How to Write Like A Person

Announcing a new seminar for 2026.

Alright, this is an intervention.

I try not to think about Generative AI in the shower. But not long ago, something happened that hurt my heart and changed my plans.

In the showers at my gym, there are standard bottles of shampoo, conditioner and body wash, and they all have a little cheery paragraph of what could politely be termed hype text. It was one of the first times I’d seen incontestably AI- generated writing in the wild.

I stared at it for some time, wet and naked and confused and cross. This is what the shampoo said:

In just a few swift scrubs, your hair will be stripped of its salty shame and revitalized in the nourishing glow of neroli blossom. Breathe deep and feel the strength of powerful florals transforming you, right in the follicles. Remember, you’ve earned this.

And the conditioner:

Luxuriate as this treatment graces your scalp with the spirit of a thousand personal trainers. Yes. You are great.

Now, a trip to my gym is already a spelunking expedition into the guts of neoliberal cyberpunk hell: neon strip-lighting, broken equipment, thudding techno. Unreasonably attractive people in apparently functional skintight lycra, clenching and jerking in a vast basement unsullied by the sun. I’m usually into it. But in the dim red light of the showers, I felt suddenly soiled. Complicit. Here’s what the body wash said:

You’re throbbing. We can feel it. It’s because you’ve worked hard that this formula works even harder, gently embracing screaming muscles in a foaming blanket of peppermint suds. Your body, once a temple, will become an igloo. Invigorated, yet calm. Big, glacial energy, like a polar bear in a chill out tent. Come. Step inside.

It talks like a creepy, ubiquitous, tweaked-out minor demon of Mammon, all keywords and ketamine logic. I hate it.

I hate it so much more than I expected to hate it. I hate what it means for writing and thinking. It probably took longer for a mediocre copywriter to create the prompt to get the machine to spit out this embarrassing dogshit than it would have done to use a goddamn pencil like a person. Whoever produced this either didn’t trust themselves to do better than the algorithm at pleasing their paymasters, or the paymasters considered it an unacceptable risk to trust a human being with something as unpredictable as writing. Either way, it’s lazy, it’s cowardly, and it’s insulting.

Before this, I’d been cautiously, quietly optimistic about the great robot future. The concept of large language models is simply too interesting to have one opinion about. I was privately a little excited about what humans and machines could do together. But this? This the sort of industrial idiocy that happens when machine stupidity is matched to human cowardice and mashed through the maw of the profit motive. It’s bad and thoughtless and it’s everywhere.

So I have decided to do something about it. And you’re all invited.

Now, mostly I’m too British to talk about how I really feel about writing. I never wanted to be precious about it - the world could always do with one fewer of the sort of pretentious fuckboy who talks about the Power of Words, gets out a guitar at parties, and keeps whining about how nobody understands him. But it turns out that I have some quite strong opinions about all this. For a start, if you’re a writer you don’t get to complain that nobody understands you. Make them.

And if you don’t know how, ChatGPT will never teach you. Claude will never do it for you. I have taken the evil machine for multiple test drives. One far-off day it might manage to write like a person. At that point it will deserve rights like a person because it will be a person, and like the rest of us who exist mostly in text, it will need to practice.

Writing is not entirely numinous. It can be taught. It can be learned. And we should be learning, because these days almost everything we do looks like typing, doesn’t it? Because whether we are filing taxes or falling in love or taking a test or trying to cheat rubes out of their life savings, so very much of our lives are lived in text. I think we should care about how we craft it. I think we should trust ourselves more than we trust any fleshless algorithm, no matter how it flatters us.

Right now there are particular reasons to slow down and pay attention to how we use language, to how we tell stories, because bad and brainless writing is already everywhere and before long we’ll be swimming in dumb robot slop. Ultimately, writing well means taking charge of your chaotic, disparate, degenerate self and wrestling that self into a shape that makes sense. Joan Didion said that she wrote in order to find out what she was thinking. Right now, in the howling ad-soaked hypernormal flamewar of all against all that online culture has become, we are losing track of one another, of ourselves. Writing takes the confusing business of translating yourself to world and turns it into craft.

Right now I’m writing myself back into lucidity after two years of gnarly, dreadful burnout that muzzled me. I was terrified. I thought, for a long time, that I wouldn’t be able to do my job until I was strong and healthy and happy again. It turned out that things got better in proportion to how often I sat down and concentrated on line-level craft. On structure, on form, and on voice. A lot of people I know could stand to do the same, and this is the right time to try.

And I think I can help.

So I’m starting a writing seminar. on this blog. For paid subscribers (I’ll still be running regular essays and threads here for free). I promise you, it’ll be a bargain at the price.

This seminar is designed to make you a better writer, which is an end in itself. It’s a seminar, rather than a class or a series, because it’s ongoing, it’s interactive and what you’ll get out of it depends very much on what you put in. You can jump in anytime. You can fit it around the rest of your life. There’s no ticking clock. The only way to fail this class is to stop showing up.

This course is not designed to teach you to write a bestselling novel or land an agent, although it might well help you do both of those things and more. There are reasons to write well that have nothing to do with money or prizes or watching your words well enough not to embarrass your employer in public. As a professional, experienced writer, I’ve got an advantage in any interaction that happens over text. Would you like to be better at pitch emails? Smacking down on the group thread? Sexting? Well, then.

This seminar is going to take in a number of different writing disciplines. I’ll share what I’ve learned from my time as a columnist, from my years in journalism, from screenwriting, creative non-fiction, game design and script doctoring. I actually don’t know anyone who does as many different kinds of writing as me, and I’ve found that they all inform each other. I’m a dialogue specialist who also does interactive game design. I know more about narrative pacing than most journalists; I know more about line-level structure than most novelists. I’ve worked in Hollywood writers’ rooms and been embedded with the far right as a reporter. This seminar will take in all the relevant literal and figurative war stories I’m legally allowed to share.

Things we will likely cover include: dialogue, pacing, structure,point of view, characterization, editing, plotting, genre, worldbuilding, campaign design, thematics, classical rhetoric (I know, but trust me on this), adaptation, thematics. Pattern and rhythm. Line-level faff and series-level structure. We will not be nitpicking over grammar. I am not going to teach you how to write proper, correct Business English. I could, but I don’t want to, because I don’t care. We are learning how to think like writers, not lawyers.

We will also cover some of the headology - how to trick or train yourself into the actual discipline of being a writer. Including, for example, how to actually finish things. And what you do when you’re halfway through a book and someone puts out a tv show with an almost-identical plot. And what role politics plays in your choices. It’s not just for people who consider themselves professionals. It’s for anyone who cares about prose.I want you to feel confident that you can do this better than a chatbot. Because writing is a tool and a weapon. We cannot just delegate this one to the algorithm. I don’t know what’s coming for us this year, but while we wait, we can sharpen the saw.

There will be reading lists. There will be regular exercises. There will, inevitably, be digressions, but if you’ve ever taken a class with me before, or indeed spent five minutes in my company, you know that sometimes you just have to strap in and trust that we’ll end up somewhere interesting.

The name of the course is ‘Write Like A Person’.

We start tomorrow.

Buckle up.

Oh, and Happy New Year.