By Dean Newlund
Artificial intelligence has made me a far more productive writer. My team and I now create proposals, reports, presentations, and even blog posts in a fraction of the time they once required. A few thoughtful prompts can organize scattered ideas, sharpen language, and eliminate hours of editing. I wouldn’t want to give that up.
But lately I’ve found myself reaching for a pen more often. Not because AI can’t help me write. It can. But because I’ve begun to wonder if writing was ever primarily about producing words. I’ve come to believe it has always been one of the most powerful ways we learn to think. What if the greatest product of writing isn’t the page we finish, but the person we become while writing it?
That question takes me back to my freshman year of college.
On the first day of my writing class, our professor gave us one assignment: write a semi-autobiographical short story and be prepared to read it aloud the next morning. It was a brilliant way to shrink the class. Forty students walked in. About half returned.
I had always been an avid journaler, so the blank page never intimidated me. It invited me.
The story I read the next day was about a college student who discovers that his writing professor is the father of his best friend, who had recently jumped off a twenty-story building in Honolulu. The suicide was real. My best friend was real. Then, the grief consumed me daily.
When I finished reading, several people in class were crying. That day I discovered something far more important than writing well. I discovered the power of authenticity.
Over the next few years I wrote fiction and nonfiction: a story about California’s Bohemian Grove, where business and political leaders gather behind closed gates; a painfully sentimental story about my girlfriend leaving me; and a poem that used a bicycle as a metaphor for becoming an adult and learning responsibility and freedom.
Looking back, I realize every one of those pieces was autobiographical. That’s because all writing is autobiographical in one form or another. Whether we are telling a story, making an argument, or creating a fictional character, we are revealing ourselves. As a young man, writing became the place where I found myself, worked through questions, explored possibilities, and imagined futures that did not yet exist. It was both a reflection of what was and an affirmation of what could be.
That is what concerns me about AI.
Not because it writes poorly. Quite the opposite. It often writes remarkably well.
What concerns me is the temptation to let AI do too much of the wrestling that has always belonged to us.
There are still days when I want to experience writing from farm to table—no fillers, no dyes, no enhancers. I want my thoughts, my quirky turns of phrase, my occasional rabbit trails, and yes, even my imperfect sentences. I don’t always want them transformed into perfectly balanced Wonder Bread prose—grammatically flawless perhaps, but stripped of the flavor that makes it mine.
The great joy of writing comes from facing oneself—the unsettling fear that there is nothing there, only to discover a glimmer of an idea that slowly takes shape into something worth saying. Writing is the joy of self-discovery and the joy of creating ideas through language. For just a little while, it allows us to play God, because what is born on the page did not exist until we brought it into being.
That is why the joy of writing is diminished when we know, deep down, that AI carried us through the struggle. We think the struggle is standing between us and clarity. More often, the struggle is what creates the clarity.
Most of us think writing is the final step of thinking. I’ve come to believe it’s often the first. We don’t write because we’ve figured everything out. We write to discover what we’ve been trying to say all along.
I’ve spent more than thirty years helping leaders think more clearly, make better decisions, and build healthier organizations. One thing has become unmistakably clear: the best leaders rarely have the quickest answers. They ask better questions. They sit with uncertainty. They resist the urge to rush toward certainty because they know clarity usually arrives through the struggle, not around it.
Writing develops that same muscle. The greatest product of writing isn’t the page. It’s the writer.
Companies say they want strategic thinkers, innovative leaders, and authentic people. Those qualities do not magically appear because someone asks for them. They are cultivated by people who have learned to wrestle with ideas long enough for something original to emerge. Writing has always been one of the great disciplines of that process.
Use AI to edit. Use it to research. Use it to organize. Use it to challenge your assumptions. Use it to make good writing even better.
But every once in a while, close the laptop. Pick up a pen. Sit quietly before a blank page.
Not because the page needs you.
Because you still need it.
AI can help us express what we already know. But it cannot struggle on our behalf. And the struggle, it turns out, is not an obstacle to creativity. It is one of the most human experiences we have. It is where vague feelings become convictions, scattered thoughts become ideas, and ideas become something that didn’t exist before.
That is the part of writing I refuse to outsource.
Note: No writing was harmed by AI in the making of this article