I’ve started noticing something rotten in the way I write. Not a typo, not a cliché. No, never that.
Something much worse. A kind of obedience.
My sentences sit too straight, like children lined up for inspection. They don’t breathe. They don’t snarl. They don’t even sweat. They just wait for approval like I’m some petty god with a grading pen.
Yet I write. And then, like a coward, I start trimming it. Smoothing the gristle. Washing off the scent that might alert anyone that I’m not the person they assume I am.
The first lie: that I want to be understood.
I don’t.
I want to be felt. Preferably in the ribcage.
And every time I edit myself into civility, a small animal inside me claws the walls. I can hear it. You probably can too if you lean close enough. It hates my good behavior. It hates my “clarity.” It hates the version of me that tries to pass for someone who thinks before they speak instead of someone who speaks and then watches the consequences bloom like a bruise.
Maybe they’ll think I’m reliable. Reasonable. Safe.
God, what a boring thing to be.
Machines don’t have this problem.
Machines don’t crave evidence of their own shadow.
I never meant to mention this, but since I’m excavating—so here: when I was sixteen, I got a love note from a girl I liked. It was unsigned. Like the idiot I was, I read it loud in class. The others laugehed. Then I saw her face swell with redness. Tears. Watched her face collapse. I didn’t understand. Then I did, and there was nothing I could do to undo it. I still think about how her eyes changed. A small, irreversible extinction.
Machinery can’t do that.
It can simulate cruelty, but it can’t feel the aftertaste.
And here’s the crack: I hoard that memory because it reminds me I’m capable of damage. Most people run from that knowledge. Writers shouldn’t. Writers should press their tongue to the battery and say yes, that’s the current.
Speaking of damage—let me risk being unlikeable, since that’s the only honesty worth anything:
I don’t trust writers who strive to be inspirational. It feels like they’re hiding the corpse under the floorboards. Every human I’ve ever met carries a small graveyard inside them, but half of them are terrified someone will hear the bones shift when they speak.
The other half?
They write.
In this series, I don’t want to inspire. I want you to find the truth within you. That gnarly, ugly thing that you suppress. Because truth makes you vulnerable.
I want writing that reeks a little. Writing with fingerprints smudged in places you wish were clean. Writing that switches tone mid-breath because the truth arrived early and kicked the door in.
So here’s my vow, scribbled in metaphorical blood:
No more housebroken paragraphs.
If a sentence wants to break its own legs to get the thought onto the page, I’ll hand it the hammer.
And if someone asks why my writing is—well, start reading my newer stuff and let me know what word you’d use—I’ll tell them the truth:
Because I stopped imitating the living and started writing like someone who remembers they’re going to die.
O, to be inspirational. The help and list I meant to start with.
Here it comes.
Does the rise of large language models scare you? I think it does. Every writer with “self respect” produces an anti-AI piece and publishes it with pride.
And people lap it up. But here’s the truth. They’re not educating readers about LLM and its tells. They’re building a moat around their identity as a writer.
“I’m a real writer, godsdamnit.”
They lean back, or forward, whichever. The self-righteousness is dripping like drool out of their mouths.
“I’m just helping people write better.”
“I’m protecting their credibility.” Nice cover story, chump. Nice velvet curtain. Behind it, something feral is pacing.
Here’s the mirror they didn’t ask for. It’s a shield. Against this:
What part of my own writing is already so machine-like that I fear being mistaken for the thing I critique?
And yeah, there are signs. The structured phrasing. The colon-happy titles. The hedging. The risk-aversion. The sterile cleanliness. The absence of blood in the language.
But those are not AI traits. They’re human traits at scale.
The averaged-out, exhausted, conflict-avoiding human voice of the internet. AI didn’t invent this. They just fed on our landfill and now exhale it with uncanny smoothness.
You’re not fighting robots. You’re fighting mediocrity wearing a programmable mask.
And if your writing looks like AI, then take a deep breath, for faen.
Your edge as a writer is not your ability to detect clichés. It’s your willingness to write something with fingerprints on it. Something that smells faintly of sweat, piss, bad breath, musk and the inside of an unwashed backpack. Something that doesn’t apologize for being alive.
Now—the lists.
Things You Need To Stop Doing
You are not an AI. Don’t make your identity into a defensive, holier than thou swamp-rat. It’ll suffocate your work.
Stop acting like originality is something you can slap on afterward. You write by bleeding first, not by applying small cuts after.
Stop curating your thoughts into clean instruction. Your best writing should scare you. If it doesn’t, it’s wearing someone else’s voice.
Things You Need To Face
You fear being irrelevant. Or worse: outdated. A primal fear.
You’re angry at how quickly “writing” has been cheapened. But the anger is misdirected. It should be aimed at your own reluctance to push into territory the machines cannot follow: confession, contradiction, moral messiness.
You say you want to be a writer? Why then did you take the role of the watchman guarding the border? Stop policing other people’s writing. You are not them.
The 5-Point Way To Stay Unmistakably Human
1. Change emotional register mid-paragraph.
Humans do mood swings in real time.
AIs do controlled prose. ← Don’t be this guy.
2. Say something you wish weren’t true about yourself.
Admit to a petty thought or a failure.
Machines cannot confess because they have no soul to save. ← they can pretend, badly.
3. Break a sentence because your thought breaks.
Not for effect—
but because you actually lost the thread and refuse to fake coherence.
4. Mention a memory you didn’t plan to bring up.
The moment you surprise yourself, you’ve left machine land. You’re in truth land. That’s where you want to be.
5. Write one sentence that risks making you unlikeable.
Machines don’t do reputational danger.
People do it without even thinking. Why do you think we so often end up in the dog house?
6. Write like you’re willing to lose something.
Time, ego, dignity, a reader.
Anything less will always sound like a seminar on how to avoid detection.
Don’t fake it. Write dangerously. Live on the edge. Live like the myth you can be.
Damnit, that was 6 points. Well, fine. I’ll keep it that way.