By now, we’ve all seen the hype cycle welcoming and lamenting AI’s advancements. It’s true: Its astonishing innovations are a source of wonder. And, at the same time, ill-conceived incentives and unintended consequences will probably lead us, led by AI, in a meandering race to the bottom, in some areas at least.
We’re in the grey space of before, awaiting potential regulations and experiments in implementation that will determine ethical and practical usage. In the meantime, we can draw from AI many useful lessons. For writers and others, AI offers a lens for understanding and responding to creative anxiety, maybe even the creative anxiety provoked by AI.
Creative anxiety is the stress that follows from the pressure to think expansively and improvisationally. When we feel it, we freeze before our task, work superficially through a tough problem, or avoid whatever is causing our discomfort.
As an existential threat to creativity, AI is a legitimate cause of this (and other) anxiety. But AI is not yet so much an existential threat as it is a reinforcing mechanism of two critical biases. To wit, it supports our tendency to confuse excess with meaning and our assumption that creativity is limited.
Our online lives encourage the conflation of excess with meaning in many, many ways. Such conflation is an efficient mechanism of/for the attention economy, in part because it eliminates the firsthand, active, participatory, and also time- and body-consuming experiences that typically inform significance. Our online experiences are gained second- or third-hand, passively and asynchronously. Their value depends not on impact but on endless accrual.
Yet, the pervasiveness of digital ennui suggests that the accrual can’t really lead to the kinds of significance on which meaning depends. That’s one reason why the online scroll feels so endless and futile: We seek, infinitely, some meaning.
AI promises a new tool for making excess meaningful. In fact, its ability to accumulate the furthest pixels of the digital world suggests its output is particularly authoritative. This has implications for creativity, too: Those of us who experience creative anxiety often implicitly assume that creativity is a limited resource. It’s out there and acquirable mostly through discovery. AI’s capacity to access everything out there suggests a claim on locatable creativity.
But this isn’t quite right. Excess can inform significance and meaning, but it must do so by way of an interested interpreter. And creativity isn’t contingent on everything: It actually depends on nothing. By some measures, creativity is the improvisation that follows restriction—it’s an internal potential. In fact, it’s the possible basis of our evolutionary capacity and is therefore inherent, as possibility, in every living thing.
Ultimately, while AI provokes anxiety, it also suggests strategies of response. We can, for instance, create significance and meaning by seeking out firsthand experiences (perhaps using AI as a tool to inform these experiences). We can also structure our work in restrictive ways that require improvisation (perhaps using AI as a tool to help set restrictions).
AI can be a meaningful and creative, if fundamentally derivative, producer. But for now it requires interpreters to cull from its excess and respond to its nothings with flexible improvisation. It can help us to channel the very anxiety it provokes, even—or especially—when we consider it a stone against which to sharpen our response.
AI: Stimulus and Response to Creative Anxiety
By now, we’ve all seen the hype cycle welcoming and lamenting AI’s advancements. It’s true: Its astonishing innovations are a source of wonder. And, at the same time, ill-conceived incentives and unintended consequences will probably lead us, led by AI, in a meandering race to the bottom, in some areas at least.
We’re in the grey space of before, awaiting potential regulations and experiments in implementation that will determine ethical and practical usage. In the meantime, we can draw from AI many useful lessons. For writers and others, AI offers a lens for understanding and responding to creative anxiety, maybe even the creative anxiety provoked by AI.
Creative anxiety is the stress that follows from the pressure to think expansively and improvisationally. When we feel it, we freeze before our task, work superficially through a tough problem, or avoid whatever is causing our discomfort.
As an existential threat to creativity, AI is a legitimate cause of this (and other) anxiety. But AI is not yet so much an existential threat as it is a reinforcing mechanism of two critical biases. To wit, it supports our tendency to confuse excess with meaning and our assumption that creativity is limited.
Our online lives encourage the conflation of excess with meaning in many, many ways. Such conflation is an efficient mechanism of/for the attention economy, in part because it eliminates the firsthand, active, participatory, and also time- and body-consuming experiences that typically inform significance. Our online experiences are gained second- or third-hand, passively and asynchronously. Their value depends not on impact but on endless accrual.
Yet, the pervasiveness of digital ennui suggests that the accrual can’t really lead to the kinds of significance on which meaning depends. That’s one reason why the online scroll feels so endless and futile: We seek, infinitely, some meaning.
AI promises a new tool for making excess meaningful. In fact, its ability to accumulate the furthest pixels of the digital world suggests its output is particularly authoritative. This has implications for creativity, too: Those of us who experience creative anxiety often implicitly assume that creativity is a limited resource. It’s out there and acquirable mostly through discovery. AI’s capacity to access everything out there suggests a claim on locatable creativity.
But this isn’t quite right. Excess can inform significance and meaning, but it must do so by way of an interested interpreter. And creativity isn’t contingent on everything: It actually depends on nothing. By some measures, creativity is the improvisation that follows restriction—it’s an internal potential. In fact, it’s the possible basis of our evolutionary capacity and is therefore inherent, as possibility, in every living thing.
