Why Write A Book in 2025?

This morning started on a dull note for me as I read this story from NY Magazine about everybody cheating their way through college. It’s pretty distressing to think that the entire idea of college is dissolving around us, and further to realize that this is the entire point of many of the AI warlords out there, who seem to be pursuing vindictive agendas of their own against institutions they dropped out of.

So with all the AI tools out there striving to take every single bit of effort out of the creative writing experience, and with all the ever-improving AI books out there, why the hell would you write a book in 2025? And even more importantly, should you make such a fateful decision, how do you write a book in 2025? How do you avoid the trap of thinking AI is the answer, while at the same time trying to compete directly with the ever-improving outputs of these large language models?

I can’t say I know the answer to any of these, but thinking it through – and writing about it – is a great next step. So let’s do that.

Why Write A Book in 2025?

Well, first of all, why are you writing the book period? This question must be answered, and it must come from you, not from me. But to inspire you, here are some common reasons I’ve heard, and the conclusions you might draw from them:

• I want to sell my book and make a million dollars (Many people’s real reason, especially in America, even if they lie to themselves about it)

If this is your reasoning, then there might be a case to be made for using AI to write your book. Let me explain: writing simply to make a profitable asset (your book) says to me that your entire focus is on the outcome, and the journey to get there is meaningless to you. So if you don’t care about the journey of creation, that implies strongly that you don’t care about the humanity of your work – defined as the literal human hours that went into creating the work. So why not outsource it to AI?

It should be made clear that writing a book with the goal of making money or fame, especially when that goal isn’t even one you’d admit to yourself, is TOTALLY natural in today’s over-commercialized world. I don’t agree at all with the framework of life that led to the over-commercialized world we live in, but I certainly can’t blame you, a singular writer, for adapting to the world in which you live. It ain’t your fault. I would just urge you to admit your deep, dark goals to yourself, and then understand that you need other, more human motivations to write if you’re ever going to actually do it in a way that benefits other humans.

• I want to create something cool, perhaps inspired by things created by others that I find cool (My reason)

This motivation is kind of the balance between caring about the end product and caring about the journey. And that’s perfect, in my mind! You need a vision of the end goal to get you through the journey of creating a book, after all. But this is a crucial point: you also need the journey to help you shape the end goal. A book idea is a simple thing, and it naturally needs to develop to include the plots and characters and settings you inevitably come up with. Nobody has that nailed down on day 1 (and if they do, they’ve put in a ton of work to get to that point, even if that work was simply thinking about their book, and it will inevitably change anyway during the drafting process).

• I have a million words in my head and they have to go somewhere or I’m gonna explode

I don’t know if this is real but there are many writers who over-romanticize their craft by making such claims. This reasoning is also, unfortunately, frequently misappropriated by the pro-genAI folks who think that writing is just a filter to get their amazing ideas out into the world. They’re wrong, by the way – writing is a way to reflect ideas back onto yourself in order to hone them, and nobody’s ideas are ever as great as they think once they’re exposed to the real world in written form. But the fact remains that you can argue that genAI is a way to smooth the process of creation, and that it’s therefore an OK thing to use.

I’d urge anyone with this “why” to avoid the trap of shortcutting the process. Getting the words on a page as fast as possible is always hard, but if you really are full to bursting with words, you’ve got a superpower many of us writers don’t have, and you should embrace it. The frustration of having a million ideas and not being able to write them all down fast enough is a better problem than the inverse, believe me.

So what the heck should I do?

Even as I write this post, WordPress is prompting me to use its AI assistant to help write the article. You could make the case that I should use the AI assistant – this blog post is just a means to promote my more “important” novel writing, isn’t it? Why wouldn’t I want to outsource that to an unthinking AI servant?

The answer to that question is because writing is a form of thinking to me. I personally think better as I write; maybe you can do it all in your head, but I think there’s a reason writing is the primary way children are taught pretty much anything. It’s because writing is thinking, and to outsource thinking is insane.

Let’s zoom out, first, to handle some counter-arguments to my thesis. AI has great use cases. These are normally in areas of human endeavor where humans generally know how to do something but lack the physical computing power in our brains to do it; identifying drug chemistries, finding cancer cells, all kinds of stuff like that where we’ve accelerated a process that we already knew how to do, just slower. There will be gray areas, of course, but AI as a supplement to human intelligence can be a good thing.

You could say that generative AI is doing the same thing for writing, but here’s why that’s wrong: writing implies that someone is meant to read the words being written. The fact that someone is meant to read the words being written implies that those words have value. But what is that value? As I said before – the value of writing is the thinking that went into it. The human thinking.

If you write a book with AI, you’re engaging in false advertising. You’re letting the world believe you created the thoughts that went into the book, and that’s wrong. No matter how many “ideas” you put into a genAI tool, you’re not creating value. In all human efforts, big ideas only get you so far; the real triumphs come from the details, and letting genAI create the details of your book for you means you’ve outsourced the actual value of the book, aka you’ve created nothing of value.

In 2025, you should write your book however tickles your conscience the most. Maybe you’re someone who thinks AI should be held at bay with a 30-foot pole, and that’s great. I’ll read your book. Or maybe you’re someone who thinks it’s cool to dabble – maybe there’s no need for you to calculate how long it would take to drive a horse and carriage 200 miles across mountainous terrain for your high fantasy novel, and you can let chatGPT figure that out for you. For me, that’s probably fine too. You didn’t outsource the core value of your writing, and therefore the soul of your book is intact. But the slope gets very, very slippery from there.

My advice; tread lightly.