Humans have always been fascinated with rainbows, yet these days it seems AI rainbows are uniquely alluring. Rainbows lead to that magical pot of gold, right? Even as an adult, I can’t help but see a rainbow and muse over treasure at the end. It is one of those stories that can get so ingrained in a culture, that it almost runs as a subroutine in our brains.

Like when your palm itches and you think about money. Or you hesitate and walk around a ladder instead of under it. The way you might flinch when cracking a mirror. Seven years of bad luck.

While these might be silly superstitions, we’d be naive to believe we’re immune from their influence…or the childlike hope of easy treasure.

We have been down this path before many times with different rainbows: the internet, websites, social media, Facebook fan pages, self-publishing, etc. We’re not immune to the lure of easy treasure…and right now, the shiniest rainbow is labeled “AI”.

The “AI Rainbows” Distraction

Might as well begin with pointing out the ugly truth. To be really excellent at any skill, one has to suffer. We humans, deep down, don’t respect what took nothing to learn, create, or do.

It reminds me of a debate I was having with Spawn (teenage son) about the movie The Matrix. All of us were wowed at the superhuman feats one could “learn” in that movie with just a flash drive plugged into your HEAD. Need to know Kung Fu? Don’t have a couple decades to haul water up the stairs to some monastery while the master hits you with sticks?

No problem. Let’s just give this a download….

I extended the logic with Spawn, though. While this idea of “instant skill” might be novel and exciting initially, what it steals is far more insidious. What if tomorrow, I could download how to play masterful piano? Who really would want to listen to me play? Or come to a concert? Buy my music? Seems to me they’d all be busy pushing their own new and shiny skills in similar fashion.

For a while.

Then it would all feel hollow, empty, cheap, and a lot like…cheating.

How long would I stick to playing piano? What takes nothing to “master” also takes nothing to “dismiss.” How quickly would I grow bored with my new and “perfect” piano skills?

***The same skills everyone else with that “piano mastery brain download” have, too.

It took me years of reading, writing, learning, practicing, sacrificing and showing up day after day even when I didn’t feel like it to hone my skills. Yes, AI can outline faster, organize faster, can even WRITE FOR ME! But why would I do that? Unused muscles either never develop or, if developed, will atrophy from disuse.

The AI rainbow is alluring but so were the sirens’ songs, and where, exactly was that song leading those sailors?

AI Rainbows & Fool’s Gold Fallacy

I have personally witnessed a MASSIVE shift in the quality of writing in the past ten years. With all the digital tools rainbows we have, the easy access to research, spell check, and grammar check, one should expect overall quality to improve. Yet, we are seeing the opposite. Unwatchable movies, unreadable books, soulless art, music without that human spark.

Do we need to mention the McDonald’s Christmas commercial that used ONLY AI? Yes, yes we do.

I’ll admit the Digital Age has been to blame for feeding this monster, especially once social media became such a cornerstone for relevance and market advantage. The relentless demand for more content, fresh content, relevant content to “captivate” audiences has chained many creatives to Hell’s Treadmill.

Companies are falling for this as well, which is why they’re leaning far too heavily on AI. AI can be controlled, monitored and writers become interchangeable pieces on a Monopoly board. Easy to plug in, duplicate and keep on a leash. Same for all creatives. Writers are picky, actors are divas, and artists are moody. Most inconveniently?

They expect to actually be PAID for what they do.

*clutching pearls*

Thus, in another staggering move to “increase profits” and “save money” companies are increasingly outsourcing to AI generated content. Content that is supposed to be bold, edgy, creative, compelling…and just happens to look, sound and feel just as “unique” as all the other “unique” content.

When everyone is special, then no one is, which was the point we explored in the last post, Counterfeit Creativity: The High Cost of Cheap Art.

Writers Who Know How to MINE

Mining is a mixture of skill, courage, tenacity, wisdom, and flat out insanity. It is a lot of tedium, toil, work, and thankless pain. Writing, like mining for anything, requires patience, endurance, innovation, and passion. But, last I checked, those weren’t for SALE.

Yet, what do we know about all “gold rushes”? Who gets rich? The ones wielding shovels or those selling shovels? Prospectors rarely struck it rich. Winners sold to the miners. BIG WINNERS (snakes) sold to those who liked the idea of being rich more than the work involved.

Whether it was reselling spent plots, phony maps, or sure-fire tricks to STRIKE IT RICH, it didn’t matter. There was always a naive/gullible market ready to throw their own gold down to skip the hard parts…and a snake to take their money.

