the art of writing

Grace Lin: She asks, Where do you get your ideas?

Mo Willems: Well, Leah, that's a very good question and I'm afraid you may not like the answer because ideas are not things you get. People tend to think that ideas are things like diamonds. And then you go out and you get them and you grab them and you bring them back. But that's not what ideas are.

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The novelist Jennifer Egan says, “You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly. You can’t write regularly and well. One should accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.”

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