Ultimately, while AI provokes anxiety, it also suggests strategies of response. We can, for instance, create significance and meaning by seeking out firsthand experiences (perhaps using AI as a tool to inform these experiences). We can also structure our work in restrictive ways that require improvisation (perhaps using AI as a tool to help set restrictions).
AI can be a meaningful and creative, if fundamentally derivative, producer. But for now it requires interpreters to cull from its excess and respond to its nothings with flexible improvisation. It can help us to channel the very anxiety it provokes, even—or especially—when we consider it a stone against which to sharpen our response.
Audience Aspirations
Books fails for many reasons, but nonfiction books fail when they fail to find an audience. Although this is a common consequence after publication, it can be hedged against in the early stages of book development.
When nonfiction books fail to find an audience, it’s typically because they were developed, accidentally or purposely, for everyone. A book read by everyone sounds like a worthy aim, but it’s a reflexive and counterproductive goal.
Why? After all, everyone sounds like a lot of readers, and most people associated with books (rightly) believe that the more readers the better. Also, the concept of “audience” is inclusive: When we describe our book as a book for everyone, we mean it’s a book for anyone. No one should not read it.
This results in the everyone reflex: the natural and potentially even logical assumption that when we write, we write for everyone. The reflex is powerful, and when it guides development, it leads to books that fail to find real readers.
The everyone reflex is partly a manifestation of our confirmation and egocentric biases: We assume that others are as interested in our subject matter as we are, even if they don’t know it yet.
In this way, the reflex lets us sidestep the responsibility of explaining our book’s relevance. Though this seems unnecessary—surely interested readers will find our book?—it’s a critical part of argumentation and one of our most powerful tools in positioning our book for success.
To circumvent the everyone reflex during the development stage, we must ask and answer the question of our book’s relevance. We must explain, on the page, our book’s “significant and demonstrable bearing on the matter at hand.” This explanation serves as our book’s reason-for-being, giving shape to our argument and pointing toward its most appropriate audience.
By identifying our book’s significance to the matter at hand, as well as the interested readers who already do and should care about it, we write not for the nameless, featureless everybody, but for the very particular readers who need and want our book.
Critique as an Invitation to Collaboration
The most viscerally painful critique I received was from my PhD advisor in a high-stakes, high-reward meeting before my defense. She’d reviewed my 320-page, 466-footnote project. She had much to say.
I, of course, wanted to be showered with praise. I also wanted appreciation for the work I had put in. I wanted approval that would not only validate my efforts, but would also free me from this project, which felt more like a boulder than a millstone around my neck.
Given these hopes, it won’t be surprising to hear that I didn’t receive anything like the praise I sought. Instead, my advisor was outraged that I hadn’t adequately cited her influence. Then, she picked apart my argument, piece by piece, pointing out its every weakness, and theoretically dismantling its overarching structure.
I was annoyed. Then incensed. Then devastated. I was also embarrassed—embarrassed that my work hadn’t garnered her approval and embarrassed that I wanted that approval so badly.
Today, more than ten years on, a major part of my work includes participating in similarly high-stakes, high-rewards conversations about high-commitment projects. I’m frequently the critic, but my work is also often the object of judgment. I still wonder: Why is it so hard to hear critique?
I’ve come to feel that critique hurts for a variety of reasons: It hurts because it mimics our inner doubts and insecurities. It hurts because it indicates rejection from a group we seek to join. Critique also communicates a strong signal that we must return to something that we long to release. It’s a painful indication that despite our efforts we haven’t achieved our aims.
I haven’t learned to lessen the sting of critique, but I have learned to view it not as evidence of universal disappointment but as an invitation to collaboration. It may not be gentle, thoughtful, or even particularly well-meant, but a critique frequently offers ideas that can make my ideas better.
Luckily, learning to view critique as collaboration isn’t a perspective shift that requires ten years to make. I believe I learned it back then, after the hurt of my advisor’s words subsided. When I felt capable of opening up my document yet again, I applied many of her suggestions. I ripped apart the garment I had spent years weaving, then pieced it into something new. It actually didn’t take nearly as long as I had feared, and once I was finished, I experienced the relief of utter rightness. The project was not only in better shape, but it had finally, finally achieved the form I’d been aiming at all along.
Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to feel the pain of critique many, many times. It still hurts, but now I consider it an invitation to collaboration. When I accept, my projects benefit.
Love is a Battlefield
Valentine’s Day is for lovers, for family, for friends, for children, and for pets. It’s also for artists, for creators, and for writers, too. We can think of our relationship to creativity as a labor of love, but a passion project requires more than care; it requires a commitment.
These projects are marked by the love-is-a-battlefield kind of love (thanks, Pat). We may actively avoid committing because so many complicated feelings are involved: We’ll need to negotiate some give and take, some push and pull, and our intense, sometimes furious devotion.
A passion project also stirs up resentments that can mimic our most fraught intimacies (echoing Terry Real’s “normal marital hatred” here). We can spend infinite time thinking about our project, or thinking about making time to work on it, or thinking about working on it. But then, when we’re actually working on it, we’re dissatisfied. Infinitude is too vast. We want something more, something better, something different.
