What Even Writing Is

To a culture losing the identity of a writer.

Most of the discussion about writing that I see floating around online is how to not write like AI, how to write better/different than AI, or whether AI is or will become a good writer.

Very little of it touches on what writing is, what it does, or why we do it, which I think would better allow us to approach the source of the fear of losing human writers.

An analogy:

There are fifty taxidermied animals, at least: a bison, a bear, a lion, a baboon, many deer, an elephant foot (made into a waste basket), and several exotic pelts on the floor.

I used to play Xbox with my best friend in that corner (on that same TV) pretty much every day after school. This is his parents’ house. I only think about how unusual it all is when I bring a new visitor to see the racquetball court. I play here every Tuesday night since I moved back to the area.

Racquetball is like if tennis were in a giant cinderblock cube: You get your rubber ball, racquet, and protective eyewear (there are plenty to choose from already at the house) and head into the cubic cathedral.

The object of the game is to hit the rubber ball (sometimes going about Mach 1) and make it strike the far wall before it bounces off the floor twice. Once you manage it, it’s now up to the other guy to do the same. Whoever fails either loses the serve or the other guy gets a point. You play to fifteen.

Echoes of rubber whacks, Serena Williams grunts, and slapping feet all merge into a pandemonium of constructive and destructive interference, making intelligible sound only possible between volleys.

Unlike tennis, there is no obvious disadvantage to bracing your organs, summoning a profound wellspring of repressed rage, and trying to make the resulting impact sound like a buckshot, except maybe exhausting yourself. You don’t really care about that, though, because it feels good to really hammer that thing.

The older guys, like my friend’s dad, do that less. They tap the ball with a deft hand, bouncing twice long before anyone could possibly sprint up there to get it. The great equalizer is that the younger guys just can’t resist taking out pent-up aggression on the poor rubber ball. The statistical outcome of that approach, I would guess, is about -15%. Enough to not notice in the short term, but to cost you 3-5 points over the span of a game and roughly make up for loss of youth (only within the game, mind).

In my defense, there is something magical that happens when you get two young lunatics hitting the ball as hard as they can. Your spinal cord is forced to operate the racquet instead of your neocortex. Exhaustion overcomes your thinking mind and suddenly you realize what a liability thinking normally is. You do things you didn’t think you were capable of. The racquet is an extension of your arm: your consciousness literally engulfs it. It is as much “you” as your fingernails, at least.

What’s really good is when your awareness seeps into the room.

When the ball is flying high and fast toward the back wall, you learn to turn and run forward to rendezvous with it, for example. Many such heuristics you learn and then forget you learned. Over time, the physics of the game leaks out of your head and into your bones. You can “feel” where the ball is going to be. A trance comes over you, if you’re lucky, and you forget yourself as a body and allow the spirit of the game to play you. Then, you forget the technique of your swing and the score and you do something wild like hit the ball behind your back with reflexes only possible if you’re “The One.”

Get too proud of that, the next one is going to hit you between the eyes. In order to slip into the “mind” of the game itself, you can’t “watch” yourself play, because that shrinks your awareness to the boundaries of your skin. From your now shrunken perspective, you’re not in “the zone” and can’t find the tempo of the game, at speed. Seriousness or trying hard won’t get back in—thinking about yourself too much.

Have fun, and if you’re lucky, you’ll slip back into the zone, have the time of your life, and maybe also win the game.

This is a very good parallel to how I aspire to write.

Writing is trickier than racquetball from its inception, though. All the sitting and laboring and thinking gives the false impression that writing is a dead act. Something you get “right” by following the rules, like a taxidermist of once-alive ideas.

I’m not against rules. The rules are great because they allow for the game. In fact, add more rules: pick an album and write an essay where each paragraph starts with the titles of the songs; write all first drafts by hand; only write about grass. But don’t think that by merely following those rules you will be rewarded. The rules allow for the game by giving it a foundation upon which to transcend yourself in real time. At the highest levels, not breaking rules (or at least waving through them) is a sign of middling performance, not mastery.

Writers have more tools than ever before, but have never had such a hard time with their identity as “writer.” What even is writing anymore? AI can write, so is it a writer? Why or why not? Can you use it to help you write? How much? Are you an “expert” or not? By what pedigree? If not, do you stick only to subjective experience? How is that different from a personal journal and why should I want to read your journal? If you do venture out into intersubjective thought, what is your philosophy? Are you analytic or continental? Have you read the entire Western Canon and also the most recent scientific literature? Can you interpret data? What are your sources for that claim? Do you know that someone already thought of that in 1972 and most people agree that it’s wrong?

