Writing as fitness exercise

This is the first-part on writing as necessary friction.

Jean-Baptiste Oudry (from Getty Open Content)

It makes sense that many writers, when faced with the existential dread of generative AI, return to the same metaphor: that the nature of writing is the same as fitness exercise.

Humans work out and lift weights at the gym in order to build muscles. A stronger body is more easily able to move through the world and sustain a longer, healthier life. The entire point of exercise is to stress the muscles, not to move a specific weighted object at a particular time and place. We can always get a machine to do that same exact movement but then what’s the point? Your body is no longer involved in the process. There are no benefits by forgoing the effort.

Writing is like that but for thinking and communicating. It’s a skill that must be built through repeated training and maintained by long-term deliberate practice.

I can observe the effects of a writing practice on my thinking. I have more mental clarity on subjects that I have written about, compared to idle rumination or even long conversations with others. I am more well-informed and structured in my reasoning. I absorb new information more readily into the existing scaffolds in my mind. I can articulate more nuanced opinions and convey my meaning with simpler, more concise language.

There are debates that writing cultivates different kinds of reasoning faculties, too. There is much fear and speculation that we are becoming a post-literate society, especially with the influx of illiterate college students who need ChatGPT to regurgitate all their required reading to them in predigested LLM chunks. This panic arises from genuine concern that the declining ability to read and write is degrading cognitive function.

Long-form writing is able to provide a deeper level of communication which cannot be replicated by podcasts or video content. It takes long, complex arguments and commits them to the page. The exact wording, lines of reasoning, and conclusions are therefore exposed to scrutiny and possible attack. A video or audio recording can always be defended as misconstrued or taken out of context, while a direct written quotation is incontrovertible proof. As Adam Mastroianni writes in Text is king,

That’s actually where I agree with the worrywarts of the written word: all serious intellectual work happens on the page, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. If you want to contribute to the world of ideas, if you want to entertain and manipulate complex thoughts, you have to read and write.

According to one theory, that’s why writing originated: to pin facts in place. At first, those facts were things like “Hirin owes Mushin four bushels of wheat”, but once you realize that knowledge can be hardened and preserved by encoding it in little squiggles, you unlock a whole new realm of logic and reasoning.

This mode of communication is so valuable that it is theorized to have evolved independently three times:

Writing is humankind’s principal technology for collecting, manipulating, storing, retrieving, communicating and disseminating information. Writing may have been invented independently three times in different parts of the world: in the Near East, China and Mesoamerica.

What I love about the framing of writing as an invented technology is the reminder that it’s fundamentally a tool, and that it’s use as a tool does not necessarily come naturally. We must train ourselves to be able to communicate in this way.

Rayne Fisher-Quann captures this transformative quality of writing on ourselves:

An essay is not the process of translating a fully-formed idea into words on a page; it is the process of discovering and testing an idea by challenging it with form, syntax, structure. The friction between idea and ability that AI evangelists promise to eradicate is not a problem suffered by a disadvantaged few. It’s the fundamental condition of the writer, and it is precisely through that friction that we discover what it is we actually have to say.

Expressing ideas effectively through writing is not something that people are born being able to do or not do; it’s a muscle that anyone can develop and that anyone can let atrophy.

There are also useful subskills that writing will strengthen, similar to how the body recruits accessory muscles to complete a full-body compound movement. Writing requires holding large amounts of context in your short-term memory. To avoid misunderstandings or imprecise language, writers must adopt a fresh perspective to spot the gulf between the written meaning and authorial intent. We construct imaginary debates to poke holes in our arguments, shore up our best defenses with more facts and references, and use the most beautiful language we know to stick our theses firmly in the reader’s minds.

I don’t use AI shortcuts in my writing because the core purpose is to build my mental muscles. I need to be the one feeling the friction.

There are definitely some useful applications that might be included here and there without disrupting the hard work, like helping with gathering research or identifying weak paragraphs to edit. Frank Chimero, a designer and prolific writer, offers the analogy of AI as an instrument in his deeply insightful talk Beyond the Machine:

Thinking of AI as an instrument recenters the focus on practice. Instruments require a performance that relies on technique—the horn makes the sound, but how and what you blow into it matters; the drum machine keeps time and plays the samples, but what you sample and how you swing on top of it becomes your signature.

In other words, instruments can surprise you with what they offer, but they are not automatic. In the end, they require a touch. You use a tool, but you play an instrument. It’s a more expansive way of doing, and the doing of it all is important, because that’s where you develop the instincts for excellence. There is no purpose to better machines if they do not also produce better humans.

At one point, even word processors were suspected of damaging the creative process of writing. It’s hard to remember the past mindsets of people experiencing the technological change that has become so normalized to us. Now it seems quaint, almost cute, that we had those kinds of fears.

Computer bus Heiloo, 1985 (from Rijksmuseum)

John Hersey gave an interview to The Paris Review in 1986, revealing how the computer dramatically improved the tedious manual labor of revision,

And I found [the computer] just wonderfully convenient; a huge and very versatile typewriter was what it amounted to. It could remember what I’d done, and help me find mistakes, and so on. If I used an out-of-the-way word and had a dim memory of having used it a hundred pages earlier, I could simply type the word and ask the machine to find it, and there it would be, in its context, right away, instead of my having to riffle through a hundred pages and spend two or three hours looking for it. It was simply a time-saver. It took about a month to get used to looking at words on a screen, almost as if in a new language; but once that was past, it seemed just like using a typewriter. So when these badly-named machines—processor! God!—came on the market some years later, I was really eager to find one. I think there’s a great deal of nonsense about computers and writers; the machine corrupts the writer, unless you write with a pencil you haven’t chosen the words, and so on. But it has made revision much more inviting to me, because when I revised before on the typewriter, there was a commitment of labor in typing a page; though I might have an urge to change the page, I was reluctant to retype it. But with this machine, there’s no cost of labor in revision at all, so I’ve found that I’ve spent much more time, much more care, in revision since I started using it.

[…]

I think there are a lot of things that are annoying about modern computers, particularly the ones that are interactive and keep giving you cute questions to answer as you work. That kind of thing would madden me. But I have a very simple, old-fashioned, “dedicated” word processor that doesn’t inflict any of that on me. I think of it as a useful tool.

The lesson here is to carefully tend the skills that can work with and through the instruments, whether the instrument is pen and paper, word processors, or even generative AI. Writing provides a mental strength-training that cannot be captured through other mediums. And the painful repetition and effort of crafting an essay does add up to something greater than the sum of its parts, just like a heart-wrenching musical performance is more than just the instrument and the individual notes played one after another.

It surely says something that writing not only evolved multiple times but has survived through all subsequent technological revolutions. It will survive this one too.