#thinking-through-writing

For most of my life, I thought writing meant choosing the words.

Not merely having an idea and communicating it successfully, but deciding exactly how one sentence should lead into another. Whether this word was better than that one. Whether a paragraph needed one more sentence or one fewer. Whether some thought sounded too formal, too blunt, too sentimental, too vague.

I cared about these things partly because I was lucky enough to begin reading seriously when I was young, and partly because I had English teachers who made writing feel like something worth taking seriously.

Language wasn't just packaging for thought. The packaging was part of the thought.

That makes my current writing process slightly strange.

These days, I often begin with the ideas and outsource much of the composition.

I explain what I am thinking to an artificial intelligence. I describe the argument, the uncertainty, the examples, the tone I am after, the things I do and do not want the piece to say. Then I get back a draft.

I read it.

And surprisingly often, my reaction is simply:

Yes. That's basically it.

Maybe I change some things. Maybe I push back against a sentence that goes too far or ask for a section to be reworked. But if the words adequately represent the structure that was already in my head, I increasingly feel little compulsion to replace them merely so that I can say I personally typed every sentence.