A lot of people are nervous—and with good reason—that Artificial Intelligence (AI) might take away opportunities from human writers. After all, why should publishers pay humans to produce material when they can get a GPT to spit out something similar for free? What is it that can differentiate human writers from the bots?

Two things: voice and craft.

Voice is a writer’s literary DNA. It’s what makes a book by Jane Austen feel like it was written by Austen and not by some other writer of the time. The author’s voice is much more than just their style or flair, it’s in the very essence of their writing, from the words they choose (or don’t choose) to the way they craft their characters and put together their plots. Voice is the differentiator that makes writing truly human and unless AI grows a soul, it will never be able to fully imitate a writer’s voice.

Craft is the great equalizer. While not all writers are born with equal amounts of talent, everyone who applies themselves can learn the craft. I’ve seen so-called “talented” writers flop because they didn’t invest in their craft, and I’ve seen middle-of-the-road writers come out as shining stars because they did double-down on craft. Understanding the mechanics of writing and storytelling is the thing that allows us human writers to stand apart from AI-generated material.

AI: The Proverbial Elephant in the Room

This essay is not intended to start an argument on the merits of AI (or lack thereof). I have purposefully stayed quiet on this subject because I think enough people are railing about AI or singing its praises, and adding my voice to the cacophony won’t make much of a difference. Plus, I don’t consider myself enough of an expert to contribute meaningfully to the conversation.

I do think that AI is here whether we like it or not. We can stick our fingers in our ears and go “la-la-la-la-la,” but that won’t make AI go away. The folks I follow online, who take a measured stance on AI, have taken the time to understand it and get a sense for what it can (and can’t) do. Even if you think AI is the most terrible thing on the planet, it behooves you to understand it. After all, the wisest warrior is one who knows their enemy.

What we have to realize when it comes to AI is that time is not going to stand still. Some folks are certain that the AI bubble is about to burst while others are convinced that we’re two steps away from Skynet and a Terminator revolution. Still others think that AI is the greatest thing ever and use it for all sorts of tasks, from writing book jacket blurbs to marketing copy or even crafting their author newsletters and creating images for their book covers. (For the record, this newsletter is 100% handcrafted by yours truly.)

I consider myself “AI-cautious.” I recognize that there’s no turning back the clock on this technology and as writers we have to learn to co-exist with it somehow. Even if we choose not to use it ourselves, we have to adapt to a world where other people around us are using it. But that doesn’t mean there’s no room in this brave new world for handcrafted, artful writing.

Little Man (now age 13), who is a wiz at coding, is also a true optimist when it comes to AI. He could easily have given up on his craft and looked toward other, more “marketable” skill-sets. Yet, he insists on learning how to code and writing all his code from the ground up. Why? Because according to him, AI can’t replace artistic jobs. (And I think he’s right!) It can replace some of the more mechanical (AKA boring) tasks about those jobs, but when it comes to true artistry, AI just can’t cut it. I think the same is true in writing.

This is why, when writers start to panic about AI taking their jobs, I remind them of those two magical components that AI can’t touch: voice and craft.

Hone Your Voice

I’ve spoken about voice at length in the past, and one of the things I repeat again and again is this idea that voice isn’t something you find, it’s something you have, you just need to unearth it. A lot of writing teachers talk about helping students “find their voice,” as though it’s loose change stuck between couch cushions. Whether you realize it or not, you already have a voice, you just have to figure out what it is and cultivate it into what you want it to become.

So, how do you do that? How do you shape your voice into something that you want? To become a voice virtuoso, you have to do three things: (1) Understand the capabilities of your voice, (2) Fine-tune your technique, and (3) Expand your range.

Understand the Capabilities of Your Voice

I want you to try a writing exercise. Choose a nursery rhyme (like “Humpty Dumpty” or “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”) and rewrite it in the voice of some author you admire. In other words, the nursery rhyme provides the basics—characters and plot—so you don’t have to think about those things and can focus solely on the voice. Do this exercise several times over the course of a week, each time in the voice and style of a different author. You will learn volumes about your own voice in the process.

What this exercise does is it allows you to understand the mechanics of how another author’s voice operates. Do they use short, clipped sentences? Or are their phrases long, luxurious, and lyrical? Do they focus mainly on action or do they take time to describe the setting or the characters? And what exactly is it that makes an author’s voice uniquely theirs? When you imitate another writer’s voice, you get an inside look at how their voice works. Once you can do that with someone else’s voice, you can start to do the same with your own.

