Brian L. Plescher
Author. Writing at the intersection of literary ambition and artificial intelligence.
My books explore what it means to make things that matter — when the tools for making are changing faster than the conversation about them, when the old models of authorship are failing, and when the work of figuring out what you actually are as a writer is as urgent as the work of writing itself.
I write seriously, with whatever is available.
The Directed Author
Creative Leadership, Authorship Identity, and the Age of AI Collaboration
Available June 12, 2025 · Kindle & Paperback
"The authors who will do the most interesting work in the next decade are the ones who can let the myth go and build something better in its place."
The crisis facing writers in the age of AI is not the one being named correctly.
It is not that artificial intelligence will replace authors. It is not that AI-generated content is obviously inferior and the market will self-correct. Both of those positions are wrong, and both of them are costing serious writers the clarity they need to make good decisions about their work, their practice, and their publishing strategy right now.
The Directed Author proposes a different model — one borrowed not from the Romantic myth of solitary genius but from the language of cinema, where the organizing intelligence behind a collaborative process has always had a name: the director. Authors working with AI tools are not diminished versions of real writers. They are auteurs in precisely this sense — creative leaders whose taste, vision, and governing intelligence determine what the work is and whether it succeeds.
For the serious independent author navigating the collision between literary ambition and AI capability. Not a prompt engineering manual. Not a defense of traditional authorship. An honest account of what is actually at stake.
Woundwise
Dissolution, Abjective Ecology, and Subversive Becoming
Nonfiction · Experimental Philosophy · 2025
Woundwise examines collapse as a methodology — how wounds, personal and cultural and social, can be reimagined not as endpoints but as openings. A rigorous, strange, necessary book for readers who have exhausted the available maps and need something built from the actual terrain.
"A field manual for turning psychiatric violence, racialised shame, and ecological collapse into collective intelligence." — LibraryThing
Slickens
A novel
Literary historical fiction · In progress
In the spent tailings fields of the industrial midwest, a surveyor is mapping territory that does not want to be mapped. Slickens is a novel of post-human cartography — of what happens to identity, language, and relation when the ground itself is waste, when the boundary between the human and the abject has dissolved so completely that dissolution becomes the only honest epistemology.
A long book made slowly, with full attention.
Essays
Writing on authorship, AI collaboration, dissolution, and what it means to make things seriously in conditions that resist seriousness.
Read the Essays →
Brian L. Plescher
I am the author of The Directed Author: Creative Leadership, Authorship Identity, and the Age of AI Collaboration — a book about what serious authorship looks like when the tools for producing fluent text have become available to anyone, and what writers who care about their work need to understand, develop, and protect in that environment.
I am also the author of Woundwise: Dissolution, Abjective Ecology, and Subversive Becoming, an experimental philosophy book that examines collapse as a methodology, and the author-in-progress of Slickens, a literary historical fiction novel developed over several years using a multi-agent AI research architecture.
My work lives at the intersection of serious literary ambition and functional AI systems. I have been inside that intersection long enough to have opinions worth reading — about authorship identity, about what the current publishing market is actually selecting for, about the difference between using AI and being used by it, and about what it means to make things that matter when the making is distributed across systems you did not build.
I hold an M.S. in Leadership, Management, and Strategy from Michigan State University, an M.Div. from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and Executive Education from Yale School of Management. I live in West Michigan.
Get in Touch
For inquiries about The Directed Author, speaking, or anything else.