A Letter to the Younger Writer

Let’s imagine we’re sitting across from each other at a small café table. You’ve got a notebook half-full of half-started ideas, and you’re looking at me the way I once looked at older writers: equal parts curious and a little desperate to know if I’m “doing it right.”

So here’s the truth, from me to you.

Writing is about being human first. Machines can spit out sentences, even clever ones, but they can’t live a life. They don’t fall in love and then scribble shaky, midnight poems that don’t quite make sense until years later. They don’t wake up to grief. They don’t sit sweating through a summer afternoon, listening to cicadas and thinking, God, I should write this down.

You can. You must. That’s the raw soil your writing will always grow from.

The Temptation of Shortcuts

I know it’s tempting. You open one of those new AI tools, type in a prompt, and suddenly you’ve got paragraphs. Whole essays. A piece of writing that, on the surface, looks decent.

But let me tell you something, that’s not writing. That’s packaging. And if you lean too hard on it, you’ll cheat yourself out of the most important part of this work: the struggle.

It’s in the wrestle with a stubborn sentence that you learn who you are as a writer. It’s in the cuts, the false starts, the drafts you hate but keep anyway because maybe, just maybe, there’s one good line in them worth saving. That’s where your voice is built.

If you let a machine carry that weight, you’ll never grow the muscle. You’ll always be half a step removed from your own words.

How to Use the Tools Without Losing Yourself

I’m not saying to avoid technology. No, use it, but use it wisely. Think of AI like a power tool in a carpenter’s shop. Helpful, efficient, sometimes brilliant for knocking down rough edges or brainstorming ideas. But the carpenter still decides the shape of the table.

Here’s how you might use it without giving up your voice:

When you’re stuck, let it suggest a few directions, then choose the one that excites you.
When you’re curious about details, use it as a springboard for research, but don’t stop there. Dig deeper. Verify.
When the blank page feels like it’s mocking you, let it throw a few lines down, and then write over them with your own.

The key is simple: you stay in charge. The tool serves you, not the other way around.

Lessons I Wish Someone Had Told Me

If I could hand you a few principles to carry with you, they’d look like this:

Write what only you can write. Your weird stories, your scars, your obsessions, those are your gold.
Let imperfection show. Readers connect more with a clumsy but honest line than a polished but empty one.
Keep living. If you don’t gather material from life, you’ll have nothing real to put on the page.
Respect the grind. The frustration you feel now? It’s building you. Don’t wish it away.
Leave fingerprints. A turn of phrase, a rhythm, a perspective that’s unmistakably yours. That’s what lasts.

A Final Word Between Us

The future is going to be filled with machine-made words. Reports, ads, summaries, even novels. They’ll be everywhere, flooding the shelves and screens. But here’s the thing: none of them will have you in them. None of them will know what it felt like to be alive in your skin, in your time.

So write. Write in a way that bleeds a little, that leaves fingerprints all over the page. Don’t let convenience rob you of connection.

Because one day, a reader will stumble across your work, maybe years from now, maybe long after we’re gone, and they’ll feel it. They’ll see themselves in your words. And they’ll know it was human.

That’s the gift only you can give.

Until Next Time