NaNoWriMo Day 16
(If this sounds like a reminder to keep exercising while you’re writing, well, it isn’t, but you really should be doing that.)
This is the most important advice I’ll give all month (except for silencing your inner editor from the 1st-31st): you should always be inhaling the world so that you can exhale it onto the page.
My Fiction Inspiration Friday posts are my own efforts to force myself to do that regularly. I share them with you because they give you a chance to slow down for a few minutes and look at something until you see it. You won’t see it the same way I do, just as your story cubes stories won’t be like mine. Neither of them are time consuming, nor are they intended to be (10-15 minutes max for either of them). Their value lies in the focused effort to stop the world for a few minutes and either look at it or write about it. Just for a little while.
Because you won’t see anything unless you stop and look. You should always be looking, listening, inhaling. Unless you’re in a museum, the world won’t stop for you to do it, so you’ll have to learn to do it while you and it are still in motion. It’s a skill, like any other, and it requires practice.
That practice of looking not just at something but into something is the single most important skill you have as a writer. Not grammar. Not spelling. Not vocabulary, the ability to write a query letter, how much coffee you can consume, or anything else.
Seeing. That’s what you do. That seeing is your skill; putting it into words is your set of tools.
Why do I sound so adamant about this? Why do I practice this with my Fiction Inspiration posts? Why is it the one thing I work on the most when I write, above everything else?
Because seeing is why you can’t be replaced by AI. All AI models can do is replicate things they’ve already consumed. They can do that by the bucketful. Ask them to barf out a 50,000 word novel and they’ll give you 50,000 words in an instant. But it won’t be a novel. It will be a pile of words that it’s been fed before, shuffled around, and regurgitated. It can’t see into things: you can. And you have to in order not to get killed by AI. AI is going to destroy mediocre writers, but it’s going to make the bright ones shine even more brightly.
How do you shine? By seeing the world in only the way you can and writing about it in the way only you can. AI doesn’t breathe. It doesn’t have to, but more importantly, it doesn’t get to. It doesn’t get to inhale the world the way you can through your eyes and your reading and your writing.
“Respiration” and “inspiration” don’t sound similar by coincidence. They are related to each other: when we’re inspired, we’ve breathed in something; we’ve done a mental act of respiration. If you’re not inspired, you’re not respiring, and if you’re not respiring, you’re expiring.
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