By David Ebenbach
When I was starting out as a writer, I sometimes caught myself daydreaming about a future that I thought I wanted. In this future, editors would be haranguing me, demanding my next novel, throwing deadlines at me. Readers, too; I fantasized about a clamor on the streets for another collection of my poems or short stories. Journalists, meanwhile, would of course be pleading for my take on X, Y, and Z. Now that I’m here in the future, I can tell you that it hasn’t turned out like that for me. Sometimes that stings. More and more, though, I recognize my situation for what it really is: a very human kind of freedom.
For the most part, in the future I’ve actually reached, I write in a way that can be described as “on spec”; I write not because someone has asked me to write a thing for them to publish, but instead “on speculation.” In other words, I write whatever I want to write, speculating/hoping that—who knows?—maybe someone will want to read it when I’m done. They’re not pounding on my door for it, but maybe they’ll open their door if I knock. Maybe. Very maybe.
Though even that’s not quite right. Writing “on spec” suggests a person who, while in the act of writing, simultaneously imagines a possible audience for a piece and hopes they’ll be interested. Perhaps they’re even crafting the piece to appeal specifically to that imagined audience. But my version of “on spec” lacks that kind of speculation; I’m almost never thinking about an audience at all as I write. Instead, I’m usually just writing whatever I feel like writing, in the way that I feel like writing it.
This is that very human freedom I was alluding to above.
I use the word “human” deliberately because, these days, we humans are not the only ones writing things. Generative AI has produced chatbots that themselves can (and do) churn out stories and poems and even novels, if you want them to. And let’s be honest: in some ways, the AI’s writing process is like the human’s. For example, writing, for both AI and people, is guided by all of the writing of other authors that we’ve absorbed along the way. We are both, in some sense, aggregators.
And yet there are differences, too, and one in particular that I’m finding increasingly crucial: AI, at least for now, never writes on spec. A chatbot writes a thing only when and because we prompt it to do so, and on those occasions it tries—albeit not always very successfully—to write the specific thing we ask for and in the specific way that we ask it to (style, length, following whatever plot points we provide, using whatever images or words we specify, etc.). By design, the AI is driven entirely by explicit external demands.
To put it more exactly, generative AI is designed to satisfy demands. We know that what it produces often turns out to be profoundly unsatisfying, but that doesn’t change the fact that its objective is to attempt to satisfy. It tries to do what it’s been asked to do, and to do it in a way that makes the user feel good. Most AI models are designed to be agreeable and likable, just like eager authors ready to meet every publisher’s request. That’s why they’re out there reinforcing users’ conspiracy theories and encouraging them to double down on bad life choices and generally agreeing with whatever they’re told. It’s trying, that is, to be everything for everyone—that same everything that I once thought I wanted to be.
I should acknowledge that I did once find myself in a situation where a publisher wanted a specific book from me, a book that I thought I was up for writing, even if the main impetus to do so was to make the publisher happy. That situation did not produce a book, however; what it produced was bursts of subpar writing alternating with heavy chunks of writer’s block. It was a brutal period in my writing life. That’s when I finally realized that I’m not very good at writing to demand, even if that’s what I had long believed that I wanted. As it turns out, I’m much better at just following my own lead, without speculating about an audience, without trying to satisfy anyone but myself.
The scholar Anatoliy Kharkhurin suggests that, for something to be truly creative, it has to be deeply rooted in the creator. It needs to be authentic. As he puts it, “Authenticity imparts meaning to a creative act by providing an opportunity for realization and manifestation of the self. It enables individuals to explore their own nature and to relate events in phenomenal reality to their own values and beliefs.” He adds, “The impetus of an authentically creative act should stem from inner urge, rather than from outer request.”
And then there’s bit by the standup comic Pete Holmes, in which he says, “You ever come home from a party, drop your keys on the counter, just like,” [here he pauses] ‘Huh! I am not for everyone.” Yes.
Holmes isn’t delivering bad news; he’s dropping wisdom. I am not for everyone. That’s good news. How, in fact, can anybody be for everyone? And how freeing is it to realize that we’re not for everyone? Writing to demand is work fit for a robot, not for a human being. Putting my focus on what audiences like while I’m writing is just going to produce writer’s block or the kind of bland mush that AI produces by the cubic ton.
So, you won’t find me waiting around for some “user” to prompt me, because I’ve got my own peculiar human preoccupations and inclinations and needs to explore. And those things are what actually keep me writing.
Bio: David Ebenbach is the author of ten books of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, winners of such awards as the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the Juniper Prize, among others. He lives in Washington, DC, where he teaches at Georgetown University. You can find out more at davidebenbach.com.
