Writing is Magic; Machine Writing is Ash

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A couple of years ago I found some of the old journals I’d kept when I was a teenager. Some of the thoughts in it were innocuous and silly. Some of them were heavier – had a weight I still carry with me today – especially the passages I wrote when I was hospitalised for a summer.

None of it’s great writing. But all of it helped at the time. Taking thoughts and putting them down into writing helped clear them, structure them, and turned them into a foundation I could build on. It helped me deal with crises and changes.

The magic of writing is this ability to witness the thought process, where somebody has used the piecemeal of words and sentences to turn incoherence into structure.

Where once there was little more than anxiety and an idea, there was now understanding.

Even when it’s your own writing, the thoughts that prompted the writing are long gone – “the past is a foreign country” as another writer put it – and even with your vague recollections your position is that of the reader and no longer the same writer.

Writing is magic even when it’s bad. The process is thinking. It forces structure in place of the anxious jumble of your mind.

It helps others order their own minds by witnessing your thoughts captured in lines.

Machine writing does none of this. It’s ash – the burnt embers of dead thoughts. It captures nothing, structures nothing, orders nothing.

Human writing is as close to mind-reading as we can get. It’s weird, lossy, and simultaneously substantial and insubstantial.

It magic even when it’s bad because it helps you think.

It’s magic even when there’s nobody to read it; the life it gives to thoughts always helps the writer, even when they sit alone with it.

So, I’d just like to echo and extend what Andy Bell wrote on the Piccalilli blog:

This article is mainly addressed to fellow educators, but also to people that write on their personal blogs. You must keep going because people still need us. If we don’t, we lose. If we stop, we lose

Writing is magic. It’s always been magic. The vikings thought bound language bound reality and reshaped it. It gives our thoughts shape.

Writing is always a gift. Bad or good writing. Sloppy or structured. Planned or improvised. It’s all magic.

Don’t let the mirage of generated, extruded, letterforms, hollow bubbles inflated by machines, take it away from you.

It’s a gift of magic you can give yourself.

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