the art of writing

The robot was quite good at copying my style, but much less good at writing anything meaningful. It could predict which words I would be most likely to use but it couldn’t make an original argument for me. Using the robot made me think a lot about the nature of writing and what goes in to its peculiar form of labor. AI tools fundamentally promise... See more

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.”

The only thing that matters, to me, is to arrange the writing in such a way that I repeatedly return to ideas again and again . I want to reread and make comments and rearrange my notes, not just type it and move on. The reason for that: I’m not particularly interesting or insightful at any point in time, but if I let five or ten Henriks layer... See more