When my last agent left the industry I found myself returning to the question of "What is the point of being an author?" Crucially that question is not: what is the point of the creative process?

I should know the answer to this, considering I spent three years working towards that goal with my non-fiction book on OCD and disgust. Several in-depth rewrites, two agents and a chorus of "not for us right now" from publishers all culminated in polite disinterest from my most recent agent’s colleagues.

I had believed wholeheartedly in the idea and wanted it sold so I could dive in deeper and eventually have something that was fully mine published. But at that last rejection I was hit with startling clarity that in its current form and at my current stage in life the book just wasn’t working. The vision I had, pushing me forward for three years, had dissipated and I was left reckoning with the question of why I so dearly wanted to ’be an author’.

The author is a cultural figure that looms large in spaces that matter to many of us – for features journalists like me, the 2010s made becoming one seem like a right of passage. For the past nine years in newsrooms I have seen proofs pile up written by people I admire as well as known names with notable followings. Colleagues with bylines at similar media companies announced signing with agents, or else there were books of essays that retrod ground that we covered daily. Some were excellent, some were dross, and I felt that when the right idea came along it would inevitably be my turn.

To ’be an author’ felt like a kind of validation that made the constantly shifting media landscape feel less treacherous. I do not know if that is really true (obviously), but when, as a journalist, you are writing based on the sell and then filling in the gaps every day, authorship would validate that my own work, independent of key performance indicators (KPIs), had merit. It was so enticing.

And so, despite the fact that the majority of people are not authors, my inability to sell a book looked in certain lights like failure. It bruised my ego that I didn’t have the following that opened the door to any old idea, or a concept on which publishers’ deemed worth taking a chance. In the moment, it stung.

But once that moment passed it gave me sudden lucidity. I was reminded that, at least for me, the failure and the grunt work and the draining back and forth of writing is the point – not the name on the spine at the end of it. 

At least for me, the failure and the grunt work and the draining back and forth of writing is the point, not the name on the spine at the end of it 

I’ve been thinking about this recently in light of various AI/publishing controversies. If I really wanted to be an author, by hook or by crook, I could throw my proposal into a language-learning model and ask it to make it more saleable. Maybe give it a more obvious audience or an easier buy-in. But I am completely disinterested in this because it would undermine everything that I enjoyed about the process – the grunt work, the teasing out ideas, the grasping for turns of phrase.

Those who use AI to not just research but write whole books are, I suspect, doing so because they want to bypass the failure. And I understand that – it hurts to have work ultimately go nowhere and languish in a Google Drive, to have had that conviction drain away. Why wouldn’t you let that work be algorithmically massaged so as to be saleable and get to write your self-congratulatory acknowledgements page?

But that failure is the point. The act of putting the words on the page (what AI can do) is only one part of the process and in some ways the least interesting: those words get their resonance from the research and thinking and teasing with you so before, and the editing and reworking that comes after. The invisible work of writing is what AI cannot generate and is the most valuable thing I have taken from this experience.

It is embarrassing to say publicly that I believed in something wholeheartedly and it simply didn’t make the cut for the market right now. But I don’t mind saying it because I want to embrace that ‘failure’ rather than acquiesce to the suggestion of ‘enhancing’ my work with AI.

There have been times, I will admit, that I fantasised about book events where I finally get to talk about these ideas or having people tell me they enjoyed this project I have laboured over. And it is naive to pretend that isn’t what motivates people to seek out book deals. It wasn’t my whole goal, sure, but it was in the mix.

But, unlike this time last year, I feel perfectly comfortable not chasing it anymore, maybe revisiting it one day if inspiration sparks again.