There have been periods of my life where I stopped reading. I don't mean that I stopped reading entirely - I still read articles and blogs and journals, but I could not find the time to read fiction novels.

Fiction makes you think and feel in a way that other writing doesn't. I've noticed that my own writing comes much easier and fresher when I'm reading fiction regularly. I think I've figured out why this is.

When you read something that's written by somebody else it has a certain statistical profile. They will choose certain words over a certain other words. This is well established fact and can even be used to a degree for fingerprinting who wrote a piece of text. Every writer at a given point in time has their own unique profile. When you absorb someone else's statistical profile like this, by reading their words, it nudges your own in a new and more interesting direction. Your words begin to sparkle slightly. Your statistical profile is no longer the stodgy old one you had before but it's now been given a shine and a luster by the fresh new shape of the words you're reading.

I think this effect is stronger for fiction than for technical writing or non-fiction because people write fiction in a different way. Non-fiction is more biased towards the normal. Put simply, fiction is written from the heart. It's creative. Maybe it's closer to your raw, "natural" statistical profile than other types of writing.

I've been trying to figure out why I don't want to read a novel where most of the words are written by an LLM, even if a human designed the novel at a high level. It feels gross. I think this is the reason. The statistical profile of LLM writing is close to the normal. That's literally how LLMs work. They sample from a distribution that captures a median way of writing. I simply don't want my mind pushed towards the statistically normal when I am reading fiction. That's the exact opposite of what I want from the experience.

For any piece of fiction that I read from the 2020s and beyond, I want to know "this text was written by a human being in their own words".