The goal of this page is simple: provide resources to help you write. But that's also ridiculously complex. Are you a poet or a novelist? Do you prefer imagining fictional worlds, or expressing the life you live every day? Do you write only for yourself, or do you want the world to know your words?
And so this project: an introductory guide to help you find resources that will help you write, regardless of your past writing experience or your genre preferences.
I started 12Writing back in 2007, soon after leaving the army. At the time, I was idealistic and inexperienced — I had this idea that I would offer free online writing workshops, and that I would be able to provide the ideal classroom experience. I didn't fully understand the internet, and I didn't know nearly as much about writing or teaching as I thought I did. So I crept forward with these goals, starting a blog and then uploading classroom management software to my own website. It was complicated work that took a lot of time — time I didn't have. It became less of a "plan" and more of a side hobby. I still needed a day job to pay the bills — but I was lucky. Between the G.I. Bill and teaching assistantships, grad school became my day job. And that carried me into leading workshops and adjuncting and a few years teaching high school language arts. I followed my writing dreams, but they didn't carry me to the "fame" or "success" I'd always dreamed of — and those dreams sure didn't build me a website.
For many of us, this is how writing works. We start with ideas. We have goals. But the time? The income to cover rent and groceries? A writing group that offers feedback and encouragement? Those feel like luxuries. In the creative writing workshops I teach, I've met so many writers who've had to wait until retirement before focusing their writing journey. Among my college students, I've met so many young people who simply can't picture themselves as writers — even when they're writing beautiful paragraphs or posting their stories on fan fiction websites.
This is why I've returned some focus to the website. For my students, I need a resource I can customize for each individual author. Something that encourages you regardless of where you are in your writing journey, whatever your genres of preference.
I'm a science fiction writer who literally snuck my way into grad school, and I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on memoir and rhetoric. I served in the U.S. Army for five years as an Arabic linguist — and trust me, the job was far less exciting than it sounds. But I got to serve in the 82nd Airborne Division, and I spent ten months in Afghanistan. Compared to many, I was lucky — my deployment was pretty boring. But that doesn't mean the military was easy — and life has been pretty stressful ever since. My hope is that I can help you find space in your life for more writing just as I found space in mine.
It's sad that I have to write an AI policy for a creative writing website, but this is the world we live in. Fundamentally, this is what I believe about writing:
A computer can't do your thinking for you.
You should never pass off someone else's work as your own.
We need to acknowledge the individual contributions made by authors, artists, and researchers.
Today's large language models (LLMs) causes real problems on both these points. Yes, you can use AI in ethical and responsible ways, but I have serious issues with how we often use them today. This is partly because people aren't fully aware of how today's "AI" actually works. Though we call them "artificial intelligence," they haven't actually reached the level of "intelligence." An LLM like ChatGPT is simply a more sophisticated version of the search engines we've been using for years. LLMs function by scanning some selection of material — usually from the open internet — and then assigning numerical values to all the words and images they gather into a database. Whenever you enter a prompt for your favorite AI, the processors assign numerical values to all the words in your question — and then produce responses that numerically line up your prompt with information from that vast database.
Yes, I'm oversimplifying a bit, but it's important to remember that AI is not "thinking" for itself like a human being. Instead, it's scraping together information from all across the internet — information that's been composed by countless human authors, artists, and researchers — and then reassembling all that data to give you a customized response to any prompt. The AI isn't "creating" knowledge — it's digesting existing information and then regurgitating it, usually without acknowledging the original human authors. Also, the AI has no reliable way to choose between "good" and "bad" information. It can list off multiple perspectives on a topic, and it can give you the accepted knowledge it finds from the majority of its sources, but these LLMs don't actually have lives. They don't know what it means to follow the wrong advice, make mistakes, or fail.
This is why I don't use AI in my writing, and I avoid using it in my research. I look for information produced by people who've actually been there — individual writers and teachers who know how it feels to struggle at the keyboard in that difficult search for words. My goal is to provide somethign that AI can't provide: my own insights, followed up with my recommendations for books, activities, and other materials produced by people who've also sat in the place where you are right now.
Now, this is not to say that AI is entirely wrong or bad. I find it's summaries of Amazon reviews extremely helpful when I'm choosing how best to feed my money into the capitalist vending machine currently drowning our planet in landfill.