110. AI, Agency Decay, and the Messy Draft Worth Writing

Is AI quietly eroding your creative confidence? I’m sharing what I’m seeing in manuscripts as an editor, discussing the concept of “agency decay,” and making a case for why the messy, uncertain work of drafting is exactly where your writer’s voice gets made.

In this episode:

• Why AI-generated pages are recognizable to agents, editors, and book coaches
• What “agency decay” is and how it chips away at your creative confidence over time
• The difference between using AI as a tool vs. letting it replace your creative work
• 3 practical strategies to reclaim your voice and trust yourself on the page

For fiction writers, memoir writers, and anyone who’s been tempted to outsource the blank page, this one’s for you.

To find more on Nicole, visit nicolemeier.com

Transcript

TWW EP 110 - AI Erosion

[00:00:00] Nicole Meier: If you've used AI to generate your manuscript pages and hope an agent, editor, or publisher won't notice, you're going to be wrong. It's recognizable. It's also heartbreaking because what gets lost is the thing that makes a story authentically you. There's a difference between using AI as a tool that supports your work and AI as a replacement for the creativity that is your work

[00:00:34] Nicole Meier: Welcome to The Whole Writer, a place where we talk about what it means to show up as someone who's grounded in their voice, in their community, and in their creative path, even when the world tells them to hustle, compare, or conform. I'm Nicole Meier, a multi-published author and book coach who believes that nurturing the person behind the page is just as important as refining the words on it.

[00:00:59] Nicole Meier: In each episode, we'll explore the terrain of writing life with honesty, warmth, and practical wisdom, creating space for you to write from a place of wholeness rather than depletion. Whether you're drafting your first manuscript or publishing your fifth book, you'll find conversation and companionship for the journey here.

[00:01:21] Nicole Meier: So settle in, bring your questions and your curiosity, and let's discover together what it means to write and live with authenticity and purpose

[00:01:34] Nicole Meier: Hi there, writers. I went back and forth about how I wanted to do today's episode. AI and writing is a topic that has a way of bringing out strong opinions fast, and I'm aware that wherever I land, I run the risk of alienating someone. Writers who feel like AI is a lifeline, writers who feel like AI is a threat, people who are somewhere in the middle trying to figure out what they actually think.

[00:02:02] Nicole Meier: I get it. I'm still figuring out what I think, too. And on top of that, I'm realistic about how quickly this conversation is evolving. What's true about AI and the writing landscape today may look very different six months from now, a year from now. So anything I say here comes with that caveat built in But here's what finally pushed me to press record.

[00:02:26] Nicole Meier: It started to bleed into the work I do with other writers. As an editor and a coach, I'm seeing obvious use of AI in some of the manuscripts that cross my desk now, and at a certain point, I couldn't justify staying quiet about something I'm watching happen in real time. So here we go. I actually addressed this directly in a recent Substack note, and I want to read it to you because I think it's the right place to start this conversation.

[00:02:53] Nicole Meier: Here's what I wrote. "If you've used AI to generate your manuscript pages and hope an agent, editor, or publisher won't notice, you're going to be wrong. I've worked with hundreds of novel writers over the years, and sadly, I'm beginning to see AI bleed into the work more and more. It's recognizable. It's also heartbreaking because what gets lost is the thing that makes a story authentically you.

[00:03:20] Nicole Meier: Please trust your creative intuition enough to write the messy draft yourself. Strengthening it can always come later in the feedback and revision stage." That's what I wrote, and I meant every word of it, and boy, did people respond. And yes, while the topic brings up strong emotions for people, I do think there's a more nuanced question underneath it all, and that's the question of motivation.

[00:03:46] Nicole Meier: All right, to begin, I use AI regularly, and I'm not apologetic about it. I use it to analyze data like where my client leads are coming from. I use it to help me find SEO-friendly keywords for my podcast descriptions on Apple and Spotify and YouTube so that the show actually gets discovered by people it's meant for.

[00:04:07] Nicole Meier: I use it to research writers' conferences, figuring out which ones align with where I want to teach and what I want to offer. I use it for backend tasks that used to eat up hours of my week. AI has made my business more efficient, full stop. So when I say I'm worried about AI in the writing space, I'm not coming at this from a place of fear or technophobia.

