From Wilbur Smith to ChatGPT: Why Stories Still Matter

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Years ago, long before I met Caroline, I was madly in love. The girl in question was smart, fun, beautiful and professionally ambitious. I was smitten, but there was a slight niggle.

She didn’t read.

I mean, she read. The Economist. Non-fiction books that spelt out how the sub-prime mortgage crisis happened. That kind of stuff.

But she didn’t care for fiction. She thought novels were a waste of time, as they weren’t about real people or events, and you couldn’t really learn from them. And that, in the end, was something I couldn’t get past. I needed someone in my life who shared my values, and I deeply value the great storytellers and their written words.

In my family, we’ve always read. We devour stories, novels (and in my case even comic books). We love to travel, and we like to read along the way. We like to read on planes, trains and automobiles. We read on the beach, in the mountains, in the bush, on the couch. Even at home, we make time for it. I have a childhood memory of my mum sitting at the kitchen counter at midnight unable to tear herself away from the latest Jeffrey Archer.

When I met Caroline, I found a smart, fun, beautiful and professional woman who also happened to love reading. Sold.

Nine years, two kids and a dog later, we were on a family trip to Umngazi in the Wild Coast. They have a quaint little exchange library at this epic resort, and with time to sit around while the kids ran off to fish or play or swim or whatever else the incredible resort lines up for them (it really is magic), I reacquainted myself with a certain Mr Wilbur Smith. He is an author whose racy works had prime position in our family library when I was growing up. As a teenager and in my 20s, I devoured his sexy historical fiction. Over the years, I sporadically reread some of his books or grabbed a new novel, but this moment was when I re-engaged. After tearing through the seminal work When the Lion Feeds, I was off to the races. I reread the Courtney novels from A to Z, starting in the late 1800s with the tribal wars, the Anglo-Boer conflicts, the gold rushes and elephant poachers and daring heroes and fearless heroines and tormented villains.

I once again powered through the world wars, the rise of black political consciousness, the conception of Apartheid, the struggle for power, and the nuance of South Africa as a proxy for a global heavyweight fight between the conflicting ideals of socialism versus meritocracy or its dark brother Machiavellianism. Generations of valiant, adventurous Englishmen, downtrodden but resilient Afrikaners and marginalised, courageous Africans fought for their piece from their perspective. And boy… along the way, I was reminded how much I learned from Mr Smith through the years. He, more than any other novelist save maybe James A. Michener, has educated me on our country’s history in a more balanced and entertaining way than any schoolroom or documentary.

I then turned to ones that I haven’t read yet, but I hit a snag. There are a few, but I quickly learned to avoid everything written after 2011. The last 10 years of his life were spent lending his name and brand to books that he didn’t write himself, and they are markedly inferior. We are still seeing Wilbur Smith product today, but I wouldn’t bother. Knowing that the new ones are avoidable, I went back again and reread the later origin stories of the Courtneys and Ballantynes, his first families.

After expanding my Quiz Night array of historical facts with the epic tales of privateering and exploration in the 1700s and 1800s, where our heroes faced off against Muslim slavers on the Indian Ocean Islands, the class system in England, and the dangerous tribes of sub-Saharan Africa as early pioneers, I thought I was done. But then… I discovered Triumph of the Sun, a relatively newer book written at the end of his writing tenure. I was cautiously delighted. Would it be any good? I hoped so. And boy, did he deliver!

I had never given much thought to the fall of Khartoum, or British colonial conflicts in Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan in the late 1800s. But man, what a compelling piece of history it is, and how privileged are we that a man like Mr Smith took the time to write it. He interweaves actual historical events and figures with the utterly dashing and romantic fictional protagonists and villains of his stories. The devastating wars and conflict that defined an era of British colonialism and technological advances, especially in guns and warfare, are a hallmark of this one. Passionately religious tribesmen are pitted against stoically arrogant Englishmen, with the requisite beautiful, passionate and strong-willed women at their side. It’s gold.

I have a point here. I want to respect people that insist they only read non-fiction, I really do. Those that prefer documentaries, that only watch the Discovery Channel, that reject anything “made-up”. But I suppose, from my perspective, I can’t shake my judgement. That they, like my ex-girlfriend, are missing out. They’re only getting half of the juice in the cup. They are missing out on education riding high on the tailcoats of entertainment, on enjoyment of the art of placing memorable characters in the middle of real historical conflicts and therefore anchoring the emotional impact of what really happened. They are missing out on witnessing the craft of original creation coupled with rigorous research and process. Mr Smith is formulaic, for sure. But boy, does he do it well. He is not to the taste of sophisticated literati, for sure. But for the History Channel fan? Man, don’t check him out at your peril.

And one more thing: We live in an age where “mindless” reality TV and AI-generated content are the norm. But in both cases, a human creative is still very much in charge, directing either their sophisticated algorithm or their malleable actors to act out a preset script. Said script has a compelling beginning, middle and end, where the context and backdrop are important and the drama needs to be real. The drama is created by the struggle, and that will never change.

At this point, most of us can tell when people don’t do the work to apply themselves to their writing. Whether an email, social media post or general writing, the allure of AI is real. In my last book, on the Ryder Cup and the lead actors in it, I really gave AI a big chunk of the work to do. Its value, in the end, was to do the first edit for grammar and spelling. It’s pretty good at that, but when it came down to the writing, the text was pretty good but irritated me. It was too dramatic. Too formulaic. Too PREDICTABLE.

And that’s it, isn’t it? Humans are unpredictable. And that’s what makes us so watchable, what makes our stories so compelling, what makes us relatable. Because consistency is important, but we all need to reverse our decisions sometimes. We all fall off the wagon and get back on it. We all fail in our intentions. We all surprisingly exceed our own limitations and others’ expectations. And that, my friend, is hard for AI to copy. Please use our artificially intelligent assistant. It’s magic in so many ways. But make sure you still curate, still apply yourself, still make sure it’s you. An outline isn’t enough - multiple edits of the result are still required.

PG’s Pro Tip:

By all means, feed the antagonistic or complimentary email into your GPT and let it help you curate an effective response. But then edit. Put yourself in there. Replace “I acknowledge that” with the way you actually speak, and say “I get that this is not great.” Ask yourself if you would really say “delighted” or if you would usually say “chuffed”. Make it real. Make it you. Do that last mile delivery, every time.

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