Admit it. You looked at the title of this post and thought, “He’s going to talk about A.I., isn’t he?” Yes. But not right away. Let’s just chill out a moment. I’m not looking for an excuse to rant about large language models or anything like that. I really just want to focus on writing itself, and what it’ll look like in 5, 10, or maybe 20 years.

Before we jump ahead, let’s start in the past and move chronologically forward.

An Extremely Condensed History of Writing

If we go back far enough, we start with just verbal storytelling. Stories were memorized and recited, or embellished, and I have to imagine that some real doozies were distorted or forgotten over time.

Move forward a little bit and we start to actually writing things down. I imagine the invention of writing made it possible to create more complex narratives. Details could be preserved, and the thoughts and intentions of a storyteller could live on, long after the creator passed away. There’s still the problem of the material decaying over time, and ink fading, but we got better at that, too.

Many of the inventions around writing made it possible for more people to immortalize their thoughts and stories. Cheaper materials, better ink, better printing. Typewriters came along. Then computers. Then The Internet.

When I consider the evolution of writing from this perspective, I see a continuous trend of putting the power of words into the hands of more and more people. When we actually start thinking about the future of writing, we might be wise to consider this trend, and extrapolate along the lines of history.

Writing in the Present Day

The concerns of the past have been addressed, and writing today is more accessible than ever. If you prefer to write with pen and paper, we’ve got you covered. Pens are cheap these days. Companies literally give them away, emblazoned with their logo and corporate slogan. Some of these are nice pens, but even cheap ones last a long time and have good ink flow. And, even though there’s been a paper shortage in the printing industry, notebooks are relatively easy to come by. You can go as plain or as fancy with your notebook as you like.

This is how my friend Michael Gallowglas writes. On his blog, in his “A Day in the Life” post, every time he mentions writing, he’s doing so with specialized notebooks and multicolored pens. When he’s ready, he transposes his handwriting into a computer and uploads his words to wherever they need to go so that they’re not lost to the frailties of physical matter. One of the benefits of his approach is that even after his work has gone to print, he still has an artifact made with his hands, filled with his hard-earned words, scrawled out in his distinctive handwriting.

I start cramping and aching just thinking about it. I tend to use a custom-made split mechanical ergo keyboard I built myself, and that helps keep me from exacerbating the continuous pain I feel in my wrists. The pain has been there since my time in the Air Force, and while it’s never fully gone away, it usually doesn’t bother me unless I do something stupid.

I use Scrivener, though when I wrote The Repossessed Ghost, the first draft was done entirely in Word. When submitting my stories to my critique group, I compile it and copy it into Google Docs. My Scrivener files themselves go into the cloud, so not only can I write from different laptops or workstations without a fuss, I never have to worry about a simple hard drive failure wiping out all of my work.

The Crash of ’98 for me had nothing to do with Wall Street, but was instead the time my computer fell off my desk and wiped away all of the writing I had done up to the point.

The technology of today has made it easy for me to compose my stories into a medium that is indelible, yet malleable enough for me to edit and transform into whatever format is required for submissions. I don’t need to go to a special, dedicated place for writing, and I can bring it with me wherever I go. I have word processors, dictionaries, spell checks, thesauruses, grammar checkers, and baby name generators all at my disposal, as long as I have access to The Internet. There are podcasts and online classes to instruct, when such instructions are desired. I’m out of excuses, just like you are.

Writing in the Future — A.I.

Let’s get the bogeyman out of the way. I don’t believe that A.I. is going away. It will continue to get better over time, meaning the quality of the output will start to look more and more like the kind of fiction an author creates. Look at how far it has come with visual art. I see no reason it shouldn’t advance and produce written fiction that is both coherent and compelling.

I think A.I. and large language models will get more sophisticated and more prevalent, and I think writers will have a choice as to whether or not they incorporate them in their writing process. The recent results of the writer strike preclude writers getting replaced by A.I., and writers cannot be compelled to use A.I. to write in the movie or television industries, but if I read it correctly, it didn’t say that writers couldn’t voluntarily supplement their work with A.I.. I think there are still some legal kinks to work out, but that seems like something that will be solved before the next decade.

Before I move on from A.I., I want to drop this little analogy about how an A.I. writes. It’s like producing chicken nuggets. In the large language model, all sorts of writing, good and bad, are thrown into the mix and churned into indistinguishable word slurry. It is then shaped into something like looks like writing. It bears the familiar shape of writing, but it’s imitation information.

There is a book on Amazon today, fully generate by A.I., and it’s all about how to identify mushrooms. Don’t trust this book. The life you save may be your own.

Writing in the Future — Everything Else

Within the next 5 years, I don’t expect writing to look much different than it does today. Some other piece of software might come out that captivates the writing community and supplants Scrivener. That’s always a possibility.

Any day now, I expect a huge leap in technology involving speech-to-text. Michael has dabbled around some with this, and I know that’s how Kevin J. Anderson writes. I think Piper J. Drake also uses voice software, as she has wrist pain that is more debilitating than mine.

Our phones are capable of listening to us and turning our spoken words into text, but it isn’t awesome, and I keep wanting it to be. I want my digital assistant to actually assist me. Maybe we’ll have that in the next 5 to 10 years, and that could be an interesting game changer for writers.

I don’t think we’re particularly close to having ubiquitous thought-to-text interfaces. Following the lines of history, that feels like the next major leap to make storytelling even more accessible. Make it a waterproof wearable and people will never lose those killer ideas they have in the shower.

Imagine recording your dreams and then editing them into coherent stories.

For enough into the future, we will still be telling each other stories. But we might not be writing as we do now. We don’t practice storytelling the way we did a few thousand years ago, and our writing technology has advanced over what we had a few hundred years ago. We have eliminated most of the barriers to entry.

Perhaps the final barrier is the act of writing itself. Far enough in the future, storytelling might look completely different, and this act of scratching ink onto paper, or wiggling our digits over so many clackety keys, will seem archaic and primitive, like cave painting or chipping words into stone.