what i would really love is a structured course in easing back into writing fiction after having abandoned it for 25+ years, but like, completely self-guided. just as a secret warm-up activity for a few weeks/months before i unleash my gay and stupid bullshit upon the Reader
Give a man a fanfic, and he will read for a day. Teach a man to write, and he still won’t do it.
He’ll think about it though, and boy oh boy, he’ll be thinking about it…
I just watched a video about students getting their papers falsely flagged for using AI, even when they didn’t, and the advice was things like, “Leave in incorrect grammar,” “If you’re quoting something, don’t copy and paste it, type it out manually because it leaves a metadata trail that you used the copy/paste function and that’s a flag,” “Write in the cloud so there’s a version history,” and the one that really got me, “if you find you write in a manner that can sounds too robotic or professional and it gets flagged, go to the writing center so a writing tutor can help you sound more humanly flawed,” and like what the actual fuck.
Like I get that is practical advice, but people should not have to fucking do that. They should not have to train themselves around not sounding like AI, when AI only sounds like that BECAUSE it was trained on them.
I spent so much of my life learning how to write, I shouldn’t have to unlearn that because some computer algorithm learned from me.
do you ever start writing a comment on the internet and then think “oh what the fuck am i going on about” and delete it
I also enjoy writing an entire paragraph, thinking “you know, I don’t actually need to be involved in this conversation,” and deleting it
How growing a poetics of accounting, or, attention as ethnographic practice, can both generate new work and create a commitment to the environment, over at Poetry Foundation (huge thanks to the editors for the chance to contribute and also the gardening artwork) –
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/1649262/the-joy-of-attention
“When one retreats behind a wall of silence, that is not profound. That is just choosing not to write.
The mind that turns wrenchingly and brutally from the thing it cannot bear to contain turns somewhere, surely, with equal force.
Sublimation is a thing. You cannot reproduce trauma’s haunting omissions and gaps by simply not writing. You must reproduce the record in order to demonstrate that something has been lost.”
—Brandon Taylor, Henry James’s POV wobble.
Getting inspired to write is actually really easy! All you need to do is be the busiest you’ve ever been in your entire life and as far away from a computer as humanly possible. Hope this helps 🥰
“But in the act of making a poem at least two crucial things have taken place that are different from ordinary life. First, we have shifted the crisis to a bearable distance from us: removed it to the symbolic but vivid world of language.
Secondly, we have actively made and shaped this model of our situation rather than passively endured it as lived experience.”
— Gregory Orr, Poetry as Survival.
At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write. What she wanted was to be lost to the unfolding of an irresistible idea, to see the black thread spooling out from the end of her scratchy silver nib and coiling into words.
Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001)
born too soon to spend my teen years logging onto ao3 on my smartphone in the privacy of my own bedroom, born too late for mimeographed zines, born just in time to sneak into a common area of my family home at 2 am and wrap the modem in a thick blanket to muffle the screeching, so my parents wouldn’t catch me spending 18 cents a minute on long-distance rural dial-up to type my sexually confused hopes into webcrawler and lycos, praying maybe one other person on earth also liked the same character i did enough to make a web page about it. and that my connection to the information superhighway would hold out long enough to download 78 kilobytes worth of .txt files onto a floppy disk labeled “SCHOOL BACKUP” that i would guard with my life.