I’ve been working on this idea for my next project for a good six months now. And actually, it is far longer than that. I’ve been thinking about and churning over the idea for far, far longer. As I mentioned in last week’s post, I’m still pretty unsure what, exactly, the book will be. But there is a nugget there I keep coming back to, an idea I can’t stop returning to, worrying at. It is only really in the last three months that I’ve put anything much down on paper in a structured way (I’ve been making notes for years). And with each short snippet I write down my idea shifts a little, changes, morphs, takes shape. What I think I am writing, becomes something else. My notes do not translate directly into what I carve out on the page. What is emerging is unexpected, stranger.
I’ve been thinking about this creative process a lot recently, the alchemy of it, the difficulty of it, the time it takes and the circuitous path is makes. I’ve been thinking about it in particular in relation A.I. and the rapid, rabid infiltration of creative practice that is taking place. I worry about what is getting lost, both in terms of end product but also, more importantly, in terms of the development of thought, the juxtaposition of and clashing of ideas in the human brain that leads to new, strange, startling, transformative, deeply original ideas.
I’ve read a couple of great articles that have really chimed with my feeling-around-in-the-dark thoughts on the topic. In this Guardian article Nesrine Malik writes :
Writing is not just about rendering thoughts through words in a certain style: analysis, literary fiction, storytelling. It is about the particular alchemy of a single individual drawing on their own unique profile to construct an idea. It is about the way their brain works, the quirks they have picked up along the way, their politics, their history, their relationships, the very way they see the world. You can produce a thousand Dickenses and Rumis through AI, but you can’t create a new iconic writer. You can only draw on the chorus of styles that already exist. You can only derive, never create.
What is at stake, she writes ‘isn’t just a few unfortunate errors here and there, but a commitment to strive, imperfectly, but always credibly.’
Writer Patrick Freyne puts it like this in a recent Irish Times article:
The thinking behind AI-related work in general seems to be built around a key misunderstanding. AI boosters seem to think that when people write they are directly transferring thoughts and ideas that exist pristinely in their heads directly into language. They see the effort of writing as something that gets in the way of this pure process. They see writing as a transparent process of transference, one that can be mimicked by giving a few instructions to a machine.
Maybe that’s true for a tiny subset of geniuses but this is not what’s happening in most cases. For most people, writing is a transformative activity and the effort is the point. Even if we feel we have a clear perspective in our heads, when we try put it on paper we generally realise our great idea is just a bunch of slightly contextless impressions, impulses, factoids and biases and they don’t always cohere in the ways we imagined when they were unwritten. It’s a mess, essentially. Writing forces people to resolve internal contradictions and confront their own bullshit. It’s why it’s hard. It’s why it’s beautiful. It’s why it leads to insight. People write to communicate but also to figure out what they think.
At a recent event in Poznań, Poland, Nobel Prize-winning writer Olga Tokarczuk apparently admitted to using AI in her creative process. ‘Often I just ask the machine, ‘darling, how could we develop this beautifully?’’ She went on, according to this article in LitHub to describe how she felt writers would be those who will most closely use and interact with A.I. as a tool in their craft. I’m picturing Tokarczuk sitting at her desk, or wherever it is that she writes, her piece of writing open on the screen in front of her, struggling with in, knowing she wants to ‘develop it more beautifully’, but not sure how, or why her attempts have thus far failed. Yes, a high-powered LLM machine, a Claude or a Gemini, might have some very helpful suggestions but I can’t help but feeling that something is getting lost in that process.
It’s what Joanna Wolfarth calls creative composting. It’s what happens when you gather, notice, be bored, move your body, leave the thing, let the ideas surface without you. I love what she writes in this piece about A.I.:
I want us all to pull out our laptop chargers and loop them across the lawn so satellites can read our distress signals. I want the human. The humane.
On an episode of David Perell’s How I Write recently I listened to Anne Lamott tell a story about speaking with Elena Ferrante at a conference. Ferrante confided in Lamott that she was suffering from writers block, something Lamott says she doesn’t believe in. ‘I don’t think you’re blocked’, she said to Ferrante, ‘I think you’re just empty’. By which she meant that all that was needed was time to refill the creative well - with good conversation, with walks in nature, with some good books, good films, whatever worked for her. She needed, I thought as listened to Lamott, to mulch!
It’s what, in my humble opinion, Tokarczuk needed to do, too. Her high-powered A.I. machine might have been able to do that mulching for her, but the solutions it came up with would never have the texture of her life lived, the way she moved her body, the boredom and composting that might have lead to a far more original version of beauty, and may also have supported her creative practice in a far richer way as well.
If you’d like to compost some ideas together with some other real-life humans (on Zoom), you might enjoy our next MULCH Meeting next Thursday June 11th 7-8pm GMT +1. A casual chat for paid subscribers where we share what’s sparking our interest, what’s niggling at us, what we are working on, what we can’t work out. I love these calls as one thing always leads to another and we all almost always come away with a new perspective, a new insight, a new way to approach an idea.
I’ll send a link to all paid subscribers the day before our call, and if you’re like to upgrade to paid to join us, you can do so here:
Layla x
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