the art of writing

I tell my students to liberate a certain part of their mind that, because they are good, humble people they may have likely suppressed, and that's the part that wants to be known, that wants to be famous or rich or whatever. I say that part is not entirely separate from the part of you that wants to be a great writer. Which is not separate from the... See more

Current AI writing tools are a great way to mass produce writing that is intensely mid, and makes you feel dead inside. Can we use AI to help the best writers do better work? I don't know. But let's think about the bottlenecks for good writing.

During Q&A at a conference I spoke at a few years back, someone asked me “What’s your take on the true value of a university education?” I shared my general opinion (summary: great socially, but not realistic enough academically) and ended with a description of a course I’d like to see taught in college. In fact, I’d like to teach it.

It would be a... See more

I think this is the way we’ll use AI to write in the future. We’ll interact with AI in a continuous, back-and-forth way. We’ll write a few sentences, and then we’ll ask it for suggestions. We’ll write a few more sentences, and then we’ll ask it again. We’ll keep going back and forth like this, and over time the AI will get better as it learns more... See more

The kind we love is focused, challenging, sustained, with a pen in hand, making note of new turns of phrase and peculiar, precise words, and feeling our brains get ever-so-slightly reconfigured by the text. The kind of reading we love requires a piece of text be worked over so many times that the author probably never wants to see it again. The... See more