Endless Creation

I’m not a big fan of AI, though it’s clearly here to stay. Also, admittedly, when I need, say, an image of an anthropomorphized duck with a monocle writing in an ancient journal – which, because of my enduring love of roleplaying games, I occasionally do – it’s pretty handy. It’s handy because I don’t have the skill necessary nor the interest required to create that image. I just want that picture, and, after typing in a few instructions, I have it – or something close enough to it. I’m not that fussy when it comes to images of literary ducks.

However, in another life, I would have had the skill necessary to create such a picture myself. I used to draw when I was young. For a time, I even thought I would be a cartoonist; I’d go to art stores and buy special inking pens and found a book on how to draw perspective. But then, somewhere in my teens, my creative interest shifted entirely to writing, and that was that. I’d stood at a crossroads, apparently, and made a choice. You start down a path, and the intersection you left behind grows more and more distant. You could go back, but this path is too interesting not to find out what comes next.

I can’t imagine using AI to write a story, though I know people who do. If it works somehow for them, great, but it would seem to circumnavigate the entire reason I do what I do. AI gives you an immediate result; the pleasurable part of storytelling for me is the step-by-step, word-by-word journey. It’s making choices and discovering over and over and over. Eventually, I reach something I call an end, I get that result, which is nice, but then it’s on to the next journey.

That’s writing, and that’s life. It never ends, and we don’t want it to. What do we really ever have but experiences? All the results we point to, the published books, the homes and children and businesses, all of them are a consequence of a long stream of choices and experiences, a stream that still flows past inert creations that we finished and moved on from. You may have loved making them, but they aren’t you, you are that stream, running and running forever down to an ocean we all eventually rejoin.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com