The thing about my writing is that I grew up holding myself to this impossibly high standard of quality. I wanted to be a "real writer" so I pushed myself hard to develop excellent prose, insightful dialogue, dynamic pacing, a rich vocabulary etc etc. And all of that is great, except the "practice" never made me feel confident enough to finish a work and see it through. I would see somebody else's published novel blowing my abilities our of the water, or I would look back on the beginning of a current work and become frustrated with it, then I would scrap it and start over. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it as well as possible.
And now people use generative AI to squeeze out a slop and shamelessly publish legions of soulless works everywhere all the time. Books, fanfics, essays, all of it -- invaded by AI.
So now I think I don't want my writing to be perfect. Yeah, I'll always hold myself to the standard of "doing the best I could at the time", but what's the sense in making myself miserable trying to create something that has no mistakes? When I'm allowed to be human and flawed instead? SHOULD be human and flawed! I AM human and flawed!
Maybe the real problem is that I used to want to write so I could achieve a goal that involved other people being impressed by what I could do. But in this world of smoke and mirrors, the greatest accomplishment I can hope to work towards is writing something that makes me proud of myself and my efforts in the craft. It's a victory I win from myself.
That's a feeling AI will never be able to give you, btw.
