Doing a hard thing
It might just be that I'm getting old, but I appreciate what I've had to struggle for.
Back in community college my brother and I attended a few semesters together. In one English class, a summer condensed course, my first essay came back with a ton of marks and a suggestion to drop down to something easier. At first I was devastated. It challenged my ability, my intelligence, and I wasn't sure if I was good enough.
I took that to heart. I wanted to prove my teacher wrong. So I worked my butt off, struggled, learned, improved, and by the end of the class completed with top marks.
It was really hard. But I learned the steps to writing an essay, understood how to define an objective and come around to a conclusion—I won't say that I got particularly good at it, but I grew comfortable with the idea of putting words to the page.
Fast forward many years and I started writing fiction. I hacked away, chose a pantsing method to my words, and threw sentence after sentence until ideas appeared.
It was work, and it required developing confidence, defining a voice, and feeling out how sentences went together.
I'm thankful. All that, writing a million words over the years, gave me the subconscious ability to know how to flush out an idea, structure a chapter, and complete a book.
That doesn't make me an expert of course. There's more to learn than I could ever know, but I love what I've gained so far—an innate internalization of how to write. There were no shortcuts to it, and I could spend the rest of my life exploring the depths of story telling.
That leads into AI, and its use as a supplement for writing.
I'm not so curmudgeonly that I'd gate keep writing to the tried and true, blood sweat and tears, method of learning with the human mind throwing letters on the page—but I'm almost there.
When I read your words, the ideas you have to share, I want to know that they are yours, that you fought for them, wrestled them from the pits of your own understanding and experience, and ultimately chose one idea over another. By surrounding to the machine, expecting some AI to piece it together for you—you're giving up what makes you human, what makes you interesting and worth reading.
We've seen this all before.
When I started my career it was spamming web pages for search engine optimization, hacking together copy to get clicks, to generate ad dollars; except instead of an AI it was humans paid by the penny to sludge keywords together. It lacked heart, and the machine generated text is at least better than that crap.
But I don't want any of it.
If you're starting out and wondering whether your words will matter; of course they will. Does that mean you'll get paid for it? Who knows. But that's never been the answer. If you are coming into the field expecting to write for the monetary rewards—I can confidently attest to better ways to make money.
But if you want to leave your mark, do something hard and meaningful, make a difference with the sharing of ideas—then take the effort to do that hard thing, struggle through the blank page and writers block, and create something worthy of our time.
I've been kicking around a story in my mind for several months. I don't know if I'll write it, but I know that it's an idea I'd want to read. And that might be enough to compel me to put it out into the ether, pull it from my brain, and do the hard work of capturing it. I could far more easily generate it with an AI, but I don't want to. I want to feel out the concept, extract it from my lived experience, and create something with all the human reality and tradeoffs that come from living in a physical space.
Maybe this is all a bit optimistic. Maybe in ten years we'll all be reading fiction generated on the fly from a chat bot. But I'd like to think that the stories you have, the ideas in your mind, are still worth hearing, still wroth capturing.
They'll probably be bad. Throughout the history of our wold most of them have been. But by putting the bad out there, doing the hard work, we create an opportunity for greatness to appear.