The Creative Writing Classroom as a Defense of Human MessinessA few months ago, I ran a creative writing workshop on description. I asked students to write about a moment of arrival: stepping into a place for the first time. They wrote quietly for twenty minutes, then we shared pieces aloud. The first student described entering a hospital room, another wrote about moving to Rome, another about coming home after years away. Then one student, grinning, read a piece she freely admitted had been written almost entirely by an AI tool. I had given her permission to do so, just to see what kind of trouble it might stir up. The writing was fluent and polished. When she finished, there was a pause. One of her classmates said, “It’s good, but I can’t feel anyone in it.”That remark,  I can’t feel anyone in it,  might be the clearest expression of what is at stake when a tool can build a world before you’ve even had time to think.We are no longer only writing for clarity or insight. We are writing for presence. It wasn’t an isolated moment. At a seminar in Florence, a student waited until the room had emptied before she approached me. She was thoughtful, visibly uneasy. “I’ve been using AI to help me write my stories,” she said. “It gives me ideas, but I don’t know if any of them are really mine.” She paused. “It feels like cheating… but it also feels like the only way I can start.” Her honesty stayed with me, partly because it captures a tension I’ve seen growing among young writers, but also because it touched something I’ve been noticing in my own life as an author and freelance writer. Outside the classroom, the act of writing has changed almost overnight. The value of producing a carefully shaped piece of work (a story, an article, even a book) sits in a different cultural light than it did a decade ago. When my brother joked recently in our family WhatsApp chat, “Why are you still writing books? Just ask the thing,” it landed like a small stone in my throat. I knew it wasn’t an insult, but a sign of how quickly expectations are shifting. For years, I was the family’s writer and editor. When I published a story, an article, or an edition of my book on Abruzzo, there was an understanding that the work came from a human being who had paid deep attention: the slow stitching-together of thought, the choices behind every line. That sense of craft once felt obvious to all who wrote and read, even taken for granted. Now I sometimes wonder how to explain that value, my own continued enthusiasm for the craft of writing, in a moment when a readable page can be produced in seconds. All of this keeps steering me back to one question: what does it mean to write honestly when the tools around us can mimic almost anything except the messy details of a person’s inner life? Trying to write with AI hovering in the background feels like its own odd contradiction. On one hand, AI tools have opened extraordinary possibilities. There is no doubt about it. They can give language back to people who have long felt excluded from it. On the other hand, as Pasolini once warned, technology tends to flatten what is most human in us: that slow, almost treacherous labour of taking experience and trying to give it shape. The very thing that makes writing human. In fact, Pasolini’s Rome was the opposite of flattening anything. It was jagged, restless. His novels, like Ragazzi di Vita, exhibit the full of contradictions of the city that still refuse to be tidied up. He found his stories in the fierce edges of Rome: the borgate, the street dialects. When I think about what we risk losing now, I often think of that Rome: a city where language grew out of social friction, where voices scraped against each other and produced something unmistakably alive. The algorithm, by contrast, smooths everything down. It removes the very grit Pasolini believed was necessary for truth to survive. Rome, of course, teaches different lessons to different writers. Students arrive here holding the very human mix of excitement and fear, and- as I have witnessed- this spills into their writing almost immediately. They walk through the double doors at Fiumicino and into a veil of cigarette smoke and sharp sunlight, with men drifting past whispering “taxi, taxi” like they’re performing a spell. They’re quickly caught between wanting to belong and realising they don’t, not yet. I have witnessed that tension become part of their work. AI can sketch a postcard version of Rome, but it can’t write from the feeling of arriving here and realising the city is larger than whatever plans you have for it. It can’t capture the private, awkward moment when a place begins to change you. That interior shift is where the writing actually begins. I’ve felt the anxiety underneath the way some talk about this, especially those of us who came of age with a library thesaurus in our backpacks. I find myself more curious than afraid, listening as the same questions continue to surface: If a machine can generate a good sentence…what is left for us to do? If it can imagine a story…where does that leave imagination itself? I have struggled with this line of thinking, in a way that is existential. I’ve felt that unease—though not in the