You write for the journey, not the destination

When I was younger, I drove a moped. It took forever to get anywhere, but I enjoyed the ride. Then as a newly licensed teen driver, all I did after school was spend an hour or two driving for the fun of it. In the past two years, I've driven over 500 miles to different conferences. Last year, rather than fly home from Las Vegas, we drove 2,500 miles. And we're going to do a 5,000 mile round-trip in November.

I love driving. Maybe I wouldn't say that if my career was long-haul trucking. I love the feel of the road.

There are days I wish I had a motorcycle. But my friend James Peet is going for a ride along the Pacific Coast down to the bottom of South America. Take a look at his Writer on the Road YouTube channel.

The ongoing rage war over using AI in writing misses a fundamental point. Writing is not about the destination. Sure, I'd like my novels to sell (and you should totally buy one), and I enjoy sharing them with you as my audience and fans. But that's not fundamentally why I write. I write like I used to drive: to enjoy the journey.

Even Stephen King said he wrote to enjoy getting to know the characters. In On Writing, he said he mourned being on drugs when he wrote "Kujo" because he never got to know the characters. Having had characters refuse to take direction and move the book in a different direction, I empathize.

My graduate school's graduation requirement included one paper. I hated my first paper so much I wrote four more, including two in the last semester. It was during that semester that I finally figured out how to write a tight narrative (albeit for law).

The true satisfaction of writing is not uploading it to Kindle Direct. It's struggling with the draft. It's learning that the character's personality won't let you shoehorn him to fit the outline.

For those who use AI to write that draft, they're missing the feel of the road. They're jumping to the destination without learning it was about the ride all along.