Series: AI Ain’t Magic — What It Can and Can’t Do
Every week another ad pops up promising Joe Everyman he can “write a bestseller in 7 days with AI.” Just push a button, let the machine crank out 60,000 words, and wait for the Hollywood offers to roll in.
Bullshit.
Writing a novel isn’t just stringing sentences together. It’s building worlds, weaving plots, and knowing the human condition well enough to make strangers care. James Clavell didn’t create Shōgun because he typed “samurai romance” into a box. He lived in Asia, absorbed the culture, and sweated over the history. John Grisham didn’t crank out The Firm by algorithm—he practiced law, sat in courtrooms, and knew how power and corruption really worked.
What AI Can Help With
- Drafts fast: summaries, outlines, filler text.
- Style mimicry: “Grisham-like” pacing without the courtroom scars.
- Brainstorming: twists and arcs that still need a human heart.
Without the scars of experience, AI fiction is paint-by-numbers storytelling.
Libraries, Paperbacks, and Real Learning
When I was a kid in Missouri, the library was my ammo dump. I could walk in, check out an armful of books, and disappear into other worlds. That’s how I hit my million-word mark. That’s how I learned vocabulary, pacing, and storytelling.
But here in the Philippines? No public libraries. Bookstores are rare. Amazon shipping costs more than the book itself. I miss that freedom terribly. And I’ll tell you something else: I’ve never been a Kindle guy. Most ebooks cost $14.95 and up—and when you’re done, then what? No swap clubs. No used-book stores. No dog-eared paperback to hand a buddy.
A paperback sits on your shelf. It carries weight, smell, history. You can reread it, underline it, pass it down, or just admire the stack as proof you’ve walked through a hundred worlds. A Kindle file can’t give you that.
Maybe that’s the danger of AI, too: disposable content, churned by the gigabyte, read once and forgotten. Meanwhile Shōgun and The Firm still sit on shelves, get reread, and spark conversations decades later. That’s the difference between soul and software.
The Librarian Anecdote
I watched a man-on-the-street interview once where people were asked: “What’s the last book you read?” Most stumbled. One lady hemmed and hawed and couldn’t name a single book. The kicker? She was a librarian. That floored me.
If you ask me, I can rattle off a list without breaking stride. For years I kept books in every room—bathroom, den, bedroom. Pick one up, keep going, no sweat. People made fun of me for reading so much. I didn’t care. Books passed the time on long flights, calmed me in waiting rooms, kept me company in the shop. And I didn’t just read—I learned. I underlined biographies, novels, self-help, and nonfiction. Books gave me things I’d never know otherwise.
AI as Navigator, Not Author
My mother read to me in a rocker and made me look up words myself: “If you don’t do it yourself, you won’t learn it.” That foundation stayed with me. I admired my uncle Jack, a Marine and feature writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I read a million words and then some. So today, yes, I write with ChatGPT riding shotgun—but the imagination, discipline, and scars are mine.
Books and Movies
Here’s one last thought. A lot of great books get adapted into movies. My rule of thumb: watch the movie first—you can knock it out in 90 minutes. The book takes longer and always has more detail. Most of the time, the book wins. But sometimes the film rises to the occasion—To Kill a Mockingbird and Grisham’s The Rainmaker come to mind. They captured the essence, the weight, the heart.
Even then, the depth comes from the book. The film can hint at it, but the book makes you live it. That’s something AI-pumped fiction will never give you: a story worth filming, worth retelling, worth remembering.
Prediction
AI will flood Amazon with cookie-cutter thrillers and knockoff “historical epics” nobody remembers six months later. The novels that last—the ones that pull you in like Shōgun or keep you up past midnight like The Pelican Brief—will still come from writers who’ve lived enough life to tell the tale.
So no, Joe. AI won’t make you the next Clavell or Grisham. It can only make you the next guy with 99¢ Kindle spam that nobody reads.