Nobody Writes Alone

Ever since people found out how this book was put together, one question keeps coming back to me: "So a machine wrote it?" Fair enough. I want to give it a straight answer, and the honest answer starts long before any machine, because few serious books are written entirely alone. Here is the record first, then the facts of mine.

In 1929, by his editor's own account, a manuscript of half a million words landed at Charles Scribner's Sons. Maxwell Perkins read every page of it, then sat with Thomas Wolfe and cut the thing down to size, scene by scene. What came out of those sessions was Look Homeward, Angel. The name on the cover stayed Wolfe's. It always does.¹

A year later, children started reading mysteries by Carolyn Keene, the author of Nancy Drew. There was no Carolyn Keene. The Stratemeyer Syndicate mailed out plot outlines of two or three pages, and Mildred Wirt Benson expanded them into full books - 23 of the first 30 - for a flat fee per book, signing away every right she had.²

In 1956 Senator John F. Kennedy published Profiles in Courage, and it won the Pulitzer Prize. Decades afterwards, his speechwriter Ted Sorensen admitted in his own memoir that he had written a first draft of most of the chapters.³

James Patterson, described by the Washington Post as the world's best-selling author, runs what is effectively a small studio. Patterson builds the detailed outline; a co-writer drafts the chapters, which must be short; and when the two of them disagree, the last word is his.⁴

In 2023 Prince Harry published Spare. The man who actually held the pen, J.R. Moehringer, was reportedly paid $1 million for the job - the same man who had written Andre Agassi's Open and Phil Knight's Shoe Dog.⁵

That is a century of publishing, and the division of labour never really moved. Gathering, drafting and testing could always be hired in. What readers actually argued about, every single time, was a much shorter question: who did the judging?

Then the help learned to type for itself.

In 1984 a program called Racter produced The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed, which was published as an ordinary paperback: a book credited to a machine and sold as an ordinary paperback.⁶ In 2016 a team at Future University Hakodate entered stories co-written with their own program for Japan's Hoshi Shinichi literary award, one entry cheekily titled The Day a Computer Writes a Novel. It got through the first of four judging rounds, and the organisers later disclosed that eleven of the 2,561 submissions had been written with computer help.⁷ In 2018 Ross Goodwin bolted a camera, a GPS unit, a microphone and a clock to a Cadillac and drove from New York to New Orleans while a neural network printed the novel as it happened, line by line, on receipt paper. The result is called 1 the Road.⁸ In 2020 K Allado-McDowell spent a fortnight in conversation with the language model GPT-3 and published the exchange as Pharmako-AI - described by its author as the first book co-created with that model.⁹ In late 2022 a San Francisco product manager put together a children's picture book, Alice and Sparkle, over a single weekend - ChatGPT wrote the words, Midjourney drew the pictures - and put it straight on sale. Illustrators were furious.¹⁰ And in 2023 the novelist Stephen Marche published a crime novella, Death of an Author, and says openly that 95 per cent of its text came out of AI tools.¹¹

Look across those shelves for a moment: experimental fiction, prize short stories, a road novel, philosophy, a picture book, a crime story. There is an AI book sitting in almost every section of the bookshop now.

Most of those were experiments, of course - the machine's output was the whole point of the exercise. But a second, quieter kind of AI book has appeared alongside them, one where the machine is not the point at all. The thinking is the point; the machine is only the help. The difference between the two is not the tool. It is who reads, who judges and who decides.

Now the facts of my own book, set down the way the book itself sets them down.

I am a civil engineer by profession. The writing filled the hours a working life leaves behind, and it took five years. The book cites 498 distinct works. It carries 584 numbered endnotes. I checked the sources against the originals and verified the quotations. That hunting, claim by claim, is where most of the five years went. In an age of AI hallucination a reference has to be hunted back to its source before it can be trusted. That hunting, claim by claim, is where most of the five years actually went.

Inside that work, AI did the jobs the hired help used to do: it gathered material, tested arguments, collected facts and assisted in the writing. I reviewed what it produced, and it was never once left to decide. The reading, the judging and the deciding were not delegated. The argument, the cases, the opinions and any errors are mine.

So, the straight answer. A machine did not write this book. But then few people write a book worth reading entirely alone, and what I replaced was the help: the researcher, the typist, the sparring partner an earlier author would have paid for. Not the author - the authorship was never on offer. The method that made this book is the method it teaches. Use every tool to your advantage; depend on none of them.

What Are We Missing? is planned for 13 February 2027. The sources are listed in full, and free to download. Check them - that is what they are for.