How to Write Well (In the Age of AI Slop)

Welcome to church

The world is full of AI slop.

Most writing has become unreadable. It’s full of oversmart how-to fluff, contrasting, EM dashes, and information placed into threes.

Most writing just feels lifeless.

It’s become nothing more than a performance done by a machine. Sure, it looks like words on a page, but it has no soul. It’s saying something without saying anything much at all. On some days, it makes me depressed. I miss the days before ChatGPT went mainstream in 2022.

Now everyone is looking for the shortcut with writing, which makes sense because writing is hard. It’s not putting words on a page. No. Writing is thinking.

And most people don’t think. They’ve forgotten how to think.

TikTok and their phone have turned their brain into mashed potatoes. Not the good type of mash either. The watery type that your 3-year-old throws in the bin while having a tantrum.

Good writing is deeply human at its core. So the idea that a machine could replicate that is kind of stupid if you think about it long enough while smoking a joint.

The last thing you should want your writing to sound like is a machine.

I’m determined to bring back great writing. Here’s how to write well.

Rule 1: Show up butt-naked in all of your glory

The best writing is risky.

The writer shows up and takes a risk by sharing a story or point of view that could harm them. There’s a touch of vulnerability. They’re sharing an idea that is contrarian or goes against what society deems prim and proper.

When you publish writing like this you feel naked.

Hitting the publish button feels dangerous. You imagine you might get canceled. I did this last week. I live in Australia, and recently we all got butt-f*cked with a massive tax increase. I quote-posted the government’s polite spin on the massive tax increase and shared my unfiltered opinion about why they must be voted out.

This is risky because in Australia we have draconian social media laws. You can go to jail for criticizing the government. But I did it anyway. I'm willing to take the risk because the cause is greater than the individual.

This is what naked writing looks like. It’s powerful. That’s why people pay attention and it cuts through all the AI slop.

Rule 2: Don’t perform like a circus monkey doing tricks for bananas

Modern writing has become a performance.

People write to look smart or build an audience that inflates their ego. It’s deeply f*cking selfish. And boring.

The best writing feels like a friend wrote you some advice on the back of a napkin because they actually care about you. It’s selfless. It’s a conversation instead of a performance. It’s egoless.

The best example in history of this is The 4-Hour Workweek book written by Tim Ferriss. He struggled to write the book, so instead, he opened a blank draft in Gmail and wrote it as an email to his friend.

It removed all the overthinking and pretentiousness from the book. This one technique helped the book become a bestseller for more than a decade.

You can apply this to your writing. Write like the reader’s friend. Have a conversation with them. Remove all the formal words and jargon and just say “Gday, mate, here’s what I wanna tell you about.”

Rule 3: Be totally unhinged to the point where your grandmother turns in her grave

Modern writing is too safe.

The best writing is unhinged. It goes where most people won’t go. It says the thing we all think but are too scared to voice. Like, who said we all need to use pronouns in our bios and email signatures? Or, does International Women’s Day really empower women? Or is it just a “thoughts and prayers” kind of vibe?

I don’t have an opinion on either of these topics, but if I did, I would share it without giving two hoots what anyone thinks. Good writing feels a little naughty. It makes us dream a little. It encourages us to be leaders or to dare to inspire others.

The world needs less how-to content and more writing that pushes conversations deeper and further than before. You can’t do that if you’re wearing safety pants and bringing a box of condoms to every conversation. Sometimes you’ve gotta let your ideas impregnate people’s minds.

Rule 4: Bleed on the page until you pass out

Great writing has emotion.

Emotion moves us. It helps us abandon all logic and keep reading for reasons we can’t explain. Not everything you write has to have emotion, but some of it should.

AI can’t do emotions. It only understands how-to content. So if you want to avoid writing AI slop, then adding emotion is an easy workaround.

That doesn’t mean YOU must bleed on the page. You can share conversations or stories from other people and convey their emotion instead. But without any emotion, writing lacks the human element we all secretly crave.

Rule 5: Read a boatload of good f*cking human writing

This one isn’t obvious.

After 12 years of writing every day, whenever someone asks me how to get better, they assume my answer will be about writing. Wrong.

Writing better starts with reading better writing. Because reading great writing helps inspire you to do the same. It gives you ideas. It helps you see how to package your ideas so people will actually want to read them.

Reading a combination of old writing and modern writing is usually best.

Rule 6: Write where good writing exists

Writing well comes down to the environment.

It’s hard to write well when you’re in poor company. Writing is deeply social. You publish and people read. Other writers publish and you read. If you publish your writing in the wrong place, it messes up your mind.

It’s why I stopped writing on Medium dot com. Everyone on there was trying to write to the point of insanity to maybe earn $20 for an essay while the platform overlords mocked them like King Joffrey did to the peasants in Game of Thrones.

Being in a toxic environment like that kills your inspiration.

Your perception of the writing world comes from which corner of it you inhabit. It’s why I write on Substack. It’s where the best writers in the world are.

As my grandma used to say, roll around in the mud with pigs, and eventually you become nothing but a filthy pig waiting to become ham in someone’s sandwich.

Rule 7: The best writing breaks every Harvard University writing rule

To avoid sounding like AI slop you now must break all the rules.

AI wants to make your writing logical. It’ll tell you to flesh out the conclusion more. Or if you dare tell a story in two sentences, it’ll slap you in the face and tell you to make it longer and go into more detail.

But AI doesn’t understand writing.

Great writing isn’t logical. It doesn’t read like a neat little essay you wrote for Mrs Winterbottom in Grade 3 to try to get an A+. Great writing is messy. It has incomplete thoughts. The flow is often illogical. It’s not chronological. The contention isn’t always revealed right at the start.

Great writing is kind of like that TV show Lost. It’s all over the place. You never know where it’s going to take you. One minute you’re on a plane, then it crashes, and now you’re stuck on an island. And before you realize it, weird sh*t is happening and you’re seeing ghosts from 100 years ago.

If it’s logical and flows nicely, it’s probably bullsh*t.

Non-AI slop is also imperfect. Grammarly didn't jam in a whole bunch of extra punctuation. There are spelling mistakes. Some of the facts might be slightly off. You might start a thought and forget to finish it.

This is the writing era we’re moving into.

We’re so damn tired of perfect writing performances that inspire no one and read like a listicle from a Wordpress blog 10 years ago. The world is going mad. We’re going back in time to an era when technology didn’t filter the words and shape our thinking.

Raw, unfiltered writing is the future. And the good news is we’re all overqualified to do it. Even you.

Closing Thought

I’m going to end in an unexpected way with a cookie-cutter conclusion that’ll make AI wet its pants in excitement.

The secret to writing well in an era of AI slop is to violently refuse to go down this dark path and reject every hack and copywriting technique there is.

Lean into your human side as much as possible in your writing, or expect your words to be lost in a never-ending pile of AI dog sh*t. Ask yourself, “Does this essay show proof I’m human?” If it doesn’t, light a match and let your essay burn. Then write it again like a human freaking being.

It’s now either unhinged human writing or AI slop. The messy middle has been removed – and I love it. You should too.

What's the one opinion you have that you're still too scared to publish?

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