It’s human nature.

Fast-forward to today, and AI companies, prompt gurus, “millionaire author” courses, content mills, “authentic human author” certifications. They’re the shovel-sellers. They profit off the rush without digging themselves.

But here’s where the metaphor flips in our favor. In every gold rush, a few stubborn diggers hit pay dirt. Over time, tests and failures, they eventually became experts at terrain and geology. Skilled prospectors learned invaluable tells that could lead to larger, richer strikes.

They learned to spot “tells” (signs in the geology/terrain like quartz veins, color changes in soil, or river bends that trap gold). Writers—masterful writers—do something similar. We notice the patterns, the trauma, the unevenness and how that all guides the way to the REAL story.

In my opinion, AI’s fixation on “perfect” is one of the biggest flaws in the system. Humans are messy, ugly, irrational, emotional, unpredictable and illogical, which—ironically—are all the ingredients of AMAZING WRITING!

AI is the CZ of our time. Flawless! Perfect! But still just a fancy piece of glass.

All Writers Should Be Wary of AI Rainbows

We have seen this play out time and time again. Whenever we invent a tool to make something better, faster, cheaper, easier, there is always, always a cost. We have film students in COLLEGE who cannot sit through a full-length movie, writers who never read, and Amazon and the internet is drowning us in AI slop.

Why?

Again, humans will always choose novelty and the path of least resistance (at least for a while).

Did spellcheck make a generation of better spellers? Nope. It masked errors so well that many never internalized rules—kids lean on it, brains skip the muscle-building, and we end up with adults who can’t spell.

Did grammar check transform us all into a society that understood the complexities of sentence structure and subject-verb agreement? Hardly. It fixes surface stuff on the fly, but deep grammar knowledge? The knowledge that allows a writer to wield grammar as another tool is something only a LOT of reading, studying and practice can train.

POV is an incredible tool. Why choose first-person, or third or even second? What emotional effect are we going for? In Caroline Kepnes’ You, she selected second-person POV which is almost never used…ever. Yet, when placed in a story told from the stalker’s perspective? Chilling.

T. Jefferson Parker broke with tradition and told the antagonist’s POV through first-person and Charlie Hood’s (the investigator) in third. Why? Because Jeff wanted the reader to bond emotionally with the antagonist to demonstrate the emotional complexity of the topic. There is no clean black and white and good and bad. Just messy, flawed humans doing the best the can when the deck is stacked against them.

That’s the magic AI can’t replicate. It can spit out “correct” prose, but it can’t feel the weight of those choices. It can’t draw from lived chaos to make a story resonate. The cost of chasing “perfect” shortcuts? We lose the very mess that makes writing human—and worth reading.

Keep Those Mining Skills Sharp

Tools in and of themselves can only do so much. Slight tangent but makes my point. I used to LOVE watching home improvement shows that demonstrated ways to decorate for super cheap. Initially, I was mesmerized. They did ALL THAT for under $1000! Then I realized it was a thousand dollars in supplies.

That money didn’t cover the saws, drills, guns, welds OR the SKILL to use any of those. When one hires a contractor, we aren’t hiring the table saw, rather the artisan who can use that saw masterfully. I mean I can use a table saw. Can watch a video. Most have guards that will mostly keep my fingers in tact…but I have zero skills.

I am far more likely to make a mess massacre than a masterpiece.

Same in writing.

While AI rainbows are pretty, what they lead to? Not all that glitters is gold.

Right now? I feel we are living this meme from Fight Club. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. Remember, earlier I stated that humans initially love novelty and convenience? That love wears thin super quick and the shine is already dimming.

There are no shortcuts and we’d all be wise to just leave the AI rainbows where they belong…on Lisa Frank Trapper Keepers.

What are YOUR Thoughts on AI Rainbows?

I know today is St. Patrick’s and we all want a bit of luck, but luck alone has never been enough without the skills to take advantage of opportunity.

How do you feel about what AI is doing to us skill-wise? Are new writers failing to mature and dig deeper because of the quick thrill of “perfectly packaged prose”? If they are “training” on recycled content, how valuable is the training? Are the younger generations of content creators driven by a desire to create meaningful art and expression or the need for a quick dopamine fix?

Is AI unwittingly eroding the very character traits necessary for great artists (Eg. tenacity)?

For writers who have been here more than a minute, are you concerned that your skills will erode? Do you find yourself constantly second-guessing skills you’ve used for years? Or does that compel you to train even harder to stand apart from the crowd?

