How to Outpace AI - Or at least enjoy trying

This post originally appeared as my November 2025 e-newsletter. Subscribe to my newsletter to get more writing tips and first dibs on future workshops in your email inbox once per month. I'll keep your contact info. private.

At friends’ urging, I recently searched the database of titles that Anthropic used to train its AI system. Yes, some of my books were there. And yes, I filled out the tedious forms so that I might get a minuscule fraction of the lawsuit payout. I agree: the company should pay for content it stole.

But I don’t care if AI, having ingested my text, could replicate my style from, say, 2012. I’m no longer that author. I would like to think my writing has evolved such that an AI model wouldn’t recognize my current pieces as mine, compared with those long-ago publications. Maybe I’m even composing new stories that no machine could generate.

It’s true that our writing voice, like our speaking voice, is inherent to some extent. It’s what makes us unique. Often, it’s precisely what grips readers and compels them to find more of our work. In workshops, I urge every writer to embrace their instinctive voice fully. Even if you might try mimicking your favorite author as an exercise, return to what’s natural for you.

At the same time, I believe we can advance our writing by devoting more time and attention to our style. That might mean:

• stretching to find more apt figurative language—such as metaphors, symbols, similes, onomatopoeia (e.g., from Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter: My mind, thought Bill, is like a fly in a matchbox)—and eliminate cliches
• describing settings, actions, characters, etc. with more originality (e.g., from Elizabeth Bishop’s “Memories of Uncle Neddy”: If Uncle Neddy was a 'devil,' a feeble smokey-black one, Aunt Hat was a red, real one—redheaded, freckled, red-knuckled, strong, all fierce fire and flame).
• inhabiting a narrator’s perspective more deeply to represent their psyche in the writing’s rhythm and diction (e.g., from Charles D’Ambrosio’s “Loitering”: This is totally false, but for the sake of the story let’s say the events in question begin around 2:00 AM, just because that’s when I show up on the scene).
• experimenting with constructions or forms you rarely use, such as sentence-long stories, lists, odes, run-on sentences, or parallel constructions (e.g., from Muriel Spark’s The Comforters: He was accustomed to Louisa's food: whelks, periwinkles, milts and roes, chitterlings and sweetbreads, giblets, brains and the tripes of ruminating animals. Louisa prepared them at long ease, by many processes of affusion, diffusion and immersion, requiring many pans of brine, many purifications and simmerings, much sousing and sweetening by slow degrees).

Enhancing our natural style means returning to our work again and again to overcome the shorthand that might have been essential for propelling us through the first draft.

What else is possible in your work-in-progress? Can you raise the bar on what makes your work unique? And keep raising it?