These days I brace myself when I begin to scroll through social media. Most of what I find are authors supporting other authors and obviously I love these, but there is always at least one controversy that steals the show.

Today it is the “writers who don’t embrace AI are going to be left behind” fight.

Now.

Normally I try to temper my words. I dislike making anyone feel poorly about themselves because our world is a trash fire and they absolutely do not need me pouring gasoline on their personal lives.

Today I simply cannot hold back.

If you utilize AI for any part of your writing journey – outlining, drafting and what have you – you are NOT a writer. You are not writing. You just aren’t.

Writers bleed onto the page. We shut the door on the rest of the world, open the notebook (computer, word processor, whatever works for the individual) and delve into our humanity. We ask ourselves why the world is the way that it is, we fight to understand it and seek some glimmer of hope for the darkest moments in life.

Writing is not about the book. It never was.

Writing is about the struggle to understand what it means to be human. Yes, even romance novels do this. In between all the scenes that make you blush, there is a very real conversation about what human relationships look like, what works and what doesn’t, and how we become better people because of them.

Writing is not about the sales. It never was.

Writing is about sharing what you learned in the middle of the struggle to tell this story. If you have not struggled to understand, if you have input a few commands into an AI to get it to spit out a copy-cat of a novel that a thousand other REAL writers already released into the world, you are missing the whole point of the writing journey.

You are not racing against other writers if you are using AI. You are racing against a technology that has learned to mimic humans. Worst of all, you are not growing as a human being.

Because at the end of the day, writing is about confronting ourselves, learning from what see there, and sharing it with the world.

If you want to write a book, then do the work. Shut the door. Turn off the internet. Learn something about yourself, your relationships, and what life has made you.

Until you do, we aren’t running the same race.