Fine-Tune Your Technique

At DIY MFA we tend to focus on “big craft” topics like character development, plot and story structure, world-building, etc. Yet, a lot of voice work happens as “small craft” at the sentence level. There’s a lot of nuance in how sentences are put together and what words an author chooses in order to communicate a specific idea. Even the way a sentence is structured can do a lot to convey the intricacies of voice.

One of my favorite resources for “small craft,” sentence-level work is the book Spellbinding Sentences by my friend and colleague Barbara Baig. She is a true artist when it comes to sentence-level craft and this book shows you how to write sentences that really sparkle. Like me, Barbara is a firm believer in practice, so her book is sprinkled throughout with exercises and opportunities for you to put your newfound knowledge into action. If you want to understand your voice on a nuts-and-bolts level, I highly recommend getting this book and working through it step-by-step.

If you decide to buy Spellbinding Sentences, we hope you’ll do so by supporting your local bookstore. If you choose to use Amazon, please consider using our Amazon Affiliate link, where DIY MFA will get a commission at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Expand Your Range

I’m a firm believer that your voice is already in you, and all you have to do is cultivate it and shape it as you would like it to be. While you can modulate your voice to some degree, you can’t change it completely.

As I’ve said before, voice is a writer’s literary DNA, and like DNA, it can’t be modified without changing the essence of who that person is. That said, the same DNA can manifest in different forms or different types of cells throughout a person’s body. So, while that DNA—that core essence—is still the same, we can find that same genetic code in a bone cell, a blood cell, or a brain cell.

When you expand your range, you’re expanding how your voice manifests itself in the world, but you’re not changing the essence of that voice. Think of a singer who—with careful practice and training—works to expand their range. They might do exercises to try to coax some higher pitches out of their voice or to access the deeper tones. Still, that singer’s voice is inherently the singer’s and no one else’s. It’s not as if some other singer has stepped in to sing those higher or lower notes. It’s that same singer accessing a broader range of notes through practice.

The way to expand your range is by doing the exercises mentioned above (both the nursery rhyme prompt and the practice sections of Spellbinding Sentences). Be gentle as you work to expand your range. Small, incremental steps can yield huge progress over time. As with singing, the fastest way to break your voice is to force it. So take your time and cultivate your voice slowly and with care.

As I’ve often said in the past, your voice is your own. And while you might not be able to grow roses from sunflower seeds, with enough water, sunshine, and care, you can grow the best sunflowers anyone has ever seen.

Conquer the Craft

As I’ve said above, craft is the great equalizer. It levels the playing field between writers with great talent and those who are only so-so (but are determined enough to learn the craft). AI can do a lot of things, but as of right now, it’s not smart enough to learn and apply the craft. Yes, it can search HUGE databases and produce answers to questions, but it can’t put craft techniques into practice.

You can ask an AI to spit out an essay in the style of some famous author, and the AI might even produce a somewhat similar imitation, but it can’t replicate the essence that is that author’s voice, and it can’t creatively produce new stories that haven’t been written yet. That’s where craft comes in. With craft, you can produce good, new material. AI can’t do that.

Everything AI produces is, at its core, derivative. It searches an enormous database of information and produces an answer based on the material it has analyzed. But AI can’t come up with truly original material, because if it’s that original, it’s not in the database. Ultimately, AI is information-driven, not skill-driven.

But craft is a skill.

When we practice our craft, we deepen our understanding of various techniques. We learn how to make characters feel real to the readers. We learn how to immerse our readers in a story world. And we learn how to put a compelling story together that hooks our readers from page one. This is not just information that can be searched in a database. These are skills that must be honed through practice.

This is why craft is the great differentiator when it comes to AI. At some point, even if people are using AI for various writerly tasks, there has to be someone well-versed in the craft who can take that material output and actually turn it into something.

Full disclosure, before writing this newsletter, I decided to experiment and ask an AI a few questions about voice and craft. (I even asked the AI how it might make itself obsolete. That was amusing to say the least.) The answers I got to my queries completely lacked focus and direction. There was so much extraneous information that there was no way to turn it into anything actually usable. Had I relied on AI to write this newsletter, it would have been a long laundry list of disjointed information… most of it not very good or original.

Still, the process of experimenting with AI gave me a sense of what it could (and couldn’t) do, and after seeing the results, I am all the more convinced that writers are not in trouble. At least not with the technology as it is today. AI is not going to kill publishing, though in the future, it will likely change a lot about how we do our work.

The World Is Not About to End Because of AI

I’ll readily admit, I don’t love AI. I don’t like what it’s doing for our environment, and I don’t like that in many cases it uses copyrighted material without permission. (I take the latter personally because the DIY MFA book was one of the ones pirated and potentially used to train Meta’s AI.)

