Write Weirder Is Fun Advice, But It Misses the Point

Laura Brooke Robson wrote a really charming piece for Writer’s Digest about how AI prose is getting better, how it freaks her out, and how the answer might be to “write weirder.” She points to books that spell “naturally” as “gnaturally,” that fracture timelines in surprising ways, that land jokes no algorithm would attempt. And I genuinely loved reading her essay. She’s funny. She’s honest about being scared. She made a staircase out of her sentences to prove she’s human and it worked on me.

But I keep getting stuck on the core argument.

The Weirdness Trap

“Write weirder” is advice that works perfectly if you’re Laura Brooke Robson writing literary fiction in New York with a book literally called Love Is an Algorithm. It works if your audience is the kind of reader who picks up Book of the Month selections and notices when an author does something clever with structure.

It does not work if you write small-town romance. Or cozy mystery. Or LitRPG. Or military sci-fi.

Most commercially successful genre fiction isn’t weird. It’s satisfying. Readers come back to their favorite series because they know what they’re getting, and they want more of it. The romance reader picking up book seven in a series isn’t hunting for structural experimentation. She wants the banter, the tension, the payoff. The idea that authors need to get weirder to survive AI assumes that “surprising form” is the only moat, and that’s just… not true for most of the book market.

What AI Actually Can’t Do

Robson admits AI dialogue has gone from “Ralph extolled, crossing his arms” to something resembling competent prose. She’s right. It has. But she frames this as a terrifying trajectory, like if AI writes at a 20-year-old’s level now, it’ll hit 30-year-old level next year.

That math doesn’t hold.

AI improvement isn’t linear talent progression. A 10-year-old writing badly and a 20-year-old writing okay are both producing text without real understanding. The jump from “passable” to “genuinely moving” isn’t the same kind of jump. It’s not just better word selection. It’s lived experience filtered through a perspective that has something at stake. AI can mimic the patterns of good writing without understanding why those patterns matter to a specific reader in a specific emotional moment.

I’ve tested this extensively (occupational hazard of running this site). Claude can write solid, clean prose. It can match tone. It can structure an argument. What it can’t do is decide that this scene needs to breathe for two extra paragraphs because the reader needs to sit with the grief before the plot moves forward. That’s not weirdness. That’s taste.

The Real Defense Is Giving a Damn

Robson describes reading like a detective now, scanning everything for AI tells, and that resonated with me. I do it too. But my conclusion is different from hers.

The thing that makes me trust a piece of writing isn’t a typo or an invented word. It’s specificity. It’s the author who clearly spent four hours researching how saddle leather smells in the rain because her cowboy romance needed that one sentence to land. It’s the fantasy author who built a magic system that doesn’t quite work like any other magic system because she was solving a story problem, not following a template.

Weirdness for the sake of proving you’re human is still performative. It’s just performing for a different audience.

Use the Damn Tools

The part of Robson’s essay that frustrated me most was the framing of AI as purely adversarial. She checks in on Claude and ChatGPT “to see how their fiction skills are coming along” like she’s monitoring an approaching army. She talks about wanting to be better than AI, like it’s a competition.

It’s not.

I use AI when I write. Not to generate my prose (I’m too much of a control freak for that), but to brainstorm when I’m stuck, to pressure-test plot logic, to catch when I’m being lazy with my descriptions. It makes my writing better because it frees up my brain to focus on the parts that actually require me. The weird parts, sure. But also the deeply normal parts that just need to be executed with care.

The authors who are going to thrive aren’t the ones who write the weirdest books. They’re the ones who figure out how to use every tool available to them, including AI, to write books that readers genuinely love. And then they show up, build relationships with those readers, and do it again.

Writing weirder is fun. Writing with purpose is better.