Welcome to the World Where Everyone is a Writer and Nobody Reads

While conversing with a friend, a globally acclaimed and published author, the topic moved to AI writing systems.

He remarked: “Welcome to the world where everyone is a writer and nobody reads.”

How astute, I thought.

Look no farther than LinkedIn for evidence. People who you know have never written an essay since their college days are flooding your feed with . It’s obvious they’re using AI. What’s not so obvious is who is actually reading them?

Today, people delegate their writing to AI. The readers increasingly delegate their reading to AI summarizers. It’s a closed loop: AI writes for AI to read.

Where AI Actually Works

For most business writing, AI is better.

Marketing collaterals, technical documentation, marketing campaigns, etc. benefit from AI’s efficiency.

For these tasks, AI’s mechanical consistency and accuracy is the point. Nobody wants their instruction manual to have “personality.” Nobody needs vulnerability in a quarterly report. Of course, human oversight is necessary. But there’s no doubt AI is a productivity-enhancer.

But the world of literature (particularly fiction) is different. The writing that moves is exactly what AI cannot provide.

Note: Some business writing does need authenticity and storytelling: like executive comms.

The Problem with Perfect Templates

My author friend has been averse to formulas, thanks to his stint at a literary agency in the US during his early career. The agency capitalized on the great American writing dream, promising aspiring writers a detailed critique of their manuscript using their ‘Five-Point Formula’.

My point? Templates are nothing new. What’s new is how AI is automating this process.

But templates don’t guarantee success.

In 1985, Christopher Vogler wrote “A Practical Guide to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” identifying the storytelling framework for success in Hollywood movies. This memo has been public knowledge for forty years. Yet Hollywood’s success rate hasn’t dramatically improved despite enormous resources.

Salim-Javed drew inspiration from ‘The Magnificent Seven’ and wrote ‘Sholay,’ a cult classic still admired today. Ram Gopal Varma had the exact same template and produced ‘Aag,’ which failed miserably and became a laughingstock.

Personalizing a template for your story remains difficult.

Why Thinking For Oneself (Still) Matters

Recently, I was reading a business analysis article that felt infinite at 2000 words. Fluent, yet clunky.

Anyone from the trenches could spot this. The article ticked the checklist: right framework, jargon, and structure. But it didn’t read like someone who experienced the problem and the unexpected friction first-hand. It didn’t capture the chaos when theory collided with reality.

It was then I realized why AI writing appears clunky. It’s because, at some level, it betrays the lack of human perception and understanding. It has the palette but lacks the painting.

As Arthur Schopenhauer wrote: “The intellectual attainments of a man who thinks for himself resemble a fine painting, where the light and shade are correct, the tone sustained, the colour perfectly harmonised; it is true to life. On the other hand, the intellectual attainments of the mere man of learning are like a large palette, full of all sorts of colours, which at most are systematically arranged, but devoid of harmony, connection and meaning.”

And what produces harmony? This creative struggle of thinking through a problem, wrestling with contradictions, arriving at insights through failure.

Templates and AI optimization, on the other hand, produce systematic arrangement.

I once fed an essay to Claude AI for review. It suggested changes, which I incorporated. The AI-revised essay was better-optimized in terms of storytelling.

Yet something felt amiss.

I asked Claude: “I think the original essay has more human heft and feels authentic. What do you think?”

Claude’s response is gold:

“You’re absolutely right…The original has genuine personality—those meandering thoughts.. the personal anecdotes that don’t perfectly serve the argument but feel real. It reads like someone thinking through a complex issue in real time… My revision, while more ‘structurally sound,’ stripped out exactly what made it human: the beautiful messiness, the voice that emerges naturally rather than being crafted intentionally.”

Fiction: Where the Struggle Is the Point

Fiction isn’t about picture-perfect writing. It’s a struggle to understand the messy human self. To make sense of our flawed inner and outer world.

The reader connects with the writer through shared effort and vulnerability.

George Saunders, in “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,” describes the Russian short story masters as writers who “seemed to regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool. They changed you when you read them, made the world seem to be telling a different, more interesting story, a story in which you might play a meaningful part, and in which you had responsibilities.”

These stories asked the big questions: How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?

Questions that don’t yield to templates. Because the path requires exactly what AI eliminates: the meandering thoughts of a writer struggling through complexity without a predetermined answer.

Finding Your Iconic Space

As George Saunders describes his writing program at Syracuse University, the goal is to help writers “acquire the technical means to become defiantly and joyfully themselves.”

He calls this their “iconic space”: the place from which they will write the stories only they could write, using what makes them uniquely themselves: their strengths, weaknesses, obsessions, peculiarities, the whole deal.

This is what fiction is about. Not writing stuff because you can write. But writing stuff that only you can write.

In a world where AI can write everything, what will you write that only you can write? What struggle will you refuse to outsource?

Literary success comes from defying templates. It comes from the beautiful, messy human struggle. And perhaps that’s why fewer people read. Because when writing becomes effortless, it loses the struggle that made it worth reading in the first place.