[00:04:27] Nicole Meier: I'm actually coming at it from a place of love, love for the craft and love for the writers I work with. The distinction I keep coming back to is this. There's a difference between using AI as a tool that supports your work and AI as a replacement for the creativity that is your work. When I use AI to pull together conference research, I'm still the one deciding where I want to go and why.

[00:04:52] Nicole Meier: I'm still exercising judgment. I'm still in the driver's seat. When a writer uses AI to generate their manuscript pages, something very different is happening, and that's what I want to focus more on today. Okay, I did a little digging recently, and I came across something that gave language to the worry I've been carrying.

[00:05:12] Nicole Meier: Researchers have identified a phenomenon they're calling, quote, "agency decay". It sounds kind of spooky, right? So here's how it works. When people outsource creative and analytical tasks to AI, tasks that require real thinking, real problem-solving, real decision-making, their own skills in those areas begin to atrophy, like muscles you stop using.

[00:05:37] Nicole Meier: And what follows is lower confidence, a reduced sense of ownership over ideas, and a creeping dependence on the tool to do heavy lifting. Agency decay. Whew. I think about that phrase in the context of novel writing and memoir writing, and honestly, it breaks my heart a little. Because here's what I know from working with writers for as long as I have.

[00:06:03] Nicole Meier: The messy, uncertain, sometimes agonizing work of drafting is where your voice gets made. That's where you find out what you actually have to say and think about your characters. That's where the surprising moments happen, the ones that even you didn't see coming. That's where the story becomes yours.

[00:06:24] Nicole Meier: When you hand that process over to AI, you don't just get a mediocre draft. You miss the experience, I really want to emphasize that, the experience of discovering what you're capable of. And over time, if researchers are right about agency decay, you start to doubt whether you were ever capable of it at all.

[00:06:45] Nicole Meier: That's the real cost. Not just a flat manuscript, a writer who no longer trusts themselves. Let me be specific about what I mean when I say I can recognize AI-generated pages, because I think it's useful for you to hear this. It's in the prose, maybe even in the hook. It's always quite polished on the surface and holds me on this weird generic kind of surface as a reader, and there are patterns.

[00:07:15] Nicole Meier: The sentence-level writing tends to be even, but too even. Human writers, on the other hand, have rhythmic variation, sentences that speed up when the tension rises and slow down in the quiet moments, that break the rules. They feel intentional. AI-generated prose often has a kind of like metronomic quality to them.

[00:07:37] Nicole Meier: After a while, it reads nice, but artificial, no pun intended. There tends to be zero character interiority. Even when a writer has given me a strong sense of their protagonist and their query or in their notes, the voice on the pages, those feel generic to me, like a composite of every character who's ever been written, rather than this specific person and this specific story.

[00:08:04] Nicole Meier: And often, emotional beats land wrong. There's often technically correct emotional vocabulary. You know, the characters are feeling things, though not a lot, and they react to things, but the texture or the rawness of those emotions is definitely missing. The way a real person's grief or joy or fury is complicated and contradictory and sometimes surprising, that specificity is missing, and that specificity is you.

[00:08:35] Nicole Meier: It comes from your life, your lived experiences, your willingness to sit with something uncomfortable until you figure out how to put it on the page. AI doesn't have that. It can imitate the shape of it, but not the substance. That has to come from you. I want to stay in a place of compassion here because I don't think writers who are using AI for their drafts are lazy or careless.

[00:09:02] Nicole Meier: I think they're scared. Writing a novel or memoir is terrifying. The scope of it is daunting, and the act of pouring yourself out onto the page, we all know it's very vulnerable. Our inner critic is relentless, and the fear that what you put on the page won't be good enough is real, and it's loud. Then along comes AI with a seductive solution for that fear.

[00:09:27] Nicole Meier: It gives you content. It removes the uncertainty of staring down a blank page. It generates something that looks on the surface like progress, but what it actually does is deprive you of the very experience that would build your confidence as a writer. You don't get stronger by avoiding the hard thing.

