Hey there, hi there, hello there! Welcome back to everyone’s favorite drunken advice column. That’s right, it’s once again time for Am I the Literary Asshole?, which is a lot like Reading Rainbow, if Reading Rainbow had a drinking game component. I’m your host, Kristen Arnett, and I’m about to be elbow-deep inside a jack-o’-lantern. Listen, when it’s fall in Florida, you have to manufacture your own seasons (and by that I mean you crank down the air conditioning and squint really hard and pretend you might see leaves changing color). It’s autumn! Let’s have some thematic fun!

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How about we crack open a boxed red wine and stuff the bag inside our hollowed-out pumpkin? Carve a hole for the spout and BAM! You’ve done some holiday crafting and now you can drink from it, too! Ain’t life grand?

Cheers! Onto our first question of the day:

1) Hi Kristen, 

I’m an unpublished writer. I’ve put it on the backburner for years and only writing sporadically but my day job and career took up a lot of my time brain space. Despite trying and studying it, I still lack confidence on whether it’s good enough, both short stories and articles. Then comes AI, that scares me and I don’t even have to rely on people or Google to find advice or ideas in life. I fear my brain has turned to mush. 

Yet I have been using AI a lot despite the rabbit hellhole it is. It annoys me with the responses that tells me more than I need or just plain waste of my time. I tell myself not to but I do plug in my writing drafts in there and ask for reviews or feedback only, from three different AIs at various levels. Of course, all keep wanting to rewrite it for me and my response is “No! I’m the writer!” I do look at the feedback with structure and flow but don’t always agree or take it. If I think I have written well and AI said it isn’t good, it does make me sometimes feel bad. I also use it when I’m stuck or looking for inspiration or ideas. 

I’ve referred to the Authors Guild on their advice for AI which seems to say they allow it to an extent? I feel guilty but I tell myself I’m using it as an editor or a writing coach which I am craving so that I can improve. What an editor or friend (if my friends wrote or even read) would be telling me. I’ve never been published because I’ve been unable to finish anything that I think is worth sending out before I give up and move on to my next idea. But if I do I wonder if I’m cheating. And even if it’s not, should I even be asking AI to review my writing? How do I stop this urge?

Hello, friend. Thanks for writing in with this (especially tough) question.

I want to start things off by commiserating a little with you. Writing can occasionally be a very lonely and frustrating endeavor, especially if you feel that you don’t have a solid community surrounding you and your work. Sitting alone, day after day, plugging your words into a document can at times feel like a fruitless pursuit. We wonder if perhaps anyone will ever want to read our work. We despair that it might not speak to anyone. Worst of all, we can fool ourselves into believing that anyone else’s opinion on our writing matters more than actually sitting down and putting the proverbial pen to the page. At the end of the day, what matters most is that you like your work. You must care about it before anyone else will.

You do not need generative AI to give you story ideas. You do not need a robot to tell you whether your work is good.

What you’re describing here (aside from the AI, we’ll get to that) is a crisis of confidence. You don’t feel as though your work is solid and you need something to tell you that you’re on the right track. The problem with this, my friend, is that you’re stuck in a never-ending cycle. It’s a loop of unease, one that’s predicated on fear. It’s the dread that no one will understand you, sure, but mostly it’s the deep-down disquiet that churns in your gut; the cyclical question: what if my writing isn’t good enough?

But making art isn’t about perfection. I know that you understand this because you’ve written the answer to your problem inside your own question. The secret villain here isn’t AI. It’s the fact that you don’t trust yourself. You know that you shouldn’t use these platforms to generate work or creative ideas (to feed your work into, to ultimately get feedback that would not be remotely valuable), but you persist in doing it anyway because you are set upon sabotaging your future success.

You need to stop putting your work into these platforms, immediately. I could get up on a high horse and give you a million reasons why you should not ever, under any circumstances be doing this when it comes to the greater collective (theft of others work and effort and time, the fact that it depletes our natural resources). But I only need tell you that you are ruining your chance at creative happiness. It’s ruining your brain. I know this because it’s making you bleed joy. Your letter troubled me, friend. I worry that you have decided to just let go of all thought and let a computer think for you. That’s not what writing and passion and creativity is about. It’s not art. You do not need generative AI to give you story ideas. You do not need a robot to tell you whether your work is good. Only you can do that. Stop roadblocking your own writing life.

