I recently had brunch with a couple of family members, the sort of wonderful partners who were and are comfortable enough in their relationship to have a good old-fashioned debate while the lobster rolls bore witness. The conflict arose when one party, a tech industry guy, asked me if I used AI to help me write. It's a question I've been fielding more and more lately. I did my best to explain why using AI in any creative endeavor holds zero appeal for me personally, that struggling through the tricky bits is where the real discovery of art resides. I think he thought I was being obstinate, that I was turning up my nose at a potentially valuable tool. He suggested that I ask a chatbot to offer solutions when I get stuck on a plot point.
His partner jumped in here, declaring that if I let AI decide where the story goes next, I'm not really the one writing it, am I? (Correct! Amen!) And art is a human endeavor that tries to get at something essential in the human experience. AI is emphatically not human and can, therefore, never create something that is. (Yes!) From this point, I sat back and enjoyed the argument over the really tasty juice blend I ordered. They didn't resolve it between them, but I have long since resolved this one on my own.
Writing is hard. It just is. And it should be. A novel is supposed to be a reflection of life and living and what it means to exist in the world; it stands to reason that any attempt to capture the human experience is fraught and difficult from the get-go. Do I enjoy drafting? Rarely. Writing the first draft takes for-freaking-ever (for me at least) and when I get to the end, all I have to show for myself is a giant pile of shit. No amount of planning or journaling or free-wheeling or manifesting non-shittiness into my creative universe makes the first draft any less awful. And the second draft isn't much better. Yet there is something deeply gratifying in writing your way through, solving problems as they crop up, finding themes and motifs in the most unlikely places. It's organic and instinctive. There's an animal realness to it, a beating heart in the words that's meant to touch the beating heart of the reader. I love that. I live for that. Why on earth would I give that over to anyone or anything else? It would be like asking someone to run a marathon on my behalf.*
This is good for me. I need to remind myself why I write from time to time, to get through the moments of nearly unbearable slog. The book I'm working on now, for example, is a big, nasty, unwieldy, overly ambitious tapestry of messy plot threads, hideous snags, loose ends, and gaping holes. I have never written a book that felt anything less than impossible at this stage of the game, but this one is particularly gnarly. I mean, I'm over here creating something out of nothing. What a thing to do to myself! And yet, it's worth it. I know it is. The story lives; I have seen its soul and glimpsed the connective tissue holding it together. If I may be so trite, the only way is through.
Over the years, I have often wondered if this is how
Georges Seurat felt as he toiled away on his pointillist paintings, making detailed images come alive on a large canvas with nothing more than minuscule dots. At times, you have to be up close, working with such precision that you get lost in that one tiny aspect of the artwork, making it as perfect as you can get it. Other times, you feel lost in a morass of details that blur together, and you have to step back to look at the work in its entirety, to examine where you are and what's left to do, to study the shape of the whole as all of those points slowly come together. And you have to do all of that without falling into an abyss of artistic despair.
Inevitably, I wind up singing "Finishing the Hat" from Sunday in the Park with George in full-throated Mandy Patinkin.***
I am drowning in a pool of many-colored story-dots at the moment, but man, those points are beginning to connect in the most gratifying ways. Every day is a new revelation. I can see more and more clearly what the work could become if I persevere, and it's cool as hell. Granted, the finished book will never touch the artistic vision in my head, but I'm going to get it as close to that goal as humanly possible ... stress the word "humanly." And maybe, just maybe, a publisher will want to acquire this book, and one day it will find its way into a reader's hands, and that reader will feel moved by the deeply human experience they encounter in the pages. For me, that's the entire point(illism) of writing a novel.
*Full disclosure: I would never, ever want to run a marathon.
**For those of you new to Megan Land, this is my process: I sit in front of a computer and Muppet-arms-flail until a year or two or five later, I wind up with a book.
***Damn, leave it to Stephen Sondheim to nail the entire point of art a million times better than I ever will. Here's Mandy Patinkin singing "Finishing the Hat" from Sunday in the Park with George:
