I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment | AI (artificial intelligence)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/10/fiction-writing-professor-ai
Publish Date: 2026-05-10 09:00:00
Source Domain: www.theguardian.com
I have been teaching fiction writing at MIT since 2017. Many of my students last wrote fiction in middle school, and very few have experienced a proper workshop, so at the start of every semester I offer these directions for writer and reader alike:
double quotation markRead the story at least twice. Mark what works and what doesn’t – underline great sentences, flag clunky syntax, gaps in logic and unrealistic dialogue. Ask yourself: does the story work? Why or why not? What could improve it? Answer in a signed letter to the author, attached to their story. Give your honest opinions. Remember that an effective peer review demands close reading of the text accompanied by a boldness of spirit.
As the directions foreshadow, most of the time we’re discussing why we didn’t like the story being workshopped, because writing a good story is immensely difficult even under the best conditions, especially for Stem-centric undergrads who thrive within a structure of quantitative problems and solutions – systems where there’s a right answer and a clean method for arriving at it.
Fiction writing isn’t quantitative. Good writing feels good to read; bad writing feels bad. An effective workshop is a paradox: students must provide textual evidence to support the qualitative as if it were the quantitative. This is a terrifying prospect for the habitually superb student, to sit in stony silence while their classmates and professor slash at their work. The act of confronting that terror is, itself, an education for the writer, because writing is both vehicle and vessel for thinking – abstract made concrete, feelings translated into words. This is what many writers talk about when they refer to good prose as not just poetic expression, but communication. Thus, when we criticize a writer’s work, not only are we criticizing their aesthetic choices, we’re also criticizing – and here’s where it can get personal – the writer’s feelings and their ability to…
