I was reading an AI-generated story today. It was well-written technically, but lacked any spirit or writer’s voice. It went nowhere. It was full of hackneyed cliches.

Apparently, short story magazines (the few that remain) are being inundated by bland, machine-written texts in the hopes of making some easy money for their human masters. This reminds me of the occasional automated phone call I get on my cell phone, speaking Chinese, trying to trick me into giving them money.

Technology seems to be its own worst enemy. The human spirit, drenched in creativity, and focused on end-results, comes alive in the face of problems. New technologies are generated and these are then turned against the populace.

In China, face-scanning software monitors everyone. What a dystopian nightmare this is! There is no room to be an individual in that benighted country.

I wonder how you can be creative while you’re under observation all the time. True creativity requires a dose of privacy for best effect.

If I can’t be alone with my thoughts, what am I left with?

It is said that all humans are creative. In minor, quibbling ways, sure. But on any real demonstrable scale? No. True creativity is reserved for the elite, and often they wander off in nonprofitable directions that are high in the clouds.

The kind of creativity that makes bank is rare. It’s just not usual for commercial results to spring from the elite creative mind. Usually what you get is a kind of stylized blur. This is attractive to those who like blurs, but mystifying to everyone else.

I like that there will always be an elite among us, but the incentives must be there for them to perform on-target. Incentives matter tremendously. It is better to have a mass market economy providing incentives than a patron doling out rewards on an individual basis. I’d rather have New York publishing houses dictate who gets published than Jeff Bezos’ former haunt, Amazon and its Kindle program.

The path to success has to be a straight one. If there are too many curves, the bicycle-riding creative type falls off the mountain. If you are commercially talented, like Producer Red One of the music world was (he introduced himself to record company bigwigs and they went “okay, you’re a genius”), you will strive and emerge victorious. But if you have to prove yourself a hundred times you’re gonna fall off and plummet to your commercial doom. Creativity can’t save you then.

Stephen King was rejected a number of times for books such as “the Long Walk.” He had gotten to the embittered point where he thought only relatives and friends of publishing executives got their books out there in the marketplace. Then he wrote CARRIE. But if he had been rejected too many times more (too many curves) he might well have given up.

The truth is, the capitalists don’t know the creative marketplace as well as they suppose. For the longest time they thought you could only sell one book a year per author to the audience. Well now James Patterson produces 3 or 4 co-authored novels at a time for your viewing pleasure. King, who had to resort to pseudonym Richard Bachman to get the writing habit out of his veins, writes more than one novel a year, even in his advanced years when the impetus to write is weaker than when he was younger. Creativity knows no bounds.

There are differences in commercial potential. A good comparison would be the late Peter Straub with history’s Stephen King. Straub was always a cerebral writer, hitting the reader over the head with a linguistic hammer. His creativity was meant for the arts, with his poems and books like Marriages. He turned to horror reluctantly, it seems, borne by a need to make money. When he wrote The Throat or Koko, he was selling out to make his next rent payment on his New York rent-controlled flat.

By contrast, Stephen King was a natural writer. Even today, when he sucks, there is a bit of the old flair in his palsied, aged hands. His creativity was meant to turn a buck. This makes sense when you consider that he grew up in utter poverty in Maine. Poverty conditioned him. It solidified him. It pointed his creativity in a certain direction and kept it there for the next 6 decades…

Everyone seems to mock Stephen King. Peter Straub sneered that King “didn’t know sex.” John Grisham, another “friend,” complains that King’s books are “like bricks.” Why is it so impossible in this world to find a true friend? Why is it that even creative types have to embrace their abusers?

You can sell a billion books literally, like Danielle Steel, and win no applause from the press. She could fall into a giant blender and endure an agonizing death and they still wouldn’t have a kind word for her. I am not sure if women have creativity inherently or if it is somehow borrowed. If Steel is actually responsible for her own success, that surely must count for something. A billion books. And Agatha Christie sold two billion. Of course, Christie has had more time to sell the ole backlist, including Ten Little Indians / And Then There Were None, but Christie hasn’t been particularly celebrated either.

King is lucky because he hit a nerve. He appeared at just the right time and just the right place to begin a career leading to all those Arts medals and awards. His creativity was framed by gigantic History in an appealing way.

The creative artist will always be with us, as long as there is a technical civilization. Only a new Dark Age could put a stop to it. As long as the elite class keeps getting born, certain of its number will turn to the creative pursuits and make a go of it. We should support them as much as we can.