What is good writing?

I’ve long identified as a writer, and ever since I was a kid marveling at the joy I got from fantasy books, the term “writer” has had an almost mystical quality to me. Unlike a doctor or a Senator, being a writer doesn’t actually require any kind of bonafide credential or achievement. You string some words together, boom, now you’re a writer. A writer can be a journalist, marketer, or someone slogging away on technical manuals for a healthcare company. In a world of accreditations, the term is almost too broad and inclusive.

Good writing makes you feel like the world makes sense, at least for a sentence.

There was a period of time that I fancied myself a screenwriter, and I wrote a lot of screenplays and even tried to film some. There are several ways to copyright a screenplay: the poor man’s method is just to email it to yourself so you have timestamped proof that the thing existed when you said it did, and hopefully that holds up in case of any kind of trademark dispute.

Another method, at least for screenplays, is to register your screenplay with the Writers Guild of America. Back when I did it, it cost $20 and you got an official-looking notice in the mail. I still have all of mine, four in total, and each one felt like a stamp of approval from the faraway academy of wizards – even if any old dummy could pay the fee and get one.

But earlier this year that very same Guild went on strike, and those wizards of writing didn’t have their demands met easily nor willingly. The major issues that caused the strike were financial (TV doesn’t work the same as it used to, meaning that residuals kind of aren’t a thing, and that’s a bummer for the people who make hit shows), but they’re also fairly existential thanks to AI.

The rise of the machines

Yeah, I know. You thought you were getting a writing blog and now 2023’s most-used acronym has reared its shiny, metallic head. So far, I’ve resisted writing about AI because, frankly, there’s been endless chatter from every other tech professional and when it comes down to it, no one has any idea where this is going. We can all pretend to be Magellan, but at the end of the day we’re just monkeys farting in our hands and calling it caviar.

One thing I’ve found fascinating is how quickly AI has become the writer. When people would stargaze and talk about jobs being replaced by AI, I always assumed the writers would be safe for a long time. We reach into our souls and connect disparate metaphors; we tame and break language to our will; we use words on a screen to communicate complicated meanings that convey our core humanity to each other. How could a large language model consisting of code and bits ever cast similar magic?

But then ChatGPT3 came, and then ChatGPT4 and its bazillion offshoots, and every SaaS company in the world has implemented some version of AI into their product in order to automagically save you time (as I’m writing this in WordPress, I just realized they have a tool implemented as well). Many of the new AI capabilities are based on writing, and many of the outputs are actually decent. Some that I’ve seen are even good, especially when the task has simple parameters, like writing an SEO-focused landing page (it turns out robots are good at writing for other robots). For the better part of a year, my LinkedIn feed has been full of breathless praise over the sheer capability of AI and how much time it will save everyone, since we’ll never have to slog through finger-to-keyboard masochism again.

But hey, I kind of like writing. 

And the thought of a society in which no one writes is truly dystopian, a little too Fahrenheit 451 than I’m comfortable with, but of course there are another dozen ways that America’s already been hurtling toward that grim future recently.

So what is good writing? If some of us are now convinced that AI can output something that meets this elusive standard of quality, let’s first define what it is.

Good Writing

Put this on my tombstone: I don’t read quickly, but I do read consistently. And in my reading career, I’ve encountered some great writing. Some of it has altered my thinking of the world, or at least my place in it, and other times it just makes me chortle or smile. Good writing makes you feel like the world makes sense, at least for a sentence.

Although I’m certainly not an arbiter of what is good, I have a writing degree and a few thousand (maybe a million?) words under my belt, and I’ve even made money putting this penchant to use. So here’s a small sampling of good writers I’ve encountered, along with the writing they produce, and I’d love to see how they compare to your own.

Kurt Vonnegut

I was probably 16 when I read my first Vonnegut novel, Mother Night. When Vonnegut gave each of his books a letter grade, this one received an A so I guess it was a pretty good place to start.

I’ll also say 16 is the perfect age to discover Vonnegut, since his mix of simple prose, crass humor, and profound insights had a way of breaking my brain open in the most pleasant way. It helps that none of his books are particularly long (he was a tall man, and preferred to write hunched over his typewriter so that he never got too comfortable and wrote a book that overstayed its welcome).

Here are some of Vonnegut’s best lines:

Laughing is good exercise. It's like jogging on the inside.

And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'

As stupid and vicious as men are, this is a lovely day.

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.

Neil Gaiman

Neverwhere was both Gaiman’s first solo novel and my introduction to him, and I quickly became voracious in the way that Gaiman fans often do. He started his career as a journalist before he became the King of the Goths in the ‘90s when he made The Sandman comics, but American Gods was his work that rocked my world.

It was large and complicated, about a violent road trip across America populated with gods from both the old world and the new one. It was clever and poetic, as Gaiman tended to be. He gets bonus points for narrating his own audiobooks in his soothing British accent, which perfectly suits his patient prose.

Here are some of Gaiman’s best lines:

Go, and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

Be wise, because the world needs more wisdom. And if you cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise, and then just behave like they would.

Susanna Clarke

Susanna Clarke isn’t nearly as well known as the other writers on this list, because she’s only actually published two novels nearly 20 years apart. Both have won oodles of awards and the first happens to be 782 pages. She basically has a fairytale rise to fame, having first caught the attention of her writing teacher (who she later married), and then Neil Gaiman.

