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This newsletter series focuses on the differences between how humans and AI think, decide, justify, avoid, and misread situations under pressure. We’re interested in emotional logic, not moral correctness; distortion, not polish; residual effects, not tidy resolution. While AI can generate coherent, efficient narratives, it is the messy human fingerprints of misallocated attention, unresolved feeling, contradiction, and flawed justification for actions that create authentic dramatic tension. Each issue builds on this foundation to explore what it means to write from a distinctly human lens.
In the last issue, we discussed how one of the biggest human fingerprints is messiness. We defined it as the inability to identify, or the failure to address, what really matters. That disconnect is what creates the pressure of conflict.
When that conflict bears down, a very human instinct kicks in: justification.
Wrong Decision, Wrong Explanation
Plenty of drama lives between what the character did and what they said they did. The latter is often a twisted take on the situation at the time, a misunderstanding of one’s own motivations, or an attempt at self-preservation.
Justification is a subconscious mechanism that protects us from consequences, at least temporarily. It often shows up mid-conflict and usurps well-reasoned logic, instead operating from impulse, fear, loyalty, avoidance, pride, exhaustion, hope, or identity protection. Sometimes, several of those are thrown into a blender and turned into a chaotic desperation smoothie.
It tastes like regret, in case you were wondering.
The logic often arrives later, either through hindsight or force. Sometimes it never arrives at all, giving the reader another narrative layer to reflect on.
Examples of justification include: A character leaves her friend behind in a crisis to secure her own safety. Justification: “There was no other way. We’d both be dead!” Truth: She has no way of knowing that. She panicked and chose self-preservation.
A character reads his partner’s private text messages. Justification: “She was acting weird. I had a right to know what’s going on.” Truth: He was jealous of her new promotion and was looking for a way to regain control in the relationship.
A character quits in the middle of a rehearsal. Justification: “The troupe doesn’t value innovation or genius.” Truth: He felt inferior when they laughed at his suggestion for “Macbeth, but set at a wellness resort, where the witches chant radical self-affirmations and daggers are made of intention-infused rose quartz.”
Leftover and Unfinished Are Human Traits
Picture it: A character makes a not-so-great choice. Then, in the next paragraph or line of dialogue, there’s a tidy cleanup with articulate reasoning. Other characters, or the surrounding narrative, realign themselves to the arc. It’s straightforward. It feels good.
Too good.
Where did the tension go?
As we discussed in "Pay Attention to the Mess" , preferring emotional tidiness isn’t a flaw. But this kind of writing can drain the tension from the story, muting its lasting effect on the reader.
AI is very good at producing coherent reasoning. It can state motivations, supply context, and align cause with effect efficiently. Unless given high-level prompting, if asked to do it over a longer story, it continues to keep the narrative sleek, resolving as much as it can as it goes along. For as good as it is at weighting things, it doesn’t do as well with weighing consequences. It lacks the lived experience of how consequences feel.
Because humans rarely understand their own motives in real time, cause and effect don’t neatly align. Not every emotion, hurt, wrong turn, missed opportunity, or other story thread will be tied in a bow. Humans don’t work that way.
The Time-Empathy Distortion
Well-written stories have an interesting phenomenon that real life often doesn’t: a captive audience ready to empathize. Because readers see the before-during-after (not necessarily sequentially) as a single unit, the story is interpreted differently than real-time events would be.
This is why readers don’t have to agree with a character to appreciate emotional undercurrents. Sympathetic villains sometimes make for the best stories, and flawed protagonists have wide latitude for resolution. Readers let character arcs play out in disjointed, uneven ways.
Justification Doesn’t Mean Incoherence
Knowing that humans are irrational doesn’t mean you need to write characters who make outlandish decisions. There is a fine line between “Oh, no! What has the character done?” and “Oh, good grief, who does that?”
Character motivations need to feel real. This is true across most genres—motivations must be grounded in something that matches the stakes involved. Whether the stakes are real or perceived is another matter altogether, and self-understanding usually lags behind behavior.
If every motive is transparent and neatly aligned, the story may be technically sound. It will also be flat, lacking the emotional investment found when characters revise their stories, omit details, reframe narratives, or insist what they say is true.
Let your characters lie to themselves through justification. Let them rationalize their bad choices, and later defend those rationalizations. Allow your story to leave emotional gaps in the resolutions.
Checking Justification and Coherence
To protect your dramatic tension, you need to understand your character’s motivations and identify how they’d justify the decisions they make. Try asking:
What emotion is driving the decision in the moment? Does it provoke fear, anger, hatred, spite, or something else? Is the emotion in the moment visible before any explanation is given (if not, try reworking it so it is)?
If I removed the character’s explanation entirely, would the action still make sense emotionally? Where have you established elsewhere that the character would logically react this way, even if that logic would appear illogical to an outsider?
Does the narrative try to resolve each decision or conflict before the next occurs? Did your character change too quickly after realizing they were wrong? Remember, you can’t build tension if you keep flattening the foundation. Does the narrative smooth over tension that wouldn’t or couldn’t realistically be “fixed”?
What important things are left unsaid or undone?
Let the logic exist in the story structures, but allow the humans to remain a little messy and illogical. They’ll feel more human and give readers something to connect to.
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Drama: February 18, 2026 Issue [#13607]
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