If you want to sidestep the tangle of non-fiction, you’ll have to do poetry and fiction, and that’s a relief in one way because at least no one will read it. How would you even know if it’s good enough for broad market success, anyway? There are many theories, most of them entail becoming a hack, and down another rabbit hole you go...

It is very difficult to play the game of writing without being henpecked to death with endless reasons why it’s already done or wrong or not marketable. How could you possibly loosen up enough to “play” in this arena? much less let it play through you.

If you’re really determined to “make” it as a writer, though (and not just someone with a journal), there is a narrow pathway cut out for you in the marketplace. It appears “scientific” in framing, but really is just a result of the modern market’s constraints. It was a literary tradition pioneered by the work of Danny Kahneman.

I think of these types of writers as taxidermists of ideas: a mix of journalism, self-help, pop-psychology, behavioral economics, and literary postmodern nonfiction. This style of writing, for various reasons, has managed to maintain a profitable niche in the modern marketplace. You’ll see it everywhere: Malcolm Gladwell, Yuval Noah Harari, Sam Harris, James Clear, Jordan Peterson’s self-help, Steven Pinker, Ryan Holiday, and so on. Once you realize that this is a particular literary style in the tradition of Kahneman and not “objective” as it wants to present itself, it becomes impossible not to notice. It is also the sort of writing most threatened by AI.

The prose is bright, clear, unambiguous, and carefully edited down to a third grade reading level. The claims are always working to a “point” which is implicitly “What does this have to do with me?” because “modern” readers are well-known to be incredibly selfish and stupid and so must never be kept reading something that is not explicitly helping their “self.”

At the same time, your contemporaries are going to read this not looking for help but for a foothold to humiliate you. So you must couch even the most obvious and banal claims in “research” only the most bad faith and hateful readers will dig into. They will certainly find fault (because most studies are either too small or not reproducible) but mostly it will be too much of a deep dive to reach mainstream attention, so your reputation will hopefully be safe at least enough to keep selling your books. Google critiques of your favorite book if you want proof of this non-fiction pagan underworld.

Downstream of all that is all the “educational” content on social media, which devours the excess blubber of hyper-taxidermic modern writing like a whale carcass. Take something someone who was great did and “deconstruct” it in an explainer video essay or Substack article. Like having a taxidermied elephant foot in your den, this produces the feeling of proximity to life without the risk of being alive or near life.

From a safe distance you can learn about how Nobel invented dynamite without ever smelling the sharp sulfur of lit TNT. Instead, channel your deepest desire to be in the world into the obsessive fastidiousness it requires to make a convincing forgery of the world. Never once write from your balls and so rightly fear AI, which is a master taxidermist. Instead, identify a memorable aspect of available data, reproduce it in delicate and beautiful detail, then contort the body of a once untamable natural beast into the awkward strictures of the CNN moral order, making the reader feel adventurous for “learning something new” while also not wrecking their moral ontology so much that they don’t fit in with normal people.

You can’t find any big ontological claims in the data, so they’re too “sweeping” to make, anyway. If you ask your editor (probably GPT), it will tell you to take it out or find better sources or “do more research.” Keep at this, slowly you’ll get Kahneman-brain and develop unconscious contempt for your readers (stupid and selfish) and your contemporaries (stupid and bad faith) and yet tailor everything you write to please them.

All “sweeping” claims are pared down until all you can do is use the data to sublimate the worship of self. No one has the audacity to tell you not to do that because there isn’t sufficient data to prove that self-worship is hell. All the better, because I can now sell you a book with 59 simple hacks to endure the fifth level.

I don’t want to get too down on the taxidermists. They can see the beauty of aliveness and reproduce it in fine detail. They have their place. The problem arises, as it has, when we begin to believe we can recreate the whole forest with animatronic baboons and foam rubber loam.

This is the state of the writing world as I see it: writers think they are only allowed to add humble little well-researched imitations of life, unless you explicitly err on the side of memoirist or novelist, which no one will read. The result is that we have mostly forgotten how to write like lunatics.