Unfortunately, when it comes to using pirated material to train Large Language Models (LLMs), it’s looking more and more like the courts are ruling in AI’s favor. One ruling in San Francisco said that using copyrighted works to train an AI constitutes “fair use,” which opens the door for other cases to make a similar argument. Still, there are many cases pending, so this is not the end of the story. In fact, more recently, Anthropic (the company behind the Claude chatbot) and class-action attorneys announced a $1.5 billion settlement meant to resolve claims that authors’ works had been pirated. Even with this announcement, though, this settlement has not yet been definitively set and there are still a lot of questions in the air. Plus, there is legislation in the works surrounding both user privacy and copyright infringement with AI, legislation that could favor the creators. This is all to say that the verdict is still out, and it’s too soon to tell how the copyright issues with AI will evolve.

I think of AI as being a lot like the printing press, disrupting our industry at a fundamental level. We could try to fight the change, but at the end of the day, it would be like competing against writers who print their material while we’re still copying each manuscript by hand. At some point we have to think about how we’re going to adapt. This is not to say that the market for handcrafted work will cease to exist overnight. It just means if we want to do handcrafted work, we have to understand what we’re competing with.

For up-to-date reporting on AI (and many other topics in the industry), I follow Jane Friedman’s newsletter The Bottom Line. Her reporting is top-notch and she takes a measured approach with AI that I find refreshing. This is a paid newsletter, but worth every penny.

I can’t tell you how to handle AI because it’s a personal choice. Some writers hate it, some love it. I myself am cautious but curious and I want to be as informed about it as possible. Here’s how I’m trying to coexist with AI:

(1) Understanding Its Use of Copyrighted Material

I do not like how AI uses copyrighted material. In fact, when I explore AI tools, the first thing I ask is: how does this model get trained? Does it use material without permission? And how does the AI use the material that is put into it? Does it use that content to further train its model? These are all questions that I want clear answers to when considering an AI tool.

(2) Being Careful with My Own Material

Before I experiment with any AI, I read the terms of service (TOS) very carefully. I look for indications of how it uses my personal data and whether it trains the model on any material I might input. I also want to understand the ownership of the output. If I input something into an AI tool and it spits out some sort of output based on my material, who owns it? Yes, it’s a pain to read all that fine print—and let’s face it, most of us skip it and accept the terms of service without batting an eyelash. But it’s important that we understand how the AI tool will use our material and our personal data.

Also, when an AI tool does not provide the above information, that tells me to run (not walk) in the opposite direction. If the terms of service and privacy statement are hidden or not readily available, it feels like the AI has something to hide. If an AI service can’t be transparent with how they handle my material and my personal data, I’m not going to use it.

(3) Fact-Checking the Output

Let’s face it, a lot of the time, AI just gets it wrong. Sometimes really wrong. This is why it’s on us to make sure we fact-check the content it generates to make sure the information we’re getting is accurate. This is yet another reason why I’m convinced that writers will not be totally out of a job because of AI. A lot of what these LLMs produce is garbage-in-garbage-out, which means that artistic pursuits focused on quality over quantity will stand apart from all the stuff that comes from AI searches.

These are just three things I keep in mind as I try to wrap my head around AI and figure out how (or if) I plan to use it in earnest. You’ll have to come up with some guiding principles of your own and determine whether you want to use AI as a tool for certain tasks, or whether you’ll avoid it altogether. Some writers will remain staunchly opposed to AI and will refuse to use it on principle—a noble sentiment, to be sure. Other writers will accept AI and will look for new ways to use it in their author careers.

I myself am in a middle camp—”AI cautious,” as I said before. I recognize that AI is here and that like it or not, it’s not going anywhere. I also don’t want to be like a lone medieval monk, copying manuscripts by hand when everyone else is using the printing press. And I think the only way to approach a new technology is to try to understand it. After all, how can we work with (or resist) something we know nothing about?

As for AI stealing writers’ jobs, I’m highly skeptical. These big tech companies might steal our published works to train their AIs and they might even try to output something that looks like our original writing, but given where AI is right now, I don’t see it as much of a threat. Until they can build a LLM with a soul, they won’t be able to capture the nuance of our craft or the essence of our voice. AI can never be human—only a poor imitation thereof. Plus, it gets a lot of things wrong. This means if we double down on voice, craft, and quality, we can still stand out.

Until next time, keep writing and keep being awesome!

P.S. For more info on Gabriela Pereira, the founder and instigator of DIY MFA, check out her profile page.
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