No, You Didn’t Write a Novel in One Day. And I’m Not Okay With You.

I’m about to go all Elvis on my computer screen.

True fact: Elvis shot out the speaker, not the screen. But who wants to ruin a good story?

You know the story, right? Elvis is holed up in the International Hotel, watching TV with a pistol in one hand. As one does. 

Robert Goulet comes on the screen. Elvis shoots out the TV. 

“All technique. No soul,” he says.

That’s how I feel every time I see someone post:

“I wrote a novel in a day using Gemini!”

All technique, no soul. 

You generated a pile of sentences that vaguely resemble a novel-shaped object. You fed prompts into a machine and got 70,000 words back. That’s not a novel. That’s a log of your click behavior. 

(Gettin’ angry? You with me people? Subscribe now!)

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Writing Isn’t Typing

Another great quote: Truman Capote and Jack Kerouac are on some talk show (you know, a while ago, at the beginning of time).

Kerouac brags that he wrote 10,000 words in one day.

“That’s not writing… that’s typing,” Capote replies. (It’s even funnier when you imagine Truman Capote kind of drawling out the word… “tyyyyyping.”)

Writing is thinking.

It’s feeling something, fumbling for words to express that feeling, revising those words over and over until—somewhere in the middle of the mess—you finally understand what it is you were trying to say in the first place.

Writing is how we come to know what we think.

Even the most private writers, the ones who never show their work to another living soul, are writing to figure something out. To see their own thoughts more clearly. To turn fog into shape.

For the rest of us—those who publish, pitch, produce, and revise until we’re raw—writing is a way of coming to know in public. It’s about taking the reader on that same journey. That’s what a great novel, a great play, a great episode of television is: a process of discovery, shared.

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This Is a Human Thing

This act of “coming to know” is deeply human. It is layered and strange and emotional and inefficient. It’s riddled with contradictions and full of false starts. It’s not a function of raw intelligence. It’s something else.

It’s heart. Or soul. Or mind. We’ve never quite known what to call it, but it’s the thing that makes us US.

Which is why my favorite sign during the last Writers Guild strike still applies:

CHATGPT NEVER WENT TO FAT CAMP.

AI may sound smart. It may even be helpful. But it doesn’t know what it feels like to be embarrassed in a cabin with twelve other kids. It doesn’t know what it feels like to lose your voice or fall in love or show your draft to someone you respect and see them wince.

WRITERS WITH INTELLIGENCE: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS NOT ONE OF US. 

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But I Still Use It

I’m not anti-AI. I’m all in on using the tools. I use Claude. I use ChatGPT. I use NotebookLM. I converse with them. I use them to brainstorm, outline, organize, rethink structure, stress-test a scene.

Hell, this post started as a rant. A bunch of blurts and half-baked thoughts I wanted to shout into the void. I typed it into google docs, looked back at it and thought, “Yeah, maybe there’s something here.” So I gave it to the AI. 

(Note: I have a project in Claude that contains a lot of my writing, substack best practices, notes on how I want my posts to read. This wasn’t a “cold call” to Claude. I’ll be going into how to set up your LLMs soon!)

AI gave this some shape. Gave me some headlines. Focused the paragraphs. I took all that and walked away and thought about it.

I came back and made some choices. Played around. I knew what to cut, what to move around. In a few drafts, the thing said what I wanted it to say.

That’s writing.

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We Have to Lead

The incredible Ted Gioia just published an amazing story about how the Chicago Sun-Times recently published a summer reading list…

The first ten books on the list didn’t exist. They were hallucinations.

NO ONE caught it. Generated by ChatGPT, and published without one editorial review. (Ted also pointed out that it was probably only a matter of a few hours before books built by AI with these titles appeared on Amazon.)

We’re heading into a flood of AI slop. SEO bait, content farms, fake blogs with fake authors and fake experiences. But I also believe audiences will crave the real thing.

That means we—real writers—need to lead the way.

We need to stop platforming nonsense like “AI-generated articles make me $1,000 a day.” We need to stop sharing YouTube videos about how to trick Claude into writing your screenplay. And we need to call bullshit when someone posts their “novel-in-a-day” word soup and expects applause.

If you’re one of us, you know: Punctuation is easy. Soul is hard.

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Your Turn

💬 Tell me about your own experiences using SudoWrite or HypeWriter or CLICK-A-SCRIPT™ (that last one’s mine, and if we lose this battle, I’m claimin’ it!)

Drop it in the comments. I’ll be reading—and probably laughing. Or crying. I’ll follow your lead.

Let’s figure this out together. Like real writers do.

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Subscribe if you haven’t. Share if you know someone who needs to hear this. And if you’re still working on that one-day novel… take another day. Make a choice. That’s where the writing starts.