Some Random and Rambling Thoughts on Writing

and some other stuff, too.

It probably wasn’t until I was in my mid-30’s or early 40’s that I realized I’m a writer. Which is maybe kind of weird considering how much of my professional life I owe to writing. From writing sketches for my first job with The State and beyond, I have always made a significant portion of my living from writing down words. As a kid, I wrote short stories and little dumb comedic pieces like synopses for future Rocky films up to the hundredth. For years, I kept a journal. I wrote blogs and essays and book reviews. I’ve written books for children and adults, screenplays and, as much as it pains me to admit, plenty of adolescent poetry. And when I don’t write, I feel the way some people do when they don’t exercise for a few days: irritable without any readily identifiable source of my irritation.

The converse is also true. Even if I do nothing else with my day, if I manage to squirt out a few hundred words on any topic for any purpose, I feel like I accomplished something. Laundry can go unwashed and unfolded, pets unfed, bills sent to the collection agency, I don’t care. As long as I put a few sentences together, I’m good.

Maybe the reason it took me so many decades to figure this out about myself was I always thought of writing as two different things: there was the writing I did for myself because it was fun and the writing I did at school which was a miserable slog of suck. The vast majority of the writing we did when “learning to write” concentrated on writing’s least pleasurable parts: rules of grammar, footnoting, research into stultifying topics, and the proper way to take notes on a 3 x 5 lined index card. Utter misery. Consequently, I didn’t equate “writing” with the thing I did for fun.

Photo of me during my school days.

Shouldn’t we encourage our kids towards outrageous acts of literary self-expression? I understand that the purpose of primary and secondary education is to mold worker bees to juice the GDP, but as we continue our heedless rush into a future of AI and quantum computers, nobody has any idea what jobs will even exist for all those worker bees to fill. How much value will the well-written research paper command versus the ability to think expansively, creatively, and critically? I don’t know the answer to that question. Maybe both will continue to be in demand, but I doubt it, not when anybody can throw a few inputs into ChatGPT and get a better-written response in a few seconds than most of us could generate in a week.

Now we’re seeing the same ease of use applied to video, with Open AI’s stunning new Soras app, which, by now, most of you have probably seen. If not, click here. Some pearl-clutchers are already writing eulogies for tomorrow’s filmmakers, just as I’m sure wags of old wrote off musicians when radio arrived. The truth is, new technologies are always replacing old. Socrates even railed against the new technology of the written word, worried that its inelasticity would ruin the minds of men used to dealing in subtlety and nuance. Now that I think of it, maybe he was right to be worried considering our own lack of appreciation for subtlety and nuance.

Yet for all of our fretting, humans have yet to figure out a way to extricate ourselves from the humanities. We find ourselves forever enmeshed in our own stories and the appetite for stories - for the written word - is only growing. So I don’t worry too much about writing being replaced or extinguished. What I worry about is our reliance on others to do our thinking for us. I worry about a one-size-fits-all educational system that seems more interesting in pushing students through than it does in lifting each student up to the light and helping them shine. I worry about the pace with which we run our children through their days, piling after-school activities on top of homework on top of resume-building activities designed to attract the attention of colleges. Do kids today even have time to create Quacky the Cheese-Loving Midget who appears in many future Rocky movies before dying in a freakish hot air balloon accident, as I did?

No, they do not.

I don’t think I’m being curmudgeonly here; if anything, I’m suggesting that the way I was taught writing (and my general education) was already outmoded when I was in school backs in the previous millennium. I’m also using writing as a stand-in for human expression in general. I don’t know what the future holds for art-making in technological terms, but I have full confidence in future art-making in artistic terms. Despite the West’s best intentions to convince us otherwise, I do not believe money-making is the highest human ideal. I think it’s storytelling, in whatever medium, because it’s in telling our stories that we teach other who we were, who we are, and who we’d like to be. And, just as importantly, who we don’t want to be.

The new technologies will help us but they won’t become us. Nor do I think we will become them, in the sense that no matter how much we try to automate our lives, however much rigidity we try to impose on ourselves and our kids, we’re too weird and slippery to ever become automatons. We’re too biological. Too human. So keep on keepin’ on. With whatever you do, be you butcher, baker, or candlestick maker. And I’ll keep on keepin’ on with the wording. Thank you for reading the things I write, but I’d still write them even if you didn’t. I can’t help it.