Write Out Loud (Reviews and Writing)

I woke up today and went to my Twitter app (it’s not X, Elon, it’s Twitter). There I saw a post asking about NaNoWriMo and whether or not it’s any good. Innocently, I replied, telling the truth: I like NaNo and used it to write two of my books. I may well use it this year to power through a WIP I am trying to write and failing to find time for. I was introduced to the annual National November Writing Month by a friend from my teen years who just happened to become a huge bestselling crime author just as I was getting into writing myself and told me she’d written her first bestseller using the competition.

She was also the one who told me Twitter was the best thing in the world for connecting with agents, publishers and ‘those in the know’ in the publishing world. She was right about NaNo but not about Twitter – for me anyway. I’m there for the kicks only.

I quickly found Twitter to be a cesspit of all that is vile about humanity. My original twitter handle ( @DKenPowell ) is still in use but you’ll find there that I am repugnant. I will swear like a trooper and call people morons and various nasties. Those people will inevitably be either:

a) right wing racists,

b) sexists,

c) horrible to someone for no good reason or

d) all of the above

I have no time for idiots who are just horrible to people or about people and won’t try to reason with them. I just call them dicks and happily wind them up for a while until I fear they will indeed be purple gammons and burst a blood vessel in their neck.

But.

That’s a dark place to go and I don’t like it. After the 2019 UK election, I found myself despairing of people and very much withdrew. The algorithms for my Twitter feed just filled with goading material and I had to make a change. So instead of interacting with the gammons, I started blocking instead. I blocked everybody remotely offensive. Gradually, my feed has become nicer. I still get political news via the more left-wing socialist peeps I follow (Twitter was always best for giving me the real news days before the BBC and other traditional news outlets would start covering it) but I get less of the dregs of humanity.

Still, it is all very murky and, of course, you can view my tweets going back way more than a decade and some of them are just horrible. I’m not ashamed of them, and I stand by every word, but they’re not nice reading.

So last year I made a new handle ( @kendkpowell ) specifically just for writing purposes. There I write about writing, I support writers, I answer interesting questions about writing that writers ask. I avoid politics. I avoid anything that is going to cause a fuss or annoy people. It’s a nice place. We’re kind to each other, supportive, encouraging. It’s a much nicer place than that gate of hell I came from.

And then today happened.

After innocently answering the question about NaNo, my feed filled with various writers – many of whom I don’t even follow, so God knows why I’m getting them on my feed – spilling the kind of bilge and ire I used to see on my political feed: all about NaNo.

It would appear that the organisers of NaNo have put out a statement saying they have no issue with writers using AI and don’t condemn any approach to writing. Specifically they said the following:

The writing world is in uproar about this. Everyone is now obliged to ‘hate’ NaNo, apparently.

For what it is worth, I’m 100% behind NaNo on this.

Firstly, it’s not even a proper competition. There’s no ‘prize’ for getting your book written in first draft in 30 days (the entire intention of the annual event). It’s a tool to help motivate you to write 1000+ words per day. It isn’t for everyone. I quite like it. I used it for both the Old Man on the Beach and The Pukur (which was my first one, actually). I used it for editing my newest book, which is now almost finished. I’m seriously considering using it this year for my latest book which I struggling to find time to write. You’re not ‘cheating’ if you use AI.

What’s more, if you want to use AI, you’re going to use it even if you don’t use NANO! Who would know? Your manuscript will always, always be judged by agents, publishers and readers by the quality of the writing. If you generate the whole thing with AI, you’re almost certainly going to get poor quality. It just isn’t that good yet. You’re not being unfair to anyone else. I could get AI to write 200,000 words right now, in seconds. I still won’t get it published. No one is going to read it.

But AI IS good at helping you to write. It can correct ( we all use spellcheck), write prompts, give you paragraph ideas, help you rephrase passages better and so on. It’s just a tool. That’s it. That’s the takeaway. It’s a tool.

NaNo are quite right to say that banning a tool is ableist and classist. For some people, using AI is a godsend. For myself, I’d love to use it but I can’t figure out how to make it do anything for me. Every time I try ChatGPT or similar, it comes up with, at best, the same a Google search would give me and, at worst, utter gibberish. But for others who know how to use it (and are probably much younger than me!) it can help those who would otherwise struggle to write anything at all.

If it’s not for you, then don’t use it. Simples. It doesn’t mean that you have to censor NaNo in some indignant rage and call it names on Twitter. I’m reminded of the fact that one hundred years or so ago, there were mass demonstrations against the telephone – people feared it would lead to degeneracy. There were even books telling housewives now to answer the phone in their house before getting dressed. It was a moral panic that now we look on as cute. The rage against AI is exactly the same. Everyone just hopping on the same bandwagon.

Now, I could go and reply to all those tweets and say all this there, end up in fights and get blocked by writers who, up until now, had seemed perfectly nice people (although, lets face it, all us writers are pretty odd so it shouldn’t be a surprise to find we go off-piste sometimes). But instead, in order to preserve some senses of peace in this particular Twitter world, I’m writing my views here. This is where I take my stance and this is the hill I die on.

Of course, once I’ve published this, I’m going to tweet the feck out of this.

Let battle commence (send in the machines).

You can buy me a coffee if you like! More accurately, you can help support my work either as a one off or monthly if you really want to show your love…

Social Entrepreneur, educationalist, bestselling author and journalist, D K Powell is the author of the bestselling collection of literary short stories “The Old Man on the Beach“. His first book, ‘Sonali’ is a photo-memoir journal of life in Bangladesh and has been highly praised by the Bangladeshi diaspora worldwide. Students learning the Bengali language have also valued the English/Bengali translations on every page. His third book is ‘Try not to Laugh’ and is a guide to memorising, revising and passing exams for students.

Both ‘The Old Man on the Beach’ and ‘Sonali’ are available on Amazon for kindle and paperback. Published by Shopno Sriti Media. The novel,’The Pukur’, was published by Histria Books in 2022.

D K Powell is available to speak at events (see his TEDx talk here) and can be contacted at dkpowell.contact@gmail.com. Alternatively, he is available for one-to-one mentoring and runs a course on the psychology of writing. Listen to his life story in interview with the BBC here.

Ken writes for a number of publications around the world. Past reviewer for Paste magazine, The Doughnut, E2D and United Airways and Lancashire Life magazine. Currently reviews for Northern Arts Review. His reviews have been read more than 7.9 million times.

Get a free trial and 20% off Shortform by clicking here. Shortform is a brilliant tool and comes with my highest recommendation.