muted, don’t-say-it-out-loud panic I sense around me. In conversations with colleagues, at my own desk planning lessons, I keep returning to the same realisation: there is a shared sense of loss, but I’m not mourning anything. Writing still does what it has always done, and I see proof of that in the classroom every day. The work we’ve devoted our lives to (teaching language, shaping stories, helping others find their voice) can feel precarious right now. It’s easy to imagine we’re witnessing the slow fading of something vital. People talk of a slow erasure of the part of our humanity that once defined our excitement and enthusiasm for sitting at our desks drowning in scrunched-up bits of paper. The reality is that the creative writing classroom has become even more essential than ever before. It is one of the few places left where language can breathe. In my classes, we sit together, we read work aloud. We listen to how a sentence feels in the mouth. We evaluate, we judge. We talk about rhythm, silence, image, emotion. These deliberate acts have taken on a new significance: they are small gestures of opposition, and they are exciting. They are the ways in which we remind one another that writing still begins with the human experience. And that is exactly the point. This is what matters; this is where we will find connection. The page is an extension of our lives, not just a surface for randomly-generated content: “Hey, Pilot! Write me a metaphor…” When I first began teaching creative writing, most of my energy went into helping students believe they had something worth saying. The question was always how to help them listen to their own thoughts, how to draw on their memories, how to find images that carried some emotional truth. Those core elements are still present, though now we add another layer. The question has shifted somewhat. The work is also to help them know why to write at all. In a world where anyone can produce a readable story with a few prompts, the act of writing must be justified not by output but by the intention behind it, the impulse that drives it. Readers, even novice ones, are beginning to sense when there is a human being behind the words. We can tell when characterisation has been worked hunched over a desk littered by coloured post-it notes. Readers want warmth, imperfection. That strange, whacky logic of being human, of holding multiple emotions or truths at once. The smoother the synthetic language becomes, the more we will crave and gravitate towards those imperfections. As I say to my students, Rome refuses to be streamlined or flattened, which is precisely why it pushes them back toward the slow, irregular act of noticing all that is the city’s structure and chaos. It reminds them that the world is not made of polished sentences, but of fragments. Writers have always adapted to whatever tools we come up with. Everything from the typewriter to word processing to social media. But this is the first time the tool can imitate the art itself. And we cannot ignore that. But we can also remember that which the machine cannot replace: the depth of consciousness that makes writing an act of connection between one human and another. Our task is no longer simply to produce original stories…but to help writers understand why their stories exist at all, and why they might matter to others. So what do we do with all this? We keep going. We write. We notice. Then we do it all over again. As a teacher of fiction, I’ve come to see the role of creative writing education as being in defence of human messiness. Not by policing technology (we can’t!), but by deepening our relationship with experience, and letting it guide us across the lines of our notebooks. The real question is not whether AI can write, but whether we can still recognise what writing is for, and what’s at stake when we prompt technology to pump out our sentences. When I read student work, I look for the moments when something true breaks through. It might be a single image, or a line that lifts off the page. Those moments are small, but they matter. They remind me that writing is still one of the few spaces where a person can think in public, where vulnerability becomes art. In an AI world, that kind of risk may become rarer, but also more valuable. Machines can simulate patterns of thought, but they cannot crave, they cannot mourn, and they certainly cannot long for someone. They can only brush against the surface of these emotions.  At its core, writing is a way of being present in the world and with ourselves. It allows us to process our experiences and to find coherence amid all the uncertainty. And maybe this piece is proof of that: me untangling my own thoughts on the page, draft after draft, feeling my way forward, one sentence at a time. I sometimes tell my students that writing can help us live in the world with greater honesty and vulnerability. In the years ahead, when language becomes ever more accessible, people will not come to creative writing for information or content. They will come, and stay, to recognise themselves in it. To feel that somewhere, in another person’s words, their own experience has been understood. by  Luciano Di Gregorio Adjunct Professor, American University of Rome  

