s always some random who flags me and my friends down to let us know that they have an idea. And whether I like it or not, it’s about to become my job to listen to this idea, and then go, sure, okay, that’s a good idea. But, as the saying goes, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride, and all the rest. I have a lot of ideas too. But I have to be another thing, a fourth thing, if I’m to survive this life I’ve chosen. I have to execute. I have to be an executor.
Reading the email that Masshole sent Rax King sent me into a spiral. Beyond the fact that the guy just can’t write, it’s the air of anguished entitlement I really can’t get over. It’s an anguished entitlement, a sort of wounded expectation I’m super familiar with as someone who’s been cursed by a witch to keep meeting every conservative’s nightmare queer person, yet somehow never getting redpilled. Like, I once knew someone who decided how everything was going to be, you know, in their whole life, and every time the world pushed back against that decision, they doubled down on it. Rather than working with the world and the people within it, they grew more and more frustrated and confused by the consequences they faced. They felt unduly victimized and the narrative they spun around themselves reflected this feeling.
The guy whose writer’s group kicked him out for using AI seems to have a similar approach to life. He can’t seem to grasp that he can’t do the thing he claims to want to do, he can’t be the thing he says he is. Nor does he seem to be capable of internalizing a simple “that’s okay.” It has to be, everyone betrayed me. Everyone rejected me. I can’t believe this could happen to me, the main character of the universe.
I don’t normally advertise my “failures,” because, well, they’re mine. Mine to mourn and learn from. But there was a good stretch of time there, end of January to the beginning of March, where I genuinely felt, I don’t know. Hollow’s not the word. Discouraged, maybe? I got a string of rejection letters from programs I’d applied to with television work, and one of them was an automated response, when last year’s (for the same program) had been personal. So I did what I believe we ought to do. I reached out directly to people I knew who’d been there before. I didn’t have any expectations (you’ll find no pressure-cooker of presumption here) or threat upon myself. One person didn’t respond at all, and I understood why: they’re busy. Another responded with a harried apology: it’s midterms and he’s losing his mind but he promises to make a sincere attempt to look at my email over spring break. The third was my boyfriend, who reminded me I do this because I love it. Because it’s fun. Because I’m good at it, and I can always make up for and mend my shortcomings by doing the work. Swap out this habit for that one. Apologize and then change course. In short, I have the tools. I know my limitations. I know where I mustn’t tread, and I know where I can charge forth, bravely, stupidly, into the unknown.
Everything else I’m bad at, that’s okay. It’s okay that I can’t color grade my films, because I have a friend who offered to do so for cheap. It’s okay I’m not the best singer, that I’ve taken a long break from music, that I don’t know the value of a good sound kit, because I have friends who can and do and will. I value all of these things because my friends do.
And I guess that’s where the crux of my issue is. Where the spiral led me to, where it always leads me to. They’re lonely.
All these slopwranglers are so fucking lonely.
Everyone is lonely (except me, fanning out my billfold again) but not everyone is entitled. Not everyone becomes addicted to or reliant on LLMs and chatbots. But it’s loneliness I hear brought up time and again by tremulous voices who hear my anti-AI stance, in public, on panels, in private, at parties, and absolutely cannot wait to tell me how abandoned they are, how I’m so privileged for having all of these people in my life I can count on when they have “literally nobody” and no one believes in them.
What do these people think being a writer is? What do they think it means? Does it mean you get everything you want, all the time, for the rest of your life? Does it mean you’re never lonely again? Maybe it means everyone listens to your ideas, all of them, and nods slowly like you’re on a podcast, like you’re making such good points. Maybe it means you get to see your name on a thicker piece of paper. Trade paperback, like glossy cardboard. Proof you’ve lived and thought your thoughts, proof someone else looked at you and went, wow, those are some good thoughts. Let’s put them down on this dead tree right now for the world to see.
To the people who think like this and somehow, manically, miraculously manage to get somewhere using that brand new shiny shortcut, only for the claws to come up and clip your wings, what did you think was going to happen? The internet is full of enough bad takes. I fricking posted a review of the Sunbeam F1 Pro Aspen on r/dumbphones and the one and only comment I got from someone was an absolutely deranged, multi-paragraph response saying the Sunbeam isn’t really a dumbphone, and the only TRUE dumbphone is basically a landline, and even though the comment got downvoted to hell, it still struck me because holy shit. I guess what I’m trying to say is putting your words out there, your words, not Claude’s or Chat’s or whatever else you’re pouring your poor, splintered mind into when you get off work, isn’t going to immediately fix all of your problems. It might, and other writers know what I’m talking about, actually invite a whole slew of newer and dumber problems you’ve never even taken the time to consider.
But if you’re a real writer, you do it anyway. You do it because you have to. Because it’s compulsive. Because you know your ideas aren’t worth shit until you’ve executed them yourself. Until you’ve pruned and poked and prodded at all the vulnerabilities and made something cool that probably literally no one will read, but you did it. You did it. And along the way, you read. You read bad books and you read good books. You watch movies and read reviews of the movies, find some scholarly analysis on Leatherface and gender or Griffin Dunne’s family memoir. You go into bookstores and you buy too many things that just sit on your shelf and you get a library card so you can pressure yourself to finish what you started. Because reading is fundamental.
And if you can’t do all that, give up. I’m serious. You don’t have to give up forever. I give up all the time. I gave up filmmaking and then it found me again. I gave up acting and I’m still fence-sitting, but maybe I’ll be asked to show my face once more, maybe I won’t. But like, give up. Go outside. There’s so much work to do beyond just sitting with your face six inches from a plate of blue light, prompting and plagiarizing your book into existence. I’m gonna say that one more time.
There is so much work to do.
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