For a profession that seems to UNIQUELY SUFFER from Imposter Syndrome, do you think AI only makes this feeling worse? It was bad when everyone assumed every published author was self-published, but at least they didn’t think a ROBOT wrote it. How does this make you feel? The shift of bad writing must be human and good writing must be AI.

I’d like your thoughts!

The post Chasing AI Rainbows & Fool’s Gold: Real Writers Know How to DIG appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Choice is a word we bandy about a lot in modern times, especially in catchy little “thought-leader” quotes on social media. Over the weekend, someone posted this little nugget of wisdom:

Some uncomfortable math:

Your bank account is a record of your decisions

Your body is a record of your habits

Your relationships are a record of your priorities

None of this is luck. All of this is compounding.

Social Media Know-It-All I Shan’t Name

IMO, this post isn’t about “uncomfortable math,” it’s moral laundering. Decisions don’t exist in a vacuum. Systems, illness, caretaking, instability and plain bad frigging luck all shape the ledger. This is true in life, but even more true in fiction.

See, the weird thing about choice, is it is an inherently human conundrum. Unlike animals guided solely by instinct, we humans possess the concept of a “self.”

We have an ego or id or whatever it is that makes us apex drama queens. It is that conscious self that permits self-reflection, which I am a huge fan of…so long as we at least flirt with a little bit of reality.

Life is not binary or clearly marked with signage.

I get why folks post these passive-aggressive snipes labeled “life lessons.” With a surface read, they feel true.

It’s easy to get folks clapping like seals, heads bobbing as if they’ve ever faced a binary world in their lives. Life is virtually never a choice between one terrible, stupid, reckless option versus the sane, level-headed, adult one.

I’d even venture to say that 99% of life is choosing the least crappy decision out of a list of horrible options while gambling the fallout is something we can handle.

Ideally later.

If LIFE is life like this, and fiction is really LIFE in distillate, what kind of choice are you offering your characters?

NO Choice

If you want to know how professional writers turn out a book or two or ten a year? Whether they’re a plotter, pantser or something in between, they understand story structure.

Deeply.

If we pan back and look at what great storytelling is, it is all about choice. And our characters must have agency. Pretty words alone are not enough. No reader is solely there for our decision to use “cerulean” instead of “blue”. They want a story with stakes.

Big ones.

If our characters keep going from thing to thing and place to place out of no volition of their own? They’re not a character. They’re flotsam. Maybe jetsam. Depends on whether we threw our character overboard or churned them up from the sea bed.

What choice did your character make to get where they are?

Choices are Rarely Obvious or Simple

If this is true in life, then why the hell are we holding the reader’s hands and taking away the very reason they want to read fiction?

First, let’s pause a brief minute and ponder a half a minute as to why anyone, in a world with TikTok and Netflix, would want to read your book? Or mine? Reading is hard, brain intensive and requires focused concentration.

So why are people reading?

For the same reason we hop on roller coasters. We want a safe place for catharsis. To teeter at the edge of the abyss…while strapped in safely in a seat that’s passed nine hundred separate inspections. Yet, don’t we also forget that while we are on the ride believing we’ll surely DIE?

Our audience already understands how life works because—DUH—they’re living one. They also smell bull sprinkles from a mile away. Sure, maybe there are some genres where there is a bit more coddling. I’m not going to pretend that The Baby-Sitters Club has anything remotely in common with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as far as genre and tone. But what do they both actually share?

CHOICES.

Sticky ones.

If I can give y’all any writing advice at all, it’s this. Learn to be hard on your characters. Then get harder and meaner. Hurl everything they believe they love through the metaphorical wood chipper, or (like Fargo) an actual one.

Choice should never be binary, A or B? It needs to be A, B, C left town, D is shacking up with Q, and S wants child support for X, Y & Z.

Life and Fiction is About Sticky Compromise

How many times in life do we get a break? Really? As in real, breathing people? Life is just one decision after another and that has only gotten exponentially worse in the Information Age.

We actually now have a word for the crappy way we feel at the end of the day, when we will happily eat cereal for dinner because we’re cooked (well done, of course).

Decision fatigue.

Do you think people get decision fatigue because life is a pretty path of petals?

Send the email now or wait and hope for better options? Fix the AC or get a new washer and dryer? Tell your partner you love them but also if they don’t stop snoring you might have to find an awesome expensive defense attorney?

Nothing easy.

Ever.

And that is life, not fiction. In stories the problems are grand, stakes are massive, failure is not an option.