A few months ago, I ran a creative writing workshop on description. I asked students to write about a moment of arrival: stepping into a place for the first time. They wrote quietly for twenty minutes, then we shared pieces aloud. The first student described entering a hospital room, another wrote about moving to Rome, another about coming home after years away. Then one student, grinning, read a piece she freely admitted had been written almost entirely by an AI tool. I had given her permission to do so, just to see what kind of trouble it might stir up. The writing was fluent and polished. When she finished, there was a pause. One of her classmates said, “It’s good, but I can’t feel anyone in it.”That remark,  I can’t feel anyone in it,  might be the clearest expression of what is at stake when a tool can build a world before you’ve even had time to think. We are no longer only writing for clarity or insight. We are writing for presence. It wasn’t an isolated moment. At a seminar in Florence, a student waited until the room had emptied before she approached me. She was thoughtful, visibly uneasy. “I’ve been using AI to help me write my stories,” she said. “It gives me ideas, but I don’t know if any of them are really mine.” She paused. “It feels like cheating… but it also feels like the only way I can start.” Her honesty stayed with me, partly because it captures a tension I’ve seen growing among young writers, but also because it touched something I’ve been noticing in my own life as an author and freelance writer. Outside the classroom, the act of writing has changed almost overnight. The value of producing a carefully shaped piece of work (a story, an article, even a book) sits in a different cultural light than it did a decade ago. When my brother joked recently in our family WhatsApp chat, “Why are you still writing books? Just ask the thing,” it landed like a small stone in my throat. I knew it wasn’t an insult, but a sign of how quickly expectations are shifting. For years, I was the family’s writer and editor. When I published a story, an article, or an edition of my book on Abruzzo, there was an understanding that the work came from a human being who had paid deep attention: the slow stitching-together of thought, the choices behind every line. That sense of craft once felt obvious to all who wrote and read, even taken for granted. Now I sometimes wonder how to explain that value, my own continued enthusiasm for the craft of writing, in a moment when a readable page can be produced in seconds. All of this keeps steering me back to one question: what does it mean to write honestly when the tools around us can mimic almost anything except the messy details of a person’s inner life? Trying to write with AI hovering in the background feels like its own odd contradiction. On one hand, AI tools have opened extraordinary possibilities. There is no doubt about it. They can give language back to people who have long felt excluded from it. On the other hand, as Pasolini once warned, technology tends to flatten what is most human in us: that slow, almost treacherous labour of taking experience and trying to give it shape. The very thing that makes writing human. In fact, Pasolini’s Rome was the opposite of flattening anything. It was jagged, restless. His novels, like Ragazzi di Vita, exhibit the full of contradictions of the city that still refuse to be tidied up. He found his stories in the fierce edges of Rome: the borgate, the street dialects. When I think about what we risk losing now, I often think of that Rome: a city where language grew out of social friction, where voices scraped against each other and produced something unmistakably alive. The algorithm, by contrast, smooths everything down. It removes the very grit Pasolini believed was necessary for truth to survive. Rome, of course, teaches different lessons to different writers. Students arrive here holding the very human mix of excitement and fear, and- as I have witnessed- this spills into their writing almost immediately. They walk through the double doors at Fiumicino and into a veil of cigarette smoke and sharp sunlight, with men drifting past whispering “taxi, taxi” like they’re performing a spell. They’re quickly caught between wanting to belong and realising they don’t, not yet. I have witnessed that tension become part of their work. AI can sketch a postcard version of Rome, but it can’t write from the feeling of arriving here and realising the city is larger than whatever plans you have for it. It can’t capture the private, awkward moment when a place begins to change you. That interior shift is where the writing actually begins. I’ve felt the anxiety underneath the way some talk about this, especially those of us who came of age with a library thesaurus in our backpacks. I find myself more curious than afraid, listening as the same questions continue to surface: If a machine can generate a good sentence…what is left for us to do? If it can imagine a story…where does that leave imagination itself? I have struggled with this line of thinking, in a way that is existential. I’ve felt that unease—though not in the muted, don’t-say-it-out-loud panic