Once you have learned to work effectively with conversational agents, there is no situation which you encounter as a writer in which you couldn’t draw on them for practical support. To the extent you are writing because you enjoy it, at least some of the time, this need not be a problem. After all why would you outsource a task which brings you satisfaction? The problem arises when you find yourself stuck, as all writers inevitably will be from time to time: unsure of the next step, unable to move forward, frustrated by your lack of progress. There are certainly chronic forms of stuckness which need to be addressed as persistent conditions susceptible to structured intervention. For example if you are often unable to start a draft because of the anxiety the blank page provokes in you, it would obviously be beneficial to overcome that predicament through the use of machine writing to produce a ‘zero draft’ i.e. recording your existing ideas and turning them into a extremely rough initial text in order to get you through that previously insurmountable initial stage.
What about forms of stuckness which aren’t chronic? What Montaigne described as the “creative confusion” which sometimes afflicts a writer, caught in a wearying oscillation between intoxication with a sense of one’s own genius and a revulsion at the banality of one’s own words? What about the predicament Boice describes where “obsessiveness and excessive self-reflection” about a long-term project “can even make a manuscript seem foreign, like someone else’s writing, or else so overly familiar that it becomes embarrassing”? What about when you suddenly discern a weakness in your argument and intuit that pulling at this newly visible thread will lead the whole edifice to come crashing down around you? If these are persistent features of the writing process, if they more or less prevent writing as a sustained and enjoyable activity, they should be reasons for seeking advice, support and transformation. This is where the capacities of AI writing tools could prove to be invaluable.
The concern I increasingly feel about machine writing is that these often aren’t persistent but rather temporary features of the writing process. Being stuck is a routine and unavoidable experience of writing which even the most outwardly successful academic writer will regularly experience. The social theorist Margaret Archer once said to me that “if you start a book and don’t feel like you are drowning then it’s not worth doing”. It was reassuring to hear that these complex theoretical monographs, repeated at regular intervals over decades, did not emerge fully formed but rather had to be worked at and struggled over.
It’s not simply that being stuck is an unavoidable feature of writing, as much as that it’s also a formative feature of writing. Through being stuck we change and grow as writers, we define what matters to us and we can transcend the limitations we have brought into a project. The things which lead us to get stuck are not immutable facts about our psychology as writers, nor are they set in stone. We can leave these challenges behind, even while recognizing that we will inevitably meet other challenges in the future that lead us to get stuck again, in new and frustrating ways.
The problem is that if we don’t struggle with our stuckness, if we see it as a problem to be solved as quickly and efficiently as possible, we lose out on the growth which might otherwise have come about. There is a balance to be struck here in which we avoid moralizing stuckness, not least of all because imbuing it with such significance carries the risk of tipping us over into the chronic forms of stuckness we have discussed. But if we see it as something which ought to be avoided to the greatest extent possible, we are likely to lose something, subtle though significant, which diminishes us as writers.
Mark Carrigan 