Nancy Kline
AUTHOR

The Real Reason For Writing It Ourselves

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I am a writer. I adore writing. I love the beauties that suddenly emerge, the words that come when I look away, the unrequested insights that flash while I am writing. I love the searches: for the perfect word, for the finest alignment of concept and context, for the thing I actually, actually want to say; and the research, the learning, the occasional delicious derailment.

I love the inevitable certainty that a final draft is final, setting it aside for the night, and discovering with the sun that at least fifteen things need to change. I love making those changes. I love what they do to the rest of the piece. I love seeing that I don’t need nearly as many words as I thought, and then paring it until it teems with that irrepressible, irreplaceable shimmer of succinctness.

I love writing as myself, casually, as if I were talking to the reader (best advice I ever received about writing). I love reading a draft to Christopher to see what delights, engages, concerns him, what questions he has, how he would change it. I love returning to my desk to integrate what I agree is important. I love the good, better, best climb of that.

Most of all, and most importantly, I love the duet that is writing and thinking. As I write, I think. So I write and so I think and so I write and so I think. I love that it is one living thing. One. It is writingthinking. And in that truth lies the point of this piece:

AI writing is murder.

Using AI to write for us is not just stealing other people’s ideas and words and constructs, which it is. It is not just lying ("I wrote this"), which it is. AI writing for us actually kills. It kills the process that is writingthinking. It murders the ignition of thought that would have come from our own writing of the sentences.

That is the point. When we write, we think. And so we must not agree to fail to think because we failed to write, because we failed to say "no" to the current #1 seducer author: AI.

I’m not alone in this conviction. Other writers and thinkers say the same thing. Compelling recently was Margaret Heffernan’s Substack piece called, “Use It or Lose It: The challenge of AI” (https://heffernanm.substack.com/p/use-it-or-lose-it-the-challenge-of). Among many invaluable things she says there is this gem:

Writing is a form of thinking; it is as I’m shaping a sentence that I’m teasing out precisely what it is I believe, and what feelings and thoughts I seek to communicate. It is when I’m editing that I identify connections between ideas, people or attitudes. It is in re-reading that I notice, and may modify, a tone that isn’t quite right – thus making me consider carefully my relationship between reader and writer. Writing is how I develop and discover what I believe to be true.

Exactly.

I suspect that Heffernan loves writing, and that she believes in herself as a writer. You, on the other hand, may not. You may live in combat with writing.

Maybe writing has been a chore, never a choice. Maybe you wrote things when you were young that were skewered by the person you naively asked to read them. Maybe your writing teacher told you you could not write, that you should concentrate on numbers instead. Maybe other teachers gave you "A"s for content and "F"s for expression. Maybe your teachers or parents hurried you.

I am sorry, if so. Those people were killers, too. Innocent but guilty.

And now AI, most commonly the ubiquitous, puffy-chested, do-it-for-you ChatGPT, is bludgeoning your writer-self’s almost-corpse. It sits there ready to seal any chances of your writer resurrection.

Again, I am sorry.

There is, however and hooray, a way to block Its mallets in midair. Write. Just write. Do it. Sit down, put your fingers on the keys, or the pencil in your hand, and go. Write until you know what you really want to say. Write until your voice begins to form. Let me be the one in your life who said, "Write casually, as if you were talking to the reader." Connect with those readers. Tell them what you really think, and feel, and want to say.

Write.

Most of all, don’t worry about syntax, or grammar, or paragraphing, or capitalising, or even spelling (watch out, though, for Siri’s incorrect corrections!). Just write.

When you read it over, or even better, out loud to yourself, revel in what is working, what is really you. Then with a bounce, tweak what isn’t. Then go to bed.

Re-read the whole thing in the morning, and smile at the changes you now want to make because time and sleep caressed you as a writer for nearly eight hours. Enjoy every minute. Your piece is good if it says what you want to say, and says it as you, and speaks to the reader.

Of course academic pieces have to groan themselves into girdles of form. That is a different journey, one that can suck the true writer-self right out of the screed. But you can get help with that from a human who can love you and honour you as they help you, and as you produce an acceptable product. Write those essays. Get your degree. Then run to the prettiest wildflower field you can find, and fly the kite that is you the writer.

Be you. That is all you need to do. Use AI for prodigiously quick searches that inform, but do not form. Be you. Don’t try to be Margaret Heffernan, or Brian Doyle, or Lewis Thomas or Maya Angelou, or Carlo Rovelli, or Marcus Aurelius. They are all nobodies when it comes to being you.

What would you like to say? How would you write it? What do you really think? Who better is there – what better is there – than you to write it, than you to think it, than you to write it, than you to think it, than you to write it, than you to think it?