the art of writing

I believe an essay is the most flexible written medium, and it calls for a fusion of genres: the soul of a memoirist, the pen of a poet, and the rigor of an academic. By learning to shape a thesis, your essays will become more than gripping stories with beautiful sentences, they will help you and your reader make sense of the world.

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.

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.”