I sense around me. In conversations with colleagues, at my own desk planning lessons, I keep returning to the same realisation: there is a shared sense of loss, but I’m not mourning anything. Writing still does what it has always done, and I see proof of that in the classroom every day. The work we’ve devoted our lives to (teaching language, shaping stories, helping others find their voice) can feel precarious right now. It’s easy to imagine we’re witnessing the slow fading of something vital. People talk of a slow erasure of the part of our humanity that once defined our excitement and enthusiasm for sitting at our desks drowning in scrunched-up bits of paper. The reality is that the creative writing classroom has become even more essential than ever before. It is one of the few places left where language can breathe. In my classes, we sit together, we read work aloud. We listen to how a sentence feels in the mouth. We evaluate, we judge. We talk about rhythm, silence, image, emotion. These deliberate acts have taken on a new significance: they are small gestures of opposition, and they are exciting. They are the ways in which we remind one another that writing still begins with the human experience. And that is exactly the point. This is what matters; this is where we will find connection. The page is an extension of our lives, not just a surface for randomly-generated content: “Hey, Pilot! Write me a metaphor…” When I first began teaching creative writing, most of my energy went into helping students believe they had something worth saying. The question was always how to help them listen to their own thoughts, how to draw on their memories, how to find images that carried some emotional truth. Those core elements are still present, though now we add another layer. The question has shifted somewhat. The work is also to help them know why to write at all. In a world where anyone can produce a readable story with a few prompts, the act of writing must be justified not by output but by the intention behind it, the impulse that drives it. Readers, even novice ones, are beginning to sense when there is a human being behind the words. We can tell when characterisation has been worked hunched over a desk littered by coloured post-it notes. Readers want warmth, imperfection. That strange, whacky logic of being human, of holding multiple emotions or truths at once. The smoother the synthetic language becomes, the more we will crave and gravitate towards those imperfections. As I say to my students, Rome refuses to be streamlined or flattened, which is precisely why it pushes them back toward the slow, irregular act of noticing all that is the city’s structure and chaos. It reminds them that the world is not made of polished sentences, but of fragments. Writers have always adapted to whatever tools we come up with. Everything from the typewriter to word processing to social media. But this is the first time the tool can imitate the art itself. And we cannot ignore that. But we can also remember that which the machine cannot replace: the depth of consciousness that makes writing an act of connection between one human and another. Our task is no longer simply to produce original stories…but to help writers understand why their stories exist at all, and why they might matter to others. So what do we do with all this? We keep going. We write. We notice. Then we do it all over again. As a teacher of fiction, I’ve come to see the role of creative writing education as being in defence of human messiness. Not by policing technology (we can’t!), but by deepening our relationship with experience, and letting it guide us across the lines of our notebooks. The real question is not whether AI can write, but whether we can still recognise what writing is for, and what’s at stake when we prompt technology to pump out our sentences. When I read student work, I look for the moments when something true breaks through. It might be a single image, or a line that lifts off the page. Those moments are small, but they matter. They remind me that writing is still one of the few spaces where a person can think in public, where vulnerability becomes art. In an AI world, that kind of risk may become rarer, but also more valuable. Machines can simulate patterns of thought, but they cannot crave, they cannot mourn, and they certainly cannot long for someone. They can only brush against the surface of these emotions.  At its core, writing is a way of being present in the world and with ourselves. It allows us to process our experiences and to find coherence amid all the uncertainty. And maybe this piece is proof of that: me untangling my own thoughts on the page, draft after draft, feeling my way forward, one sentence at a time. I sometimes tell my students that writing can help us live in the world with greater honesty and vulnerability. In the years ahead, when language becomes ever more accessible, people will not come to creative writing for information or content. They will come, and stay, to recognise themselves in it. To feel that somewhere, in another person’s words, their own experience has been understood. by  Luciano Di Gregorio Adjunct Professor, American University of Rome