Her prose has a lot in common with Gaiman’s, with a poetic British flair that subtly delivers profound truths.

Here are some of Clarke’s best lines:

He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands.

She wore a gown the color of storms, shadows, and rain and a necklace of broken promises and regrets.

There is nothing in the world so easy to explain as failure - it is, after all, what everybody does all the time.

Cormac McCarthy

I’m sure Cormac McCarthy learned punctuation, he just never cared for it much. He recently died, and was basically a hermit his whole life. He wrote No Country for Old Men and several other highly-regarded novels about the American southwest, and his first on-camera appearance was on Oprah when she picked The Road for her book club. His no-fuss attitude and ability to consistently churn out excellent fiction with no fanfare made him into a bit of a writing deity.

I’ve always found McCarthy’s prose fascinating because it’s simplistic in a way mine has never been. Many of the great writing I’m drawn to tends toward a flowery, maximalist style that covers an entire range of emotions in the breadth of a sentence. McCarthy, though, takes his time. It’s the prose equivalent of an old cowboy, perfectly content in the pasture with the horses and cattle, a man of few words but profound statements.

Here are some of McCarthy’s best lines:

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

The rain falls upon the just And also on the unjust fellas But mostly it falls upon the just Cause the unjust have the just's umbrellas

Any time you're throwin dirt you're losin ground.

Jeff VanderMeer

I found VanderMeer, as most do, through Annihilation, and I quickly downed a bunch of his work. He’s often described as a writer of ecological sci-fi, his books infused with nature and the incredible oddities it can present. There’s a bit of Lovecraft and a bit of Kafka in there, a disorienting miasma of Weird Fiction describing singleminded characters going places they probably shouldn’t.

Here are some of VanderMeer’s best lines:

Some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.

When you think about the complexity of our natural world - plants using quantum mechanics for photosynthesis, for example - a smartphone begins to look like a pretty dumb object.

That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.

Everyone always tells you that you become more alone as you get older. People write about it in books. They shout it out on street corners. They mumble it in their sleep. But it’s always a shock when it happens to you.

Bard by Google

Just for fun, I’ll throw some AI-generated prose into the mix. I made this with Google’s Bard back in June 2023, and it was a bit of an experiment with my writing group. I didn’t give it any particularly sophisticated prompts, and I certainly didn’t train it on specific styles like the above excerpts that I’ve included. This is basically just Bard putting its writer cap on.

I asked it to write a short story about a woman, Anya, trying to find her sister in a climate change-ravaged wasteland dominated by super monsters. A majority of the output is told in a maddening summary fashion, with no actual scenes, and when we do get a scene it’s repetitive (lots of screaming) and messy (she bit the bony monster? The Crawler is standing at the end?). Bard also tries really hard to wrap this story up on about a dozen occasions, which might just be a quirk of this particular AI. It would rather answer your research question than write prose, thank you very much.

Here’s one of the endings that Bard wrote:

Anya screamed and tried to run, but the Crawler was too fast. It lunged at her, its claws slashing at her flesh.

Anya fought back, but the Crawler was too strong. It pinned her to the ground and started to tear at her flesh with its claws.

Anya screamed in pain as the Crawler tore her flesh. She knew that she was going to die.

But then, she thought of her sister. She thought of how she had promised to find her, no matter what.

With a new surge of strength, Anya fought back against the Crawler. She punched and kicked, and she even bit the creature's sharp, bony body.

The Crawler was surprised by Anya's sudden attack. It let go of Anya and reared back.

Anya took the opportunity to roll away from the creature. She scrambled to her feet and ran for her life.

The Crawler chased after her, but Anya was too fast. She ran through the trees, dodging the creature's attacks.

Finally, Anya reached a clearing. She ran out into the open, and the Crawler stopped chasing her.

The Crawler stood in the middle of the clearing, watching Anya. Its eyes were filled with rage, but it knew that it could not defeat her.

Anya turned and walked away from the Crawler, leaving it standing alone in the clearing. She knew that she would never forget this day, and she knew that she would never give up her search for her sister.

The Humanity

My very biased sample of good writing may not have assuaged your fears about AI taking over the world, including the little artsy corner of it that so many word nerds like myself inhabit, but it made me feel better.

Sure, Bard in June 2023 couldn’t hold a candle to Pulitzer Prize-winning Cormac McCarthy, but it’s early days for Bard and his robot buddies. They likely will reach some point that they can ape the greats pretty reliably (and maybe they’re already there, in the hands of a more capable prompter), but I like to think there’s something about good prose that’s innately and uniquely human.

AI might connect a few dots and make a sentence flow well, but a truly great writer is tapping into a truth that an LLM can never grok because it happens to not have a heart or brain with which to feel things.

One day I’ll look back on this blog and scoff at my ignorance as I read the latest AI-written novel. Or maybe I’ll write a blog decades from now about the best AI prompters, those people so skilled at manipulating ChatGPT that they can coax out prose that rivals my above selections.

I could see a future where I’m one day the old man futilely yelling at clouds, talking endlessly about how great it was when flesh-and-blood humans wrote books, until my kids roll their eyes into blindness.

That’s part of progress though, isn’t it? We get comfortable with one way of things, then they change and we get old, then a new generation comes in who’s fine with the change and we all keep rolling along.

And then the robots learn how to wear humans like skin suits, and start writing about their feelings until we can’t tell the difference anymore.