by TWC Founder/Director Judith Lindbergh
We recently made this formal announcement, one which seemed unnecessary. Implicit. We have been writing without A.I. since the beginning. Why would we start using it now?
But in an era when A.I. is everywhere and nearly inescapable, apparently we need to take a stand.
We first shared our new, official policy this summer at our teen Creative Writing Intensives. The announcement was met with applause and cheers. Yes, these extraordinary kids truly love writing. They don’t want A.I. to usurp their creative brains any more than we do. But for others who don’t exactly embrace struggling with words–creatively or otherwise–avoiding the lure of A.I. is far more challenging.
There are practical reasons to avoid A.I.-assisted writing, particularly when we’re learning:
Writing builds our working memory, executive planning skills and metacognition — the ability to think about our thinking, weigh alternate viewpoints and revise for clarity and style. It takes decades to develop writing skills, from toddlerhood into adulthood.
What Do Students Lose When They Stop Writing?, Dana Goldstein, The New York Times, Aug. 17, 2026
In an ideal world, developing writers would relish this experience, discovering how the struggle helps them not only to compose words that make sense, but how it shapes their critical thinking.
Oddly, the problem isn’t just with developing writers. It’s deep in the professional publishing world, too. Increasingly, literary journals, agents, and publishers require “100% human writing”–often with some kind of guarantee. Yet book deals and well-respected literary prizes have crumbled under accusations of A.I.-assisted writing. Meanwhile, The Authors Guild tested how effective today’s A.I. detectors really are. Most of the results were not encouraging.
Is A.I. even avoidable at this point? It is everywhere, in every digital device, nosing in on every text message, social media post, email, search engine query, and conversation we have. It is interacting with me right now as I draft this on GoogleDocs. If I were using Word, where I do most of my fiction writing, it would be, too, if I didn’t immediately disable Copilot every time Microsoft Office updates. (Though it might still be watching. “Off” might not mean “off.” You never know….)
Yes, this verges on paranoia. Or does it? How can we escape? My most recent Substack post focused on writing by hand, a practice I returned to, trying to break up a little writer’s block. It worked. And guess what else? Writing on paper cannot be absorbed by LLMs! But to write long form fiction that way? People did. A few still do. But my writing life has existed, to date, mostly on a computer. I don’t know how well I could work without insert/delete.
Creative writing is difficult. I would be lying if I denied it. Sometimes words fly from your fingers. At other times, you find yourself shuffling entire sections, cutting, rewriting, deleting again and again. It can be frustrating and exhausting. Characters have minds of their own and plots rarely go the way you plan. Sometimes you only figure out why something isn’t working months or years into a project. Even professional authors struggle and fail.
But the struggle is the point. Through the process of writing, we learn how we think. We discover what our stories truly want to be. We wrestle with ideas, weigh alternatives, and make critical choices. We learn to communicate with clarity and eventually flare. We discover things we didn’t even know that we felt, and work through deeply personal challenges from the safety and privacy of the page.
When we give over our creative writing to A.I., even for a little idea-generating boost, we relinquish these precious lessons to the LLMs. These inhuman behemoths have absorbed all the good and all of the bad writing that exists in the vast digital reservoir of knowledge. Plots, characters, and literary voice are flattened by sameness, and brainstormed “suggestions” are the product of indiscernible blandness, like mixing all the colors of a painter’s palate until you end up with a brown the color of dung.
Another analogy: Think of highly processed foods. We know what they do to the body. What do they do to the mind? That’s basically what A.I. writing is.
Avoiding A.I. in writing is obviously vital for young, developing minds. But even published authors continue to learn by wrestling with their work. Joan Didion wrote, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” Writing exposes insights into the world and ourselves. Why would we give these invaluable opportunities away?
If writing is how we learn to think, what we give up to A.I. is our self-hood. Our individuality. Whatever compels us to pick up a pen or tap away on the keyboard burbles up from the depths of our subconscious. Writing is truly one of the acts that makes us human.
Sure, there are practical applications for A.I. If it can help find a cure for cancer or discover the origins of the Universe, I’m all in. But for creativity and self-expression (notice the prefix “self-”), let’s leave that to the humans.
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P.S. After posting an earlier version of this piece, I heard from Jane Friedman who has a different perspective and sees ways that writers can use A.I. responsibly. Come hear Jane’s ever-thoughtful and well-considered insights at our virtual event on November 15:
What Writers Need to Know About A.I. on November 15, 2PM
with publishing industry expert Jane Friedman.
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TWC Founder/Director Judith Lindbergh, the author of Akmaral and The Thrall’s Tale, has been writing without A.I. for decades. She ran this post through Pangram, the publishing-industry standard A.I. testing app. She’s happy to report that it is 100% Human-written.
