I used to write three pages before I knew what I was thinking. That was the deal. Bad sentences in service of finding the good one. Tangents that taught you which direction was actually home.
AI removed that step. I describe the shape of what I want, and a competent draft arrives in seconds. Cleaner than mine. Often better than mine. And something is missing that I can't quite name.
I think it's this: the bad first draft was the only place I met myself. The wrong word told me what the right one was. The clichéd opening forced the one that wasn't. The lost hour between page one and page three was not waste — it was the room where the thinking happened.
We didn't write rough drafts because we were inefficient. We wrote them because thinking is what writing badly produces. Skip the bad writing and you skip the thinking. You arrive at a finished page with nothing on the other side of it.
I don't want to go back. The drafts cost me hours I won't get back, and most of them deserved to be cut. But I'm trying to find the shape of what they were doing for me — the discipline of being wrong on the page, in front of myself, with no one watching.
Maybe what I'm looking for is a place to be confused on purpose. A friction the tool can't smooth away. The model arrives polished. The mind that uses the model still has to find its own way to be rough. Otherwise the writing is done and the writer never showed up.
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