What are we doing here? The question's claimed permanent residency in my head. With AI closing in from every direction, threatening to colonize all human interactions, I've been thinking about what we do in this writing program and trying to work out why it (still) matters.
The truth is, writing's always been under threat, not only from technology, but from the easier paths through life: the surface, the obvious, the already-said. AI is the latest incarnation of this threat, churning out “content” that sounds like writing but comes from nowhere and from no one; it produces text without memory or experience, without the friction and texture of a life that's actually lived.
I've been reading J. F. Martel's Art in the Age of Artifice, and it's been a bracing tonic for these bewildering days. The book reminds us that "art arises from experience—from encounter, from the souls and bodies of living beings"; that "a picture made by an algorithm, however 'black-boxed,' can never equal even a rudimentary human doodle as testimony to the Real."
Think about that for a moment: even a doodle, even the most casual mark made by a human hand, carries something an algorithm cannot touch, which is the the fact of a lived life behind it and the accumulated weight of all the mornings and mistakes and moments that brought that hand to that page.
Real writing comes from life, from the specific textures and tones of your particular existence, from the walk you took this morning when light hit the pavement in a way that made you stop, from the conversation that stayed with you for days, from the book that cracked you open, from the friend who told you the truth, from the years you spent in that job, that city, that relationship, that body.
This is what cannot be replicated; this is what will only grow more precious as we drown in what resembles writing but is only its hollow echo.
The way forward is the way writers have always moved literature forward, by cultivating interiority and varied lived experiences, paying attention to what lives beneath the surface of things, and bringing it forth with feeling and intellect.
What visions are you pursuing, and which ones have been foisted upon you? It's worth sitting with the discomfort of distinguishing between what you actually need to say and what you think you should be saying—between the voice that comes from deep within and the one that merely echoes back what the culture has already decided is valuable or marketable or safe.
This means paying attention, deeply and differently, and attending to what haunts us. Look again at the works that haunt you even though they might not have seemed particularly significant when you first experienced them. What were they saying that you didn't hear until the end? Reread the texts that astounded you in search of the secrets they sought to disclose; listen for the clues that hide in the synchronicities, the portentous dreams, the things that won't leave you alone.
Here's something else I keep coming back to from Art in the Age of Artifice: "Great art is made not for an abstract audience but for the lone percipient with whom it seeks to connect." When you write, you're not writing for everyone. You're writing for the one person who needs exactly what you have to say, that is the reader who will recognize in your words something they've always known but never had language for. As Martel writes, the symbols that compose artistic works "can only emerge within a field of awareness. . .within the context of a life being lived."
Your life; your awareness; your particular way of moving through the world. That's the field from which your work must grow.
Some practices to strengthen this capacity:
- Go for a walk, untethered from your phone; let yourself look, or don't look—just wander and see what finds you.
- Read, not to consume, but to be changed, to let the work work on you. (Art in the Age of Artifice is a good place to start.)
- Feed your soul with art, music, and films, but also with conversation and friendship, experiences for which you may need to leave your house and (gasp!) encounter other living beings in real time and space.
- Sit with boredom; it's where the interesting stuff begins, where the mind finally stops performing and starts wandering into stranger, more fertile territory.
- Pay attention to what you're paying attention to; notice what pulls at you, what won't let you go.
The work we do here—in workshops, in seminars, in mentorships—is the work of slowing down, of listening to what's underneath the noise and chatter of our perpetually connected lives, and of delving into the self's inner reservoir.
And remember this: Nothing is written in the stars above. Everything is written from within.
