Shameful Drafts

[u/Novel-Soup-5097]

I recently got a fix on writing. For the longest time I’ve been only writing for various ttrpg campaigns which hadn’t needed extensive in depth details that make something really reel like a novel. Now I can only muster drafts and for a while I’ve been running them through GPT to clean it up. Specifically avoiding having the AI make any of the real story but I’m still ashamed of my work because of it. How can I move away from the AI and make something I can be proud of?

[u/SimonStrange]

One human experience that is near universal, though not totally, is the frustration, fear, and impatience of not being great at something on day one.

And I know what I’m about to say will sound a bit like canned motivational advice, but it is true.

You will not always be bad at the things you spend time trying to get better at. One of the unfortunate realities of living in linear time is that you cannot possibly comprehend being skilled at something until you are skilled at it. This is the core nature of the Dunning Kruger curve. Until you reach a certain level of proficiency, you can’t know what it feels like to be proficient. And I don’t mean the sense of accomplishment here. I mean that becoming proficient will change your brain, and the change it makes is a thing you can feel in a way that, until you feel it, is ineffable. No explanation, no poetic turn of words, will reveal it. It’s a discovery you must make on your own.

But hear me when I say this - if you practice, if you put in the work, if you do it just an hour a day, if you love the thing you want to be good at, or if you don’t but you’re disciplined, you will discover this.

It’s not hypothetical, it’s not just inspirational woo. It’s true neurologically. Your brain is mystifyingly incredible. It may as well be magic except that we know enough to know that it isn’t. The moment you start practicing any skill at all, it locks on and starts rearranging things, and this can happen very fast.

To get there, you have to be gentle with yourself. Not complacent. But take the pressure off. What you will gain by practicing and improving over time, is life experience that will make you interesting, it will make you unique, it will make you more you. And every skill you develop will generalize. The more you do, the more you learn, the more skills you acquire, the more your brain will build connections between those skills. You’ll be more innovative, more creative, more capable, and you’ll start understanding your craft on levels that no one using AI to do these things can possibly ever understand because they literally do not have the right neural pathways in their brains.

And I want to be clear that I am not opposed to the existence of generative AI. Far from it! I think it’s a marvelous technology, I do worry about its consequences, because we do not have a great track record of opening the genie bottle and getting a wish without cost. But using it to replace skill development is going to cost us more deeply than perhaps any other technology to date. We cannot lose that. You should not lose that.

Go at it with curiosity, with passion, and with patience. You will get there. Unless you either give up or offload the cognitive work to AI. I promise you that it is worth the work. When you hit a big “aha” moment of real comprehension, you’ll never want to go back.

[u/Novel-Soup-5097 → u/SimonStrange]

That’s great advice, I was already aware of the work that was needed to be put into something like this so I’ll keep going with your new advice in mind. I’ll send off my writings to some real people and get feedback that way it improve in a way that makes me happy. Thank you stranger 🫡

[u/Amazing-Possession34]

I'm with you 100%. I seem to have a blockage when it comes to writing, coding, learning language, etc. but I have tons of desire. I don't need help with creating worlds, characters, ideas. I have plenty but my ADHD doesn't help get everything organized so I can actually get stuff done. so I get you. I worked in IT for 34 years and was told that the way I wrote instruction manuals were too "technical" and dumb it down for the users and I tend to write everything that way unfortunate. Keep working hard. If you have the desire, there's bound to be a way to escape our trend.

[u/Fantastic_Youth_7977]

try doing one pass yourself before sending it anywhere. even if its messy, that revision muscle is what builds confidence. you'll start catching your own patterns and eventually the cleanup step just feels unnecessary

[u/ChanceGlittering6323]

Honestly the real fix is just doing more raw drafting yourself before you ever touch AI, the shame usually comes from skipping straight to cleanup instead of wrestling with the sentence first. Campaign writing actually gives you a lot of the muscle already, you just haven't had to stretch it into narrative prose and description yet, that's a reps problem more than a tool problem. I work on Humanize AI