There are people and places you can reach out to that will give you this much needed sense of community. The writing world is robust and there are many of us out here writing together. Find a group, either in person or online, where you can share your fears and your ideas and your dreams. Jami Attenberg’s craft newsletter does this, and she has community spaces for 1000 Words that happen (at least) once a year. People find each other in these places. Trust that there are other writers (not generative AI programs) who will support you. Community is what you need. Not AI edits (which are unhelpful at best). Please know that you need not ever put your precious art into a machine and hope it’s going to give you something back better than you, a writer and artist, could make.

I’m rooting for you.

That one wore me out! I swear to God, ChatGPT is scarier than any goddamn horror movie. Let’s take another pull of wine, because I really need it, and roll onto our second caller:

2) I cannot stand book titles these days. It seems like every other contemporary novel has some really vague and maudlin title that gestures at empty sentimentality and grandeur without giving the reader the slightest guess as to what the book actually has going on. Lots of broad words like “beautiful,” “world,” “things,” etc. I’ve been compiling a list that you are free to edit or censor as you see fit. No offense is intended to any of these writers, surely there are at least four solid novels on here: 

[I censored all titles here—about twenty-plus of them—because I don’t wanna drag anyone’s work into this particular grievance; simply imagine some titles that might feature the words listed above and you’ve probably guessed right]

You see my point. Am I justified in hating this or is this just a skill issue on my part?

Howdy there! Wow, what a compilation (I’m a huge fan of many of the novels you offered up as examples here, by the way). But what you’re unhappy about isn’t the content of the books, it’s an issue with the titles themselves. So let’s dive into that!

Titles are tricky creatures. As someone who has published three novels myself, I would say that it’s not unusual for a book to get retitled mid-project (or even after it’s been picked up by an editor). This can happen for numerous reasons. It’s possible that the title was simply a placeholder. Perhaps the author or the publishing team feel as though that title no longer supports what the current iteration of the work is doing. And sometimes it just boils down to what is going to resonate to a search engine. Talking about SEO feels wild when we’re discussing craft and books, but quite often you’re competing with many other link clicks. Your publisher is hoping to circumvent that by coming up with a mix of words that will enable a higher search yield.

I understand what you’re saying about these kinds of vague titles, especially when it feels like it’s just a bunch of words smashed together. But what you’re describing is a phenomenon that’s been happening for years in the publishing industry. For instance, think back to when everyone was doing spoofs about titles that dealt with women in trains or in windows or in peril. Kristen Bell even did a movie about this trope (and I thought it was pretty funny, actually). It’s nothing new. This particular iteration just irks you for some reason.

And hey, we don’t need titles to tell us everything about a novel. I mean, seriously, how could they? One sentence or word can’t possibly convey the breadth of a 300-page book! But I’ll give you this one: it’s totally fine to feel grumpy about this kind of title (as long as you don’t say that directly to anyone who you listed here). Don’t worry, it’ll pass into something else soon enough. Maybe the next generation won’t be so annoying to you! Crossing my fingers.

Final pull of wine from our pumpkin stash, let’s see what’s going to close out our column today:

3) Is it Literary Asshole behavior to gossip about authors with other authors? I overheard some people at a recent open mic reading talking (loudly) about one of the poets. Then one of them got up to read immediately after! Don’t they have any shame?

This is a crime that many, many authors have committed in the past, will commit in the present, and will continue to commit far into the future. People love to gossip! And they sometimes like to be mean about it.

We can’t control how anyone behaves at readings (though god knows many of us wish we had that kind of superpower; if that were the case, we could stop people from perpetrating “this is more of a comment than a question” during the Q&A). Is it asshole behavior to talk (loudly) about a person who is performing? Yes, of course it is. But you knew that! I think the larger question here has to do with shame. You probably wonder if there’s a way to make people feel a sense of guilt over behaving that way in public. Perhaps. But the only people we have any control over are ourselves.

Rest assured that if this is a person who is going to multiple readings talking shit, they are inevitably getting that response back ten-fold. Nobody likes a person who’s cruel for no particular reason. If art is about community and showing up, then you truly show your ass if you’re being unkind to your fellow readers.

They might not feel any shame over it, but trust me on this one: karma will eventually catch them. And there’s satisfaction in that, I think.

And that’s all the time we have for today! Join me next time when I’m still probably drinking out of this rotted pumpkin? Gourds don’t hold up so well in all this Central Florida heat. And hey, please remember to send me your questions!

Spookily,
Dad

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Are you worried you’re the literary asshole? Ask Kristen via email at AskKristen@lithub.com, or anonymously here.