Month: July 2026

Oh, I’m A Creative

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

Seven years writing, and I’ve only just realized that I’m in the arts.

The Professional

I began my writing career in a very peculiar place. I wrote star-trek style simulations for students. The stories were fit to purpose. We identified a target curriculum, then produced a story that drew in those elements to challenge a student’s understanding of the material. “Oh no, one of the six volcanoes in this area is going to explode! Collect evidence and determine which volcano is active so we can evacuate the local area.”

It wasn’t art, it was instructive. The creative elements were a delivery system for the educational applications. Sure, a graphics team created 3D videos and voice actors performed the dialog, but all that stuff felt more like a factory than an art studio. In a day, I’d spend an hour writing stories, and another seven discussing logistics, scheduling actors, receiving story feedback, providing graphical feedback, and reviewing classroom use. The team’s biggest concern wasn’t quality, but profitability.

The Playwright

The first thing I did when I left my job was write a stage play. Whenever I talked about the project, I called it ‘a piece of candy’. It was a silly story about a group of young adults who stole a priceless painting with no plan on how to sell it. It was a farce, it couldn’t possibly be art! That was how I justified it to myself. After the staged reading, I left the script to rot. To me, it wasn’t art, it was a fun way to entertain people.

The Genre Writer

A year ago I published my first book, The Human Countermove. You’d think physically selling the product of my own creative labor would be enough for me to recognize myself as an artist. It wasn’t. 

First, my novel was a science fiction, a genre piece, not art. It was inspired by my love of chess, how could something with a gaming origin be artistic? If the story resonated with audiences, it just meant I was doing my job. It  was the mechanical process of pulling the levers of human emotion. 

Breaking A Mental Block

It could be that I associated ‘art’ with awards, and I associated awards with the elites, and when I imagined my writing, I didn’t see myself as writing for elites. I even attended an event called ‘arts in the park’ and didn’t put it together.

Regardless, it was something benign that finally shattered the glass.

I filed my taxes.

In past years, I’ve always been able to list my job as ‘Software Engineer’. It was a useful box to put myself in. I was a coder with a fiction writing hobby.

This year that wasn’t an option. At the top of my 1040, I was forced to mark the option labelled ‘self-employed’. One line down, those damn taxmen forced me to identify myself as what I am. A novelist. I was a novelist.

A couple weeks later I was talking to one of my engineering friends. He asked me about my latest novel, the fool. As I described it, I made two realizations. One, it was super weird. And two, the message was core to the material. Market appeal hadn’t even occurred to me. I was writing the story because I wanted to tell it, because I wanted to see it in the world. I couldn’t escape the label anymore. I was making art.

Looking back, I had been making art from the start. My novel wasn’t just a sci-fi dystopia, it was a discussion about our relationship with technology and the modern world’s instinct to strip fulfillment from our lives. My ‘piece of candy’ stageplay explored the way a single painting could mean seven things to seven people. Even my old starship ed-tech stuff explored themes of overconsumption, greed, and good and evil.

Regardless of how I felt about the quality of my work, everything I had done was creative and contributed to society’s conversation of life and philosophy.

Capitalism Ruins Everything

As I look back on my avoidance of the ’artistic’ label, there’s one particular mental block that was harder to overcome than the rest. Every time I finished writing a story, I had to sell it.

If you ever ask an author how to sell a book, they’ll always tell you the same thing, “Push your writer brain out of the room and bring in the business brain”. In order to survive, I had to sell my work, and in order to sell my work, I had to reduce it to its most basic components. Content Type: Book, Genre: Dystopian Sci-fi, Audience: Fans of Chess, etc. etc.

When I write, I write from the heart. The day my writer brain finishes his writing, the business brain cuts the mental umbilical cord and sees the work through the eyes of a capitalist. Stories become content. Content becomes products. I wasn’t a writer, I was a content creator. I wasn’t a novelist, I just wrote books.

It’s only in the last few months that I’ve realized what I’ve been doing the whole time. The reason I pick the stories I pick is not because of their market appeal, it’s because I resonate with the message. I dabble and practice and experiment, not to produce a more appealing product, but to tell better stories.

Conclusion

If you’re in the creative field, you’re an artist. It’s easy to gatekeep. The capitalist world is eager to tell you that you aren’t artistic until you can make money from your work. The inherent danger in that attitude is that you reduce your work to its success financially, and what makes a bestseller is different from what makes a resonant story.

The topic of profitability is a regular guest at my writer’s group. I suspect the same is true of every writer’s group in the country. By limiting ourselves to a particular view of success, by refusing to allow ourselves the label of ‘artist’, we cut off what may be our most personal and most meaningful works.

Every writer I’ve ever met has been, to some degree, trying to express themselves through their storytelling. They are all artists. No one goes into it for the money. So how do we keep getting tricked into dropping the label and defining ourselves by the singularly reductive metric of ‘total sales’?