Valentine’s Day is a good day to remember that when it comes to the objects of our passions, it can be ok to hate—just a little bit—what we love. Maybe your project seems to require too much sacrifice. Maybe it doesn’t live up to your standards or your ideals. Maybe your standards are so high that you can’t begin the work.
Psychotherapists and philosophers have long suggested that, in our intimate relationships, big resentments and small hatreds might possibly enhance our love. Perhaps, like the naughty child seeking secure parental devotion, our project thwarts our every effort at discipline to test our dedication.
Maybe. Maybe not. But if you find yourself returning to a project—whether an idea, a book, a venture—again and again, even after false starts and disappointments, it may be because your love is true. Celebrate your passion: It’s probably time to commit.
New Year, Old Tensions, & the Potential for Generative Balance
Writers are intimately familiar with the tension between the fresh-start promise of a potential story and the perpetual pain of a blank page. But when the new year turns over, most of us feel the discomfort between productivity and paralysis, too.
The calendar may be a construct, but we’ve tacitly agreed it’s a construct that renews itself on January 1. The implication of renewal suggests a new opportunity to rewrite our beginnings and endings, making plain the latent tension between doing and dormancy.
While we frequently discharge this tension through resolutions—declaration helps to provoke the momentum we need to act—resolutions don’t really work. This may be because resolutions borne out of a desire to discharge discomfort miss the mark.
It’s uncomfortable to feel caught between possible action and perpetual paralysis. But we shouldn’t seek to relax this feeling. We should think instead about trying to heighten it.
The push-pull tautness of desire—I want to act; I don’t want to act; I want to act—is elemental. We rely on it, especially the uncomfortable friction it generates, to negotiate a generative balance between activity and rest.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s popular line suggests something similar: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
Reframing irresolution as generative orients it to the future, aligning it with action. Withstanding such tension mistakes the locus of power. When we foster such tension instead, we open wide the world of possibility: “One should,” Fitzgerald writes, “be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
This year, it might be worth resolving to work toward the generative balance that tension makes possible. In doing so, we sustain the conditions of imaginative possibility, which gives all action meaning.
It Takes a Team
Writing a book feels like—because it very often is—solitary work. But a published book is the result of coordinated teamwork. A roster of readers, reviewers, editors, copyeditors, production managers and production assistants, marketing managers and marketing assistants—and sometimes an agent or two—are responsible for binding a sheaf of pages into a brand new book.
Some or all of the following people often have a hand in shaping a rough-draft manuscript into a clean-copy book:
The point is this: We often feel alone, and this feeling of alone-ness can be amplified in the process of writing a book. Perhaps we assume we must go it alone. Perhaps we feel as though we really are on our own. But, in truth, no one writes a really excellent book alone. It takes a team of interested, thoughtful people to bring forth a book that matters.
When It’s Not Working
When we’re faced with disappointments on a project to which we’ve committed time, effort, money, and emotion, it can be hard to know when to persist and when to quit.
On the one hand, grit can get us over the finish line, argues Angela Duckworth, even when our lungs are labored, our legs are heavy, and the race is too long.
On the other, quitting the race can save us from overvaluing persistence for its own sake, claims Annie Duke. Why should we keep running, Duke asks, when we know we can’t win, and when a loss means more than just a hit to our pride?
To dig deep and show grit, or to pull up short and quit? It’s a timeless question many of us must ask about the commitments we care about, whether it’s a project, a job, a race, or a relationship.
It’s a hard question to answer because we often assess the costs and benefits of persistence versus abandonment only when things go wrong. Yet, when things go wrong, we’re not especially good at neutral assessment. The sunk-cost fallacy and other cognitive biases typically limit our thinking and confine our actions. We end up overvaluing our investments when they aren’t paying off, or blowing long-term equity in a short-term fit of pique.
Because life is uncertain and so many variables shape our experiences, there’s no easy way to decide when to show grit or when to quit. But we can get closer to the least-wrong answer by identifying the root of resistance. Ask yourself:
The preceding exercise won’t tell you what to do, but it may give you enough clarity to make a plan. For example, if your resistance is rooted in overwhelm, take a break, or take steps to reduce contextual chaos.
If, on the other hand, your resistance is related to the possibility that we are mere drops in the swelling ocean of humanity, that there’s nothing new in its depths, and that nothing you say or do can really change the rhythm of the waves, well, quitting isn’t going to change that, so you might just need to make a plan to comfort yourself before keeping on keeping on.
The Cutting Room Floor
Producing quality writing depends on successfully wielding two opposing forces: creation and destruction (addition and subtraction; expansion and reduction). On the one hand, you have to make it. On the other, in the process of making it, you have to let go of some of what you’ve made.
Unsurprisingly, the letting-go part of the process seldom gets its due. Writers refer to it as “killing your darlings” or “the cutting room floor.” Though the pain of the effort is communicated through verbs like “kill” and “cut,” it is a fundamental part of producing quality writing.
In fact, journalist Kevin Sullivan, in conversation with journalist Chip Scanlon, cites it as the best writing advice he’s ever received: “Don Murray, my college journalism professor and friend, said you can always measure the quality of a piece of