[00:09:46] Nicole Meier: You get stronger by doing it imperfectly, messily, slowly, and finding out that you survived it. We write not only to connect but to make sense of the human condition. That's a huge part of the process, and it's how we grow as creatives. And this happens from draft number one onward. The first draft doesn't have to be good.

[00:10:10] Nicole Meier: I say this to my clients constantly. It just has to exist. It has to be yours. When you let AI generate some or all of your draft, you're solving for the wrong problem. The goal isn't to have pages. It's to become the writer who can write those pages, and that only happens one way. So let's end here with something concrete, something positive, because I don't want to leave you in the worry.

[00:10:38] Nicole Meier: I don't want to leave you without a way forward. If you've been second-guessing yourself, if you've been tempted to let AI carry more of the creative weight than it should, if you felt that slow erosion of confidence in your own instincts, here are three things I can offer. Number one, give yourself permission to write badly.

[00:11:01] Nicole Meier: That sounds so simple and cliché. Everyone says it right, but it's not easy. It might be the most important thing I can offer you. The imposter syndrome that pushes you toward AI is the same inner critic that tells you your first draft has to be pretty dang good. Guess what? It doesn't. No one's first draft is good.

[00:11:23] Nicole Meier: Believe me. I'm saying that as an author and as someone who's worked with hundreds of writers. First drafts are how you find the story. It's how you find your voice. So maybe try setting a timer for twenty minutes and writing with no intention of keeping what you produce. Without judgment or self-editing, what comes out might surprise you.

[00:11:45] Nicole Meier: It's likely going to be messy and weird, but it will be yours, and you can work with it. All right, idea number two, reconnect with your why. Agency decay, remember those words, happens when the task feels mechanical, when writing starts to feel like something you have to get through rather than something that matters to you.

[00:12:08] Nicole Meier: So go back to the source. Why are you writing this story? What is it about these characters, this world, this particular question that won't leave you alone? Write that down. Keep it somewhere, and when the fear or the doubt creeps in, read it back to yourself. Reconnecting with your why is one of the most powerful antidotes to creative paralysis I know And then idea number three, lower the stakes of the session, not the story.

[00:12:38] Nicole Meier: One reason writers freeze and one reason AI starts to look appealing is that the whole book feels overwhelming. If you're sitting down to write and you're thinking about all two or three hundred pages ahead of you, of course, the blankness feels unbearable. So try shrinking the container, not the story, just the session.

[00:12:59] Nicole Meier: So maybe today you'll just write this one scene, or just figure out what your character wants in this one moment. Small, specific, achievable things. You're not writing a whole novel today, you're writing the next thing. That shift in scale can make an enormous difference in what you're willing to try and in how much of yourself you're willing to put on the page.

[00:13:24] Nicole Meier: Writers, here's what I encourage you to hold from this conversation today. I personally am not against AI. I use it. I'll keep using it, and I think it has genuine value in the right context. Don't come at me for that. That is my own belief. But on the same hand, I am fiercely protective of your creative voice, and your creative voice lives in the places where you struggle, where you surprise yourself, where you sit with the blankness long enough for something real to emerge.

[00:13:57] Nicole Meier: No tool can do that for you. No tool should do that for you. Trust yourself enough to write that messy draft. Trust yourself enough to be imperfect. Trust yourself enough to show up again and again with your own ideas, your own instincts, your own irreplaceable way of seeing the world, because that is the thing no robot or mechanism can replicate, and that is the thing your readers are waiting for.

[00:14:27] Nicole Meier: Writers, thank you for being with me today on The Whole Writer. If this episode or message resonated with you, I really want to hear from you. You can find me over on Substack. That's where I'm living these days. And if you know a writer who needs to hear this today, please share it with them. Until next time, keep writing, keep trusting yourself, and keep being the whole writer you already are.

[00:14:51] Nicole Meier: I'll see you next time.

[00:14:57] Nicole Meier: If you want to check out my coaching programs for fiction writers, visit nicolemeier.com. That's M-E-I-E-R. And if you like this episode, I'd love you to take a minute to leave a rating and review for this podcast. This will help more writers like you to discover the show and to get going on their writing journey.

[00:15:17] Nicole Meier: Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, happy writing, everyone