The Point Was Never Just the Words: Why Writing with AI Misses the Mark

There’s a looming danger in how we talk about writing now. The focus has shifted from expression to efficiency.

The Process Was the Point All Along

If you can get a polished paragraph in seconds, why would you spend hours staring at a blank page? It sounds like a win until you realize what you’re giving up in exchange. We weren’t meant to skip the part where it’s hard. Writing has always been more than just words on a page. It’s thinking. Feeling. Wrestling with a thought you can’t quite name until you fight your way through it.

In that discomfort, seeking the right words to say, that’s where growth ignites, and the passion lights up the way.

AI Doesn’t Change, But You Do

In Internal Dialogue: A Busy Writer’s Guide, Marcy Kennedy describes internal monologue as the part of the story that shows who the character really is. Not what they say out loud. Not what they perform for others. But the unfiltered thoughts they keep to themselves.

Writers have an internal dialogue too, not in their characters, but in themselves. It’s the silent processing that happens midsentence. The rewriting. The regret. The choice to tell the truth even when it feels a little too personal.

That’s what’s missing when you outsource the writing. AI doesn’t learn. It doesn’t get uncomfortable. It doesn’t become a better storyteller after a failed draft or a hard critique.

You do.

Your Voice Isn’t Just a Style, It’s a Process

It’s tempting to think of voice as something you can replicate. After all, AI tools can now imitate syntax, cadence, and tone. They can sound enough like you. But they weren’t shaped by the same losses. They didn’t grow up with your memories. They haven’t wrestled with your fears.

Voice isn’t just about how you write. It’s how you think, how you interpret the world, how you translate emotion into language. That can’t be mimicked. It has to be lived.

Writing Isn’t Just About the End Result

Here’s what no one tells you when you try to write fast, clean, and optimized: the act of writing changes you. A story you worked through honestly will always give more back than one you generated. Not because it’s fancier, but because it meant something.

We often say that writing is healing. But that only happens if you’re the one doing it.

So if you’re tired, if you’re tempted to let the tool take over, that’s okay. But maybe pause before you hand over the pen entirely. Writing is a process where parts of that process comes from the nuance of living as a writer, taking the world in as a writer. No machine can write what you have lived through and what you feel.

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