I was in the Federal Detention Center in Oklahoma City for a couple weeks last month. Flying Con Air from a Central Florida prison to another gated community in Indiana. Hopefully my last time ever traveling with the feds. Miserable experience. Shackles, handcuffs, waist chain, black box. Impossible to eat, or scratch my ear, or blow my nose . . . But while in the holding cell, I overheard two young men discussing books.

“Man, that thing said ‘Sensational New York Times Bestseller’ and it was garbage!” one said. “I need to write a book.”

“It’s easy now,” his homeboy answered. “Between AI and talk-to-text, the books write themselves. All you gotta do is feed it an idea, pay somebody to design a badass cover, and then pump it on social media. Once it goes viral, you already know—instant millions.”

No shit. Instant millions? Who knew? 🙂

I really wanted to interject that I’ve been writing novels since 2011. Novels with badass covers and intricate plots, stories full of conflict and tension that I’ve poured my heart and soul into, plotlines that AI could never invent. Books that I’ve been pumping on social media since Obama was president. And so far . . . No millions. Instant or otherwise.

I used to fear AI. I even wrote about it in Letters to the Universe. Check out this excerpt:

Which leads me to this memoir, if that’s what this is, this collection of essays written over the last nine years at five different prisons. Hybrid memoir? It almost feels pretentious to be writing this at all. Like an unknown band putting out a greatest hits album. I guess in some ways I’m attempting to write my future into existence, that oak and acorn thing again. But with the tectonic plates of time shifting, and the great and terrible Artificial Intelligence cresting in the cosmos and on the verge of crashing into our planet like some digital tsunami, it’s beginning to feel like now or never. Pretty soon AI will be producing works that rival the masterpieces of men like David Foster Wallace and David Mitchell in a fraction of the time. The market will be flooded with synthetic brilliance and creativity. This is bad for established authors, but it’s horrible for unknown writers like myself.

Or is it?

Maybe there will be a backlash, a rage against the artificial machine. Maybe a pro-human movement will kick up like the Buy American response to all the outsourcing and offshoring of the early 2000s and usher in a new era. Maybe in this brave new world of computer-generated storytelling, the author’s backstory will inch to the forefront, and the story behind the stories will lend an authenticity to the overall reading experience. To cop David Mitchell yet again in this little rambling soliloquy, “Such elegant certainties comfort me at this quiet hour.”

But today, 1000 miles from home, 20 years and 8 books into this prison sentence, my mind keeps going back to those two young men in that Oklahoma holding cell. They were really just trying to figure out a route to get rich quick. A shortcut. That’s the American way, right? Can’t fault them for that. But is it really the American way? Nah. Maybe the American dream. Maybe . . . But upon further review, I think the American way is about hard work and sacrifice. Showing up every day, grinding through adversity, refusing to give up. If I would have known back when I first started writing Consider the Dragonfly that I would go on to produce 8 books while in prison and none of them would be bestsellers, I might’ve dropped my pen then and there.

What a colossal mistake that would have been.

Had I quit, or chased some shortcut by outsourcing all the work to a computer program in the pursuit of instant millions, I would have missed my blessing. I would have missed the transformational journey of all those hours logged, all those years of sweat and solitude, all that time spent writhing on the cell floor in search of the perfect word, hunting it like a piece of crack. Soul-sculpting, character-building years. And I would have missed the unparalleled exhilaration of writing “The End” on the final page of a long project, of slaying that dragon, of standing over it and growling “Rest in peace motherfucker” as Steven Pressfield says in his magisterial War of Art . . . then immediately starting the next one. AI could never replicate that.

The work is its own reward.

—November 18, 2024