The literary world is finally asking a question it has dodged for years: What can a human writer do that artificial intelligence cannot? The answers tend to circle around technical and personal aspects of writing, like voice, lived experience, and emotional nuance. But underneath all of the conversations taking place sits a word contemporary literary culture has carefully avoided: soul.
AI can ingest every book in a library and spit our syntax back out to us. It cannot long for something it cannot name or grieve a father it has not loved and lost. It cannot sit inside silence until the quiet solitude transforms from boredom to meaning.
That is the soul’s domain. In the age of AI, the writer’s soul is the only thing that cannot be replicated, and we haven’t built the necessary infrastructure to tend it. Most people aren’t even comfortable acknowledging or talking about it.
They use language to enter spaces where mystery lingers and invite others to join them there. A few brave books and journals have begun to say this out loud, arguing that the writer’s inner life is not a luxury but the source of any article’s depth and essay’s originality. Still, there’s a difference between having a handful of books and a small stack of journals on a shelf and having robust structures that actually support the souls of working writers.
We don’t leave craft to chance; we build MFA programs, conferences, grants, and residencies around it. We don’t leave career development to chance; we organize panels on publishing, money, and marketing. When it comes to the inner lives of writers; however, we mostly look away and hope people figure it out on their own.
During a daylong gathering of more than 120 writers from the South I attended in Birmingham, Alabama last May to discuss “what writers need,” not one presentation or session or panel discussion mentioned anything connected to the soul. It’s understandable that many avoid conversations about spiritual life. Religion has harmed many; people fear proselytizing; soul language can sound fuzzy or exclusionary; literary culture prizes the secular and intellectual.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
