Recent conversations have led me to reconsider how much I want to try and emulate LinkedIn-ese and other AI dialects.
It’s so easy to write the one-liners. Insert a pithy observation.
Another one line. This time, perhaps, followed by a question? Another pithy observation.
It was so easy.
And I’m so very very tired. To my core tired. Bone creaking, shoulders hunching, head throbbing but still groceries need buying and words need writing and shin guards need finding (again!!!) tired. Bilbo Baggins put it best: “Why, I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.”
At some point in the marathon of day-to-day survival, I began prioritizing efficiency over how I actually wanted to write. There was also something so reassuring about ‘Here is this formula. Follow this formula and people will like what you write.’ So I chose words and syntax that the algorithm liked. Hi, it’s me, you can call me Brutus. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
But I miss the way I used to write. And, maybe even more than that, I miss reading the types of things that made me fall in love with words in the first place. I want to read beautiful things. I want to read things that I remember. That make me think and feel.
Yes, I will continue reading about dragons and fae (please see above about the world feeling heavy) but I also want to read about complicated and flawed heroes doing the impossible. About a hundred years of solitude and remains of the day and roses in graveyards. About real people who lived hundreds of years ago and real things that happened hundreds of miles away.
I went back to reread one of my absolute favorite passages from literature. It’s from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. There are run-on sentences and so much missing punctuation and all sorts of things that would have me reaching for my editorial red pen. But it’s beautiful. And moving. And I remember it years after I first read it.
And AI would have a stroke.
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