New Writers Are Learning With AI Training Wheels

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

I’ve been a part of my local writing chapter for a little over 5 years. It wasn’t long after I started that ChatGPT was released into the world. Being the tech person I am, I fiddled with it. I learned how to use it for work, then shared what I learned with my fellow writers. At the time, it was a novelty. There was a sense of looming doom whenever we discussed it, but that looming doom was in the distant future.

Boy the distant future came up quick.

An AI Priest

I don’t use AI in my writing. I don’t use it in my editing. Unfortunately, as a young person that wants to be able to maintain a career ten years from now, I am forced to regularly experiment with the new AI models and learn how they work. The knowledge that experimentation has given me made me the tech expert in every writer’s room. That expertise turned me into something I didn’t expect, a priest of sorts.

Last month, during one of my chapter’s write-ins, someone came up to me to discuss their own experiments with AI. They spoke in a hushed voice, slid the work to me like it was contraband, then asked my opinion on what it all meant. I felt like I was a priest in a confessional, giving absolution to the sinner. “No, you don’t have to be ashamed of a test.”, “Yes, your AI story is disqualified from the contest”, “I wouldn’t trust an AI on opinions of taste, but that’s just me.”

In the writing world, there’s a deep shame associated with using AI. The community, without saying it out loud, has quietly endorsed a system of exile for the AI writer. I understand the instinct. I learned how to write without AI, all the best writers in my chapter learned without AI. How could anyone using AI become a ‘real’ writer?

After five or six confessionals, I realized something. It wasn’t the experienced writers that were dabbling with AI. It was the rookies.

The Next Generation of Writers

Do you remember when you first started writing?

I remember it was really hard. My mind was brimming with ideas, but when my fingers reached the keyboard, I had to push my wondrous scenes through the meat grinder of the page. Everything got all messed up, it was never as beautiful as I envisioned, and sometimes the product was incomprehensible. I ended up shoving an entire novel through that meatgrinder, now I hide that novel away. Things only started working when I brought in a professional to guide me.

In games, they call it a difficulty curve. When the game is really hard, they call it a difficulty cliff. Learning to write well is a steep, steep mountain. Most of us that scaled that mountain have forgotten what it was like.

My step-father picked up writing last year. He had never written a story before that. He’s a very tech-savvy guy, so rather than climb the cliffs of storytelling, he wrote his stories using a tool. Novelmaker. In one week, the AI wrote six books.

You might recoil reading that number. Six books in one week. I would have too, except that I knew he’d never try to publish them. It wasn’t about the money, it wasn’t about the fame, it was an expression of his creativity. He wanted to see his ideas play out on the page.

He took a break after the sixth book. Since then he’s spoken to me about writing more, and about writing better. He’s taken an interest in the craft and he’s started to see the weaknesses of AI writing. In time, he might even write a few stories of his own. I think it’s wonderful.

Last year, I presented on AI again to my writing group. I warned them that five or six years from now, new writers would learn to write not by trying and failing, but by using AI to generate their first stories. My estimate was wrong. It wasn’t five or six years, it was twelve months.

Half the new writers in my writing group have dabbled with AI. Some have asked for ChatGPT’s opinion on their work. Some have generated entire stories using it. I’m not talking about seventeen year olds that were raised on AI, either. These are adults entering the writing space using AI from the get-go.

The difficulty cliff in writing is too steep for newcomers. AI has softened the experience. On the one hand, it means there’s a glut of terrible writing. On the other hand, it means more writers are discovering their voice than ever before.

Gatekeeping Will Kill Communities

Every person is entitled to their opinion, especially on a topic as controversial as AI. It’s a values-based decision, and each of us has their own set of values. Some people think using AI for anything at all means you’ve violated some unspoken code of conduct. Some people think generating a book that’s a paraphrased copy of a different book is good business. The truth has to lie somewhere in between.

It’s okay for each person to draw personal boundaries. Personally, I’d never use AI to generate or edit my works. I think we get into trouble when we start drawing lines for others. New writers don’t ask for feedback on a one-page story that’s horribly written anymore. They show up with a ten-page story that’s bloated with filler words and ChatGPT cliches. It won’t be long before all prospective writers begin their journey using AI. As a community, we can’t just show those people the door.

That doesn’t mean we start allowing AI-generated stories to be submitted to our anthologies. It doesn’t mean we don’t point out that a story was AI-assisted. It just means we must continue to be welcoming to newcomers, no matter how they got into the art. When it becomes hard to empathize, I imagine a teen posting a forum: All the stories I’ve ever written were created with AI, I don’t feel like I’m a real writer. How do I get better?

Compassion and patience are the answers. From what I’ve seen as an accidental Writer-Priest, AI writing is like training wheels. Once a rookie learns to pedal, they’ll be eager to go without.