Viewing: Notes » Director.
Director.
(17 minute read.)
Architects and bricklayers.
The suggestion of 'architect rather than bricklayer' is an important one. It's a different role than traditional authoring, but no less valuable. There've always been good books and bad books and everything in between. This will continue—whether written by human, or directed by human. This is a central point—the one that cuts through the anxiety that so often surrounds this topic.
The architect/bricklayer distinction is useful precisely because it reframes the debate. It moves us away from the fraught question of who did the labor and toward the more relevant question of what was built. No one standing before a cathedral asks whether the architect laid every stone; they ask whether the structure stands, whether it moves them, whether it holds meaning. The bricklayer’s skill is essential, but it is in service of a vision the bricklayer may not possess.
This is a different role, not a lesser one. In fact, one might argue that the role of the author has always tended toward architecture. The great novelists were rarely just virtuosic prose stylists—though some were—but rather masters of structure, character, pacing, and theme. They built worlds. The tools for rendering those worlds at the sentence level were simply bound up in the same role, by necessity. What changes now is that the necessity has dissolved. The architecture can be separated from the bricklaying.
The binary of good and bad will persist. The availability of a new tool does not flatten the distinction between skill and its absence. A director with a budget of a hundred million dollars can still make an incoherent film. An author with the most advanced AI can still produce something shallow, derivative, or structurally unsound. The tool amplifies intent; it does not supply it.
What’s genuinely interesting is that this separation may allow for a kind of refinement in how we think about literary value itself. If the sentence-level execution is no longer the primary locus of craft, then the architecture—the vision, the structure, the emotional logic, the thematic coherence—becomes more visible, more legible as the site of authorship. We may develop new vocabularies for evaluating work that is 'directed' rather than 'written,' just as film criticism developed its own language distinct from literary criticism.
The good books and bad books will continue. But we may find that the range of what is possible—the kinds of structures that can be attempted, the scales that can be managed, the voices that can be orchestrated—expands considerably. That seems less a loss than an opening.
I like to think—and I accept I may be very wrong about this—that the use of technology discussed here can ultimately be beneficial to us as humans.
It enables more good books to be created. If that increases the amount of knowledge or enjoyment in circulation with society, that's a good thing. And on an individual level, if it enables someone—as creator—to create a book which they otherwise couldn't, and that process and event brings them increased knowledge or joy or whatever, then that too is of course good.
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