hustle culture – Kara Jorgensen

If you’ve followed me on social media for longer than a few days, you know I hate AI. I am morally opposed on every level to AI because it not only destroys the environment but is a tool of fascism. As much as I would like to word vomit about that, instead, I would like to speak about why writers shouldn’t use AI, even for seemingly minor details as so many AI-using authors claim to do.

Here’s the thing, there are no truly minor details or unimportant parts of a book as everything needs to further the characterization and mood of the story.

I can already feel some writers rolling their eyes at that. Feel free to do so at your own peril. Writers who are willing to hand over parts of their project to AI to “free up their time” to do other things should instead look at their relationship to hustle culture and why they have chosen quantity over quality. Hustle culture is rife in the writing world with many author groups pushing a churn and burn mentality where authors need to publish every 3 months or be lost to irrelevancy. If you go onto Amazon’s top 100 category boards for books on writing, you’ll find books about writing more or writing faster. While those can be useful, writing more isn’t the same as writing good or better books. The hustle side of the writing world stresses that readers don’t care about the books themselves. They’ll read anything as long as it checks off a few boxes for them, and that once you have hooked them, readers will come back every 90 days to choke down whatever book you throw at them.

I despise this mentality. For one, it is patronizing to readers. Readers won’t stick around if your book sucks or if the quality goes down over time. We’ve seen this with readers noticing an author with a massive backlist has turned to AI, and they abandon them when the writing becomes nonsensical or the quality change becomes noticeably bad. I don’t like when authors treat their readers like shit or take advantage of them by assuming they will always be there no matter how they treat them or how crappy their books are. If you’re a writer, I believe you should write for yourself first, but anything you sell to readers should be the best it could possibly be for them since they’re the ones supporting you monetarily.

What I hate even more about the hustle culture mentality is the way corporate speak has made its way into creative fields. Creativity can and should make you money. Artists should be paid fairly for their work and be able to make a stable living off of it. At the same time, I don’t think creativity should be treated like a business in the way that corporations expect exponential growth at all times. It is unsustainable. We cannot write more books every single year and increase our yearly word counts exponentially. It is impossible and will quickly lead to burn out and quality loss. In order to meet these unsustainable quotas, authors turn to AI because others have convinced them that if they outsource the tedious parts of writing to the machine, they will free up time to write more of the things they enjoy or just write faster. The problem is that those tedious parts aren’t useless; everything in your book should serve a purpose.

What many of these “write more in less time” gurus purposely ignore is writing as a craft. There is almost no discussion of how to make your writing better, only how to do it faster. If they did care about craft, none of them would be suggesting using AI. As someone who teaches young writers how to better their work, every piece of writing I have seen from AI is far worse and emptier than anything brand new writers in my classes have come up with. AI writing is confusing, devoid of charm or character, and just flat-out bad. 0/10 do not recommend using it because it will take way more time to edit than just writing something yourself. A study with people who code showed that while they thought they were taking less time using AI, they were actually taking longer because they had to review it, fix it, etc (source). This is on top of the environmental harm, the fact that it is a tool of fascism, and a plagiarism machine.

The thing that a lot of writers using AI for the “boring parts” don’t seem to understand is that the minor details are incredibly important to your story. One of my most hated posts online is the whole, “Only English teachers care that the drapes are blue. They’re just blue. The author just gave it a random color. It isn’t that deep.” Sure, that can be true occasionally, but 99% of your descriptions and details should be purposeful. When you are creating a world, even if a story takes place in the real world, you are building a microcosm specific to your characters and the story you are telling. Therefore, there is an added level of cohesion and purpose in those details that might not appear in our material reality. When you are setting the scene, you need to think about how you want the reader to feel while interacting with this part of the world, how the structure fits the function of this setting, and how the point of view character effects the way the world is interpreted or experienced. For example, a character with a phobia of dentists is going to view, experience, and describe a dental office differently than someone who doesn’t think getting their teeth cleaned is a traumatic experience. If you just let AI fill in the description of the dental office, you are losing that context. Even if the character isn’t scared of it, they will still notice details other characters won’t, and while you’re writing your story, that should be something you focus on.

The other place I’ve heard people using AI for “busy work” in books is dialogue. This really makes no sense to me because dialogue is one of the best ways to insert characterization, motivation, and movement into a story. Even if you feed a chat bot relevant information about your character, it isn’t going to understand the context of your work and anything about the character below a surface level. Any dialogue it spits out will be generic, boring, and probably ill-fitting for the moment. This is one of those situations where editing extensively will be necessary and will probably take longer than just writing it yourself.

But what if I’m stuck? Why can’t I just use AI to fill in the gap for me?

Because that’s cheating! It’s cheating yourself out of using your brain to puzzle out what should go next. It’s like saying, “I find this exercise hard, so I’m going to use a motor to move the dumbbell for me.” It isn’t going to help you, and at some point, your writing muscles are going to shrink and atrophy until you can’t write anything without constantly circling back to AI. Using AI long-term causes cognitive problems (source). If you continually use it to help write your books, you will become more dependent on it and eventually get worse at writing. The best way to combat this is to face the things that challenge you head-on. Why are you stuck on this dialogue? Why do you struggle with description? Do you not know when you need to add it, or do you simply need some resources to help you name things?

