INFPs: Your inability to self-edit is finally worth money

Recipe for Disaster by Caren Garfen (2020)

For most of literary history, the writers who won were the ones who could self-edit. Discipline, structure, the ability to hold a 400-page architecture in your head and sand it down for years. INFPs were told to become that kind of writer, and mostly they failed, because self-editing in real time is the opposite of how an INFP mind works. An INFP generates connections faster than they can evaluate them. That used to be the problem.

AI just made it the advantage. AI is a phenomenal editor. If your gift was tightening, structuring, polishing — that gift is now a commodity. Anyone can have it for $20 a month. What AI cannot do is make a connection that doesn’t already make sense. By definition, a language model produces the statistically likely next thought. The unlikely next thought — the one that shouldn’t work but does — is the only thing left that’s scarce. INFPs produce unlikely next thoughts as a default setting. You’ve spent your whole life apologizing for it.

And the form caught up too. The novel as endurance project is not where literature is happening. Annie Ernaux won the Nobel for snapshots — short, fragmented memoir where the personal is the lens for everything else: class, history, sex, news. That structure is the INFP structure.

INFPs can’t help funneling the world through personal meaning, and they can’t help connecting their own life to the greater good. For decades that read as self-indulgent. Now it’s the dominant literary mode: memoir peppered with research, social issues refracted through one person’s interior life. The thing you do naturally is the thing the culture is rewarding.

INFPs are not going to command attention by being loud. That’s never been the move. But participating in the literary movement of your moment — quietly, from the inside — is how INFPs have always made their mark. The movement is here. It’s shaped like you.

I’m starting a monthly live session for INFPs and our first topic will be INFPs and writing: what the current moment rewards, how to work with your wiring instead of against it, and how to actually finish things in a form that suits you. We’ll meet at 8pm Eastern on Tuesday, June 23. You need to be a paid subscriber to attend.