I can’t believe I live in a time that I have to say this, but I don’t want to read blog posts or work memos or marketing materials that are clearly written by AI. That the human behind the AI did not go in and add their own personality and remove the generic mediocrity. I cringe now at certain words and patterns because it’s obvious they come from Claude (“lands”, “matters”, “honest”). I look at LinkedIn and see posts that are so repetitive in their structure that the pattern can only be explained by AI (an intro of multiple one-sentence paragraphs in a row, followed by a couple of multi-sentence paragraphs).

I want to read words written by my fellow humans, from their hearts and minds, through the effort of trying to clearly express what it is they’re trying to communicate, because in that effort, they figure out what it is that they actually think and want to say.

It’s hard work to do this! It’s also rewarding. This year I’ve built a habit of journaling my thoughts after I read. I finished a story the other day, “New Shoes” by Hisham Matar, and was like, ugh, I don’t get it, I don’t have any thoughts about this, I’d rather go rummage around in the fridge than journal about it. But I made myself do it anyway, and as I journaled and puzzled my way through what I thought, I realized oh, actually this is really a kind of heartrending story about what it means to leave, and what it means to be left behind.

But how do you write what people actually want to read? It’s tempting in this AI age to say, “just write it yourself.” It’s obviously not that easy. It’s one thing to know what seems to resonate with readers, but it’s another thing entirely to know how to execute the writing of those things. When I think of what resonates for me, especially in my pleasure reading, I like interiority, vulnerability, thoughtfulness about our place in the world and the universe and in relation to each other. I like crisp sentences, precise vocabulary. I like humor and emotion, I like unsaid things. In my work reading, I want clarity: I want to know, “What should I take away from this? How does this move us forward? Who’s doing what as a result of this, and by when?” I don’t want to spend 15 minutes reading it and another 15 minutes trying to comprehend.

If I knew a secret formula for how to do any of those things, maybe I’d be a best selling novelist instead of a sometimes blogger, and maybe I wouldn’t still be saying at work, “I’m sorry this is so long.” I do know that for myself, the posts that seem to resonate most with readers are ones that are vulnerable, that grapple with mortality, or the struggles of creativity, or a small domestic thing that is an entry point into something larger. That are human.

Daily prompt: How do you write what people actually want to read?

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