In life, problems are grand, stakes are massive, and we experience actual failure all the frigging time. We don’t find true love, land the dream job, take out the evil HR Empire. This is why we read fiction. Messy but with a satisfactory ending…not some fresh toke on a fire hose.

Enjoy the RIDE!

With rollercoasters, have all the twists and turns you want, but design must play along with the laws of physics or things go terribly wrong.

Same in stories.

Additionally, just like rides have a clear beginning and clear destination, so should our stories. It’s the how we take the rider reader from beginning to the end that makes all the difference.

Which is weird because most of the time, we know how stories will end, don’t we? Well, kind of. We know the good guys will likely win, just aren’t exactly sure how. And that is what makes us tense, where we storytellers can strip away control.

How many of you sat at the edge of your seats when Frodo and Samwise finally stepped into Mordor? Did you worry when the spider tried to make Frodo into a snack? Wonder if Samwise would get there in time? I mean actually worry?

No.

WHY?

We “worried”, sure. Yet we all knew on some level they’d be successful (unlike life). If Tolkien had just let everyone fail pointlessly to illustrate some existential morass…we’d have Russian Lit. If they made that into a movie—once the reader revolts subsided—we wouldn’t have one of the most iconic movies of the modern age.

We’d have a French film.

And everyone died. The end.

Yet, somehow Tolkien threaded between Dostoevsky and Sundance’s latest rave and gave audiences movies they never tire of rewatching even though we all know the Ring is destroyed. How did Tolkien/Peter Jackson manage this tension?

Choice.

Or rather, the illusion of having one.

See this is where choices—particularly messy choices—make the difference. Once our story starts becoming predictable, we leave a nice convenient place to put a bookmark.

In our business, BOOKMARKS=DEATH.

Never, ever leave a logical place to stop reading your stories. The only acceptable place to leave your story needs to be at the end, when the reader is giddy, breathless, shaken and can’t wait to do it again.

Now Use Your AI

Obviously, this is a personal decision. Once you have your log-line (your story in ONE sentence), feel free to riff from there. Though I, personally, don’t like outlining every detail of my story, I do begin with at least a general idea where I’m going.

This starts truncating choices from there into an increasingly narrower decision tree.

We let the reader “know” a vague idea of how our story ends (true love, happily for now, business saved, family restored, babysitter club in tact, justice served); we just don’t explain how we intend on getting them there.

Every scene begins with a GOAL (external or internal). In the scene, there are three options: win, lose, draw.

Our MC should get hammered most of the book (mostly lose and draw with a rare win), but this is where we need to be careful. This is where sticky choices can help. Messy “good enough considering” choices keep our characters out of The Land of Too Stupid to Live.

Instead of obvious good and bad choices, we should mirror life, then amplify the hell out of it.

AI can actually be an excellent soundboard. When your MC hits a choke (choice) point, what is the obvious good decision? Now scrap that. Also the obvious bad one. Brainstorm until you drill down into maybe the MC’s third or tenth choice.

If we get the reader’s the adrenaline pumping, that’s awesome because stress narrows focus. They might “see” the first couple sane options but if we dig down and serve up the less obvious? It won’t make sense until after the ride is over.

And retrospectively, they’ll see it wasn’t merely brilliant but inevitable, which is why they’ll tell all their friends and preorder our next book.

Stories Have a Clear Finish Line (Ending)

So does life, but that is beyond the scope of this blog. I want y’all to imagine your reader. Then answer WHY your book? Why spend limited money and time they don’t believe they have to engage in an activity most people rate alongside doing their taxes?

Most people don’t read because they believe reading is boring. But, for those who do read or who will read…WHY?

We have desires that may or may not come to fruition in life. Stories offer a place where the underdog wins, right and wrong matter, characters defy all the odds and WIN. Stories give us respite from reality long enough to reignite what makes us utterly human.

Belief.

What Are Your Thoughts?

I LOVE hearing from you!

What choice in your story scares you to make, and why?

Where in your current project is your character avoiding the hardest decision, even though it’s the one that would change everything?

Have you ever realized mid-draft that your character had no real agency—just motion? If so, what did you change to fix it?

What’s the messiest, least satisfying choice you’ve forced a character to make, and how did it affect the story?

Have you ever used AI to brainstorm story decisions or turning points? Did it help you uncover a less obvious option you hadn’t considered?

The post Why Choice—Not Talent—Drives Great Stories appeared first on Kristen Lamb.