A form letter and a letter from someone who knows you can say the same thing. Both thank you for coming. Both hope to see you again. One of them mentions that your dog stole a pork chop off the grill, spells your nickname the way only your family does, and apologizes for the coffee ring on the corner. You’d keep that one for thirty years. The other goes in the trash before you reach the kitchen.
That difference is what people mean when they say writing has a soul. And the question gets thrown around a lot lately, because “AI has no soul” has become the favorite argument against anyone who touches the tools.
I’ve used that argument myself. I wrote that AI writing is soulless, and I meant it. But the question deserves a harder look, because it cuts both ways. If AI writing has no soul, does human writing have one by default? Does a person typing every word guarantee it?
No.
Good writing has the author’s soul in it, because the author put his heart and soul into it. Bad writing doesn’t, no matter who or what typed it.
What does it mean for writing to have a soul?
Effort has nothing to do with it. Who cares about effort? Readers don’t grade on effort.
Nobody finishes a novel and thinks, well, the author sure worked hard on that. Plenty of books were written in agony over ten years and read like a phone book. Plenty of great ones came fast.
The soul in writing is the little human parts. The detail nobody else would have thought to include, because nobody else was there. The opinion the author is willing to stand behind. The thing that went wrong and how it felt. The moment the writer shows you instead of explaining it to you.
When I write about hiking Joshua Tree after my wife died, I could tell you that grief made me go out into the desert. That’s an explanation. Or I could tell you I lost my footing on a shale cliff and grabbed the first thing available, and it was a cactus, and I ended up with a spine through my foot. That’s a human detail.
Nobody would make that up, and you believe everything around it because of it. More of that is in how writing became my passion.
A reader can’t name what’s happening, but they feel it. The book stops sounding like a book and starts sounding like a person, somebody with a sore foot and a reason to be out in that heat. A reader will follow a person a lot further than they’ll follow an explanation, and every good memoir runs on that.
Does a book written from one AI prompt have a soul?
No.
Somebody types “write me a book about a serial killer in Alaska,” adds a few parameters, and says go. What comes back is a book-shaped object. There’s no soul in it, because nobody put one there.
The machine fills every gap with the average. The cold is biting. The town is small and everyone knows everyone. The detective has a drinking problem and a dead partner. The killer leaves a calling card. Every detail is the one a thousand other books already used, because the most likely next word is the one everybody else already wrote. The result reads smoothly, and that’s the problem. There’s no snag anywhere, no moment where you stop and think, nobody would invent that. Smooth and average is the sound of nobody being home.
Nobody in that book has a dog that steals pork chops. Nobody’s grandmother says a thing only she would say. Nothing in it happened to anyone. It’s a form letter four hundred pages long.
Effort doesn’t put a soul in a book, and a tool doesn’t take it out. The author does both. – Richard LoweShare on X
People who publish those books run vending machines. I’m not mad at the vending machine, but I’d never call what falls out of it a meal.
Can human writing be soulless too?
All the time. Read a stack of corporate annual reports, a pile of dissertations or most self-published business books from before anyone had heard of ChatGPT. Human beings typed every word, and you’d swear there was nobody home.
A writer can phone it in by hand. They can hide behind jargon, refuse to take a position, sand off every opinion so nobody’s offended, and skip the failures because they’re embarrassing. What’s left is perfectly correct prose with no person in it. The soul critics like to pretend this only became possible in 2022. It’s been possible since the printing press.
Ask most people to tell their life story and the first version sounds like a résumé. Promoted here, moved there, married with two kids, retired. Every fact is accurate and none of it is alive. The life is in what they skip: the fight in the parking lot, the night they almost quit, the joke their father told at the worst possible funeral. In a memoir, my job is to dig those out.
So I deliberately ask about failures and setbacks in interviews. Readers want the ups and downs and how a person recovered. A sanitized story has no soul, and a sanitized story is exactly what most people tell first.
Where does the soul in a book come from?
From specifics only one person could supply. A name, a smell, a price, the wrong word somebody used that everybody remembers. Generic writing says the house was old. A writer with a soul in the page says the screen door had been patched with duct tape so many times it was more tape than screen. A machine can invent a screen door like that if you ask for one. It can’t know that your screen door was like that, or that your uncle did the patching and swore at it every time.
From opinions. A writer who’s willing to say “this was stupid” or “I loved her and she was wrong” puts himself on the page.
A writer who hedges every claim is hiding.
From the parts that hurt. Clients cry in my interviews all the time. When they do, I tell them the emotion belongs in the book, because the reader will feel it there too. The feeling is the soul. A book that never risks it never earns it.
From showing. Telling a reader your father was hard on you is information. Showing him making you redo the fence because one post was a quarter inch off is a life. I covered the mechanics in sensory details and in showing and telling, and my book Show Don’t Tell goes deeper.
None of those come from a prompt. They come from a person who was there, cared about it and decided to put it on the page.
Can a ghostwritten book have the author’s soul?
People ask me this, and it’s a fair question from a ghostwriter’s chair. If somebody else types the words, whose soul is on the page?
The client’s.
The soul comes from the particulars, and the particulars belong to the client. My job is to get them out. I do a lot of interviews up front, and I ask about the same thing several different ways, because people misremember, mix up events, and make things bigger or smaller than they were. Most of my questions are indirect. I ask about a trip, a house, a boss, a summer, and the details fall out of the stories they tell.
Writing in someone else’s voice means becoming them for a while. So it takes many hours of listening before I write the first chapter.
When it works, the client can feel it. One client cried reading her first chapter and told me I’d caught her perfectly. A memoir client said I’d caught his real voice and the real agony of the hard parts. I didn’t supply the agony. He lived it. I just refused to let it get smoothed out.
That’s the same test as everything else in this piece. A ghostwritten book with the client’s little human parts in it has a soul. A ghostwritten book that reads like a press release doesn’t, and that’s the ghostwriter’s failure.
Can editing take the soul out of writing?
Yes, and I hate watching it happen. A manuscript with a voice goes through a heavy-handed edit and comes back correct, smooth and dead. The odd phrasing is gone. The sentence that broke a grammar rule on purpose got fixed. The opinion got softened so nobody would complain. The author’s favorite word, the one he used a bit too much because it was his, got swapped for a synonym. Every change was defensible, and together they erased the person.
I write the way I feel, in the voice of the character and the story. Sometimes that’s grammatically correct and sometimes it’s wildly off, and I don’t write to the Chicago Manual of Style or anybody else’s rulebook. Rough edges carry a lot of the human parts. Sand all of them off and you’ve got a form letter again.
Is “AI has no soul” a fair argument against AI writing?
Against the one-prompt book, yes.
Against the writer who uses a tool for research, transcripts or a first look at structure and then writes the human parts themselves, no. That’s like saying a novel has no soul because the author used spell check.
The argument gets lazy when it’s aimed at the tool instead of the result. Nobody should care what sat on the desk. Ask whether a human being put his heart into the book. You can tell by reading it. The little human parts are either there or they aren’t.
And the people swinging the “soulless” accusation at every writer who’s ever opened an AI app should try reading their own prose with that test. Some of them wouldn’t like the answer.
The form letter and the real letter can have the same words in them, almost. The difference is the dog, the nickname and the coffee ring. If you’re writing a book, put those in. Put yourself in. That’s the soul, and nobody can supply it but you.
More on keeping your own voice in a book is in the AI and Writing Hub, and if you want help digging the human parts out of your own story, my ghostwriting work is built for that.