There are a ton of writing resources online made by authors for authors, many of which are free. Instead of using AI, slow down and invest time and effort into getting better at your craft. I know hustle culture says write more, write faster, publish quicker, but the best way to get ahead as a writer is to take time for yourself and do things to be a better writer. Sometimes, that looks like taking a break to read good books, watch shows that stoke that creative fire, do other crafts to refill your well. Other times, it’s dissecting how other authors write well and figuring out how to do that in your own way. Writing takes work, and work means effort on your part. Using AI to write the things that you struggle with or find boring means that you are cheating yourself out of the opportunity to learn, grow, and become a better writer. Before you run to ChatGPT for help when you get stuck, look up a resource on Google that can help you with this particular thing. If you are struggling, others have too, and there’s a 90% chance that someone has made something to help you figure it out on your own.

If there’s something I hate seeing online, it’s the glorification of hustle culture. For those of you who are not chronically online, hustle culture is the hyper capitalistic, you must be on 24/7, #girlboss, #productivity, work myself to death with a smile because I’m making more money than you attitude. As you can probably guess from my past screeds, I’m not a fan of capitalism for many reasons, but as an author/creator/artist, it’s particularly shitty to be expected to grind yourself to dust while supposedly doing what you love. Because if you aren’t, you’re apparently doing it wrong.

I believe artists should be able to make money from their art. I believe there should be social/governmental safety nets to allow us to do so as there are in other countries. I believe artists should be compensated fairly for their work and do it in a time frame that is aligns with their process and health. I feel like these are all very reasonable things to believe, but if you start looking at how people behave online, especially in certain online writing circles, you’ll see that is not the case.

Something I’ve noticed over the past five years of watching authortube (authors on YouTube), writertube (writers on YouTube), and writertok (writers on Tiktok) is the prevalence of hustle culture but in a way that is softer and almost more insidious because it is less obvious. I do want to preface this by saying that I see this more often with younger or less experienced writers than with people who have multiple books published, though I will touch upon some of those people later.

Beneath the aesthetic “A Day in the Life” or “Write With Me” videos is the looming threat of toxic productivity. No longer are authors writing in their pajamas gremlin style, they are out in the world writing and making content and recording B roll while doing it. The problem is that one must still write in order to have content to pump out into the world, and when your social media relies on you being a #writer, you must perform being a writer. The performance of writing is pretty clear in these videos, but the part that I find to be most toxic is the focus on large daily word counts.

Now, there are some people whose natural writing rhythm is 3k words a day or to fast draft. That’s totally fine. We all have our own pace. My problem is with the people who write for the sake of getting those large word counts, draft the same book ad nauseam, chasing their tail but never finishing anything. Or even worse, they beat themselves up over a no word or low word count day, even when the word count is perfectly normal for many writers. I’ve watched so many young or unpublished writers do this and burn themselves out. There are times when I’ve suspected a writer is burnt out and not writing, though they read off some giant word count while never talking about their project in any detail.

I’ve complained about Tiktok and the capitalist drive to produce content, but the mixing of word count and content does nothing to help writers. It gives completely unrealistic expectations to newbies, it’s fake in some cases, and in others, it drives people’s mental health into the ground when they try to maintain high levels of productivity for way too long. As much as the idea of NaNoWriMo started out as a good thing, I lay the blame for this trend at their feet. I think a lot of younger writer thought, If I can write 1666 words a day for a month, surely I can do more and for longer, without understanding that NaNo is not meant to set the pace for the entirety of their career or life. As with most things relating to hustle culture, it almost automatically excludes people without ideal circumstances, so people with lower energy levels, people with kids, with demanding jobs, etc. Those people can never be #AuthorGoals if they aren’t typing 3k a day while taking aesthetic B roll at a coffee shop.

My hope is that newer writers will understand that a lot of what they see online is not real or is heavily curated to make it look better than it truly is. There are ways to be productive and have goals without running yourself into the ground or creating a facade in order to live up to perceived expectations. The key is to focus less on content production or high daily word counts and more on what works best for you at this stage of your life. For some, it is fast drafting, but for many, a more moderate or slower approach is healthier. Don’t get caught up in what you think you should be doing because someone online tells you that you should or because you see someone successful doing it. You don’t know how much help they have or how many hours they have to work.

Going off this, be wary of people who consider themselves to be writing gurus or who churn out 10+ books a year. Many people whose sole job is writing can write 4-6 books a year, but if someone is publishing every month, be skeptical. Often, those people use ghost writers, people on Fiverr, or now, they rely on AI to do the heavy lifting with their books. They may also have assistants who run all their social media profiles or spouses who take care of all the day-to-day life stuff that you’re still doing. Don’t fall for the aesthetic hustle culture you see in online writing communities. Being a YouTube or Tiktok personality with never be a substitute for good writing or maintaining your sanity and health through good habits when it comes to a building long-term career.

Tag: hustle culture

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