As a writer, can you use AI without losing your soul?

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:2 mins read

I’ve published a new essay at The Living Dark titled “Can a Serious Writer Use AI Without Losing His Soul?” It’s an attempt to think through the question of whether writers can use artificial intelligence without surrendering the deeper source of their work.

The essay begins with my recent foreword to Youri Hermes’s The Art of Unwriting, then moves through the questions of unwriting, the daemon muse, creative flow, AI as a machine-muse, and the difference between assistance and abdication. It also touches on my own changing relationship to AI, including the way my thinking has been shaped by writing, teaching, and my current work in higher education.

My provisional answer is yes: a serious writer can use AI without losing his soul. But only if AI assists the work instead of becoming the source of the work.

The essay isn’t a manifesto against AI, and it’s certainly not an endorsement of the flood of machine-generated slop now filling the internet. It’s an attempt to think carefully about the line between using AI as a tool and allowing it to replace the living inward act by which real writing happens.

You can read the full essay at The Living Dark here:

Can a Serious Writer Use AI Without Losing His Soul?

A story I don’t remember writing

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:1 min read

While browsing through my old files recently, I came across something that genuinely surprised me: an unfinished story fragment that I have no memory of writing.

The piece, which I have now given the title “The Book of Rahmat Ghraam,” reads like a fragment of incipient weird religious horror, narrating an encounter with a strange, possibly apocryphal text that opens onto something deeper and more unsettling. Or at least that’s where it looks like it would have gone if I had pursued it further. It’s the kind of thing I would have expected to remember writing, but I don’t. That strangeness alone was enough to make me want to share it.

I’ve posted the fragment, along with some brief reflections on its origin (or lack thereof), in a new entry at The Living Dark:

An Unfinished Story That I Don’t Remember Writing
A fragment of weird religious horror from my archives

And, of course, for the many stories that I have written to completion, you can always delve into To Rouse Leviathan, which collects most of them.

The creative ebb and flow of writing

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:1 min read

Some of my most unexpected writing, the stuff that arrives with power, flow, and inspiration, has come after a few days or weeks when I have felt deeply deadened and bereft, as if abandoned by the creative spirit. This creative ebb and flow is distinct and repetitive enough across the years to constitute a pattern, and one that I can’t help but find striking and worth mulling over.

It’s as if the times when I wonder whether I’ll ever write again, and even if I will ever want to write again, represent an inner ebb tide, with the water of the psyche receding in preparation for a tidal flow. The subjective, conscious experience of that ebbing is a feeling of being totally becalmed and even averse to action, especially creative action like putting words on paper or screen.

Eventually, if this lasts long enough, I just give up and accept that I will not be writing anymore. And then, without fail (or at least so far), writing happens again, and with intensity. Learning this cycle has been an ongoing discipline of self-discovery and self-acceptance as a being rooted in the creative action-and-retreat cycles of the cosmos itself.

Against personal branding

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:2 mins read

I couldn’t care less whether anything that I publish here or anywhere else is “on brand.” What does that even mean? Aside from the troubling (and faintly ridiculous) livestock connotations of the term “brand” to begin with, what is my personal signal or signature anyway? It’s precisely whatever interests me and wants to come through me in this moment, without fundamental regard for its fortunes or reception. In this sense, on this level, I am ardently and fundamentally against personal branding, or more specifically, on burning up much or any of my precious creative energy on it.

Well-crafted communiques tuned for clarity of expression in the context of the total rhetorical moment—yes.

Manipulative, extractive attempts to maximize some preselected outcome based on egoic notions of success—no.

The inbuilt serendipity of this dream of me-plus-world will serve as a kind of synchronicity machine, making the right connections manifest. All I have to do is show up and cooperate with what happens to be my deepest identity and impulse in the first place. Any apparent “effects” are really just side effects—things to observe and enjoy along the way without grasping at them, assigning them presupposed value, or turning them into a programmatic goal aimed at controlling how they land and what they do or don’t accomplish in rounding out some image of me in my own or anyone else’s mind.

Perhaps needless to say, if you are a writer yourself, I recommend adopting a version of this same attitude, appropriately tuned and calibrated to your own sensibility. Branding as such is actually fine for practical purposes in the commercial arena. But its potential to breach its rightful limits and invade our core self-sense at the fundamental creative-motivational level is real, and also something we should seriously guard against. Your inner genius is too valuable to be sacrificed on the altar of marketing.

(For sage advice on finding the organic connection between your deep creativity and the matter of communicating your work to other people, see Dan Blank’s excellent book You Are the Gateway.)

My interview for The Creative Penn podcast

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Joanna Penn, bestselling author and creative entrepreneur, on her podcast, The Creative Penn.

The episode, titled “Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius,” explores many of the core ideas behind my recent book, including the role of the muse or daemon, the nature of creative silence, and the relationship between artistic practice and spiritual inquiry. We also talked a bit about the relationship between creative practice and the nature of cosmic fear.

Joanna was kind enough to describe the book as:

“a guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. Part craft, part devotion, Writing at the Wellspring is a call to surrender control, listen beneath the noise, and create from the place where awe and fear meet. If the page is a threshold, this book will show you how to cross.”

In our conversation, we discuss:

  • The idea of creativity as collaboration with something beyond the conscious self
  • Why periods of silence, inertia, or “writer’s block” may be integral to the creative process
  • The deeper psychological and spiritual dimensions of writing
  • The overlap between creativity and the themes of cosmic horror
  • How long-form writing projects can grow organically from blogs and ongoing reflection

You can listen to the interview through the YouTube link above or visit the official episode page (with show notes and transcript).