In fact, the entire project of philosophy has eaten itself in analytic philosophy departments at the universities: the obsessive practice of taxidermying every single word until you drown in madness of definitialism and lose the ability to prove that you even exist. “Continental” philosophy died last century as the amount of time it would take to master all the relevant material became too great and so thinkers lost their ability to write poetry because they were too busy catching up on what recent scholars thought that Hegel thought about whether vegetables participate in the Spirit dialectically or whatever. Meanwhile, poets lost cachet as revealers of wisdom as the worship of science loomed ever larger in the modern imagination.

People still crave wisdom and poetry, but they fear subjectivity, so hide their sad poetry in faux-objective pop-sci self-help. This is an anemic replacement, leaving us ever searching for the next big advice that will enrich our pale blood. We have forgotten that this is supposed to be raucous and dangerous and fun, and writers are supposed to be seeing how hard we can make the rubber slap.

We writers have failed. We can’t master every domain, so we’re too shy about getting humiliated by an “expert” in one field or another. So what? We need wild writing more than we need to uphold impossible standards of being technically correct, which only serve a hidden subjective drive anyway. Let’s stop hiding behind a rampart of faux-objectivity. Let’s swing as hard as we can just because it feels good. Let’s judge each other on style and grace and humor and not citations.

I see it happening here and there: I don’t agree with a single clause of Bentham Bulldog’s utilitarian writing, but by God I respect his swing. At the other extreme, Sam Kriss is unassailable to rationalists behind his decadent labyrinth of somewhat intimidating performative chaos. Although practically polar opposites epistemologically, both are playing the game well enough that it occasionally plays through them and they do something amazing.

This isn’t about laziness or anti-rigor. It’s a disposition more like art or sport than a faux-science. As an athlete, you have to train more than anyone if you want to be the best. Read and write for hours a day like lifting weights or practicing a jump shot. Not so you can memorize sources (I can’t even remember the title of the book I read before last), but so you can be ready to play through what has formed you when the moment emerges.

The taxidermists tend to think they are working toward a unified “Theory of Everything.” A perfectly stuffed hyper-knowledge-object that will unravel all domains of wisdom by its touch and also not need to move or change and just sit there, looming all correct-like.

I reject that frame. I see writing as good because it is both fun to make and read. All this talk of “compression” confuses me. What are we compressing? Why are we trying to fit so much into so little space? Do we really need to become neutron stars of information density so that anyone who reads will be pulled into the gravity of our insight?

The deep irony of the compressors is that, in my experience, they don’t even read. They don’t know that they need to be transformed by what they consume, so they believe they can grok the gist of a compressed output and don’t even bother with the source. They don’t understand that reading is also a living, participatory act. Summarizing any book worth reading is just as useless as summarizing a symphony.

Understandable: Pure information overload has made finding a true phenomenological frontier backed by research the work of multiple lifetimes. Popular modern writing is mostly phony Disney frontiers, playing at the boundaries of wisdom without the social risk of actually going there.

The only way I see for human writers to continue to meaningfully exist as a category is to say “screw it” and risk being wrong. Start writing more like a rockstar than a professor cloying for tenure. Start a feud with someone. Make up a word (I made up one somewhere in here). Do phenomenological leaps like athletic flourishes that couldn’t be reproduced with ten lifetimes of perfect reproductions of writing like Hemingway.

Good writing, like a sport, requires hours of immersion into the context of the greats and then hours more to practice. None of this is done to pitch faster than a pitching machine or write correcter than a writing machine. Rather, it’s that short, shining moment or two, here and there, where the whole arena of the writing world plays through you, you forget yourself, and you do something amazing. For a brief moment, you are not representing life, you are life.

That’s writing that lasts. It doesn’t happen if you’re prompting or compressing or researching because a writer is above all someone who writes things down.

When people see it done masterfully and yet effortlessly, they clock it as great in their monkey brains before they even know what they’re looking at. Here, authenticity is not the highest value and neither is technical mastery. It is a dance between them, both being required at their absolute limits, each forgiving the deficits of the other by the pureness of an all-out attempt and years of cumulative effort, neither of which can be faked.

Writing is the practice of finding the rhythm of that swing. At first, reckless jerks between the poles of structure and authenticity. With a lot of time and intentional practice, more like a gentle sway.

We lull ourselves into a courtship, and the gentle waltz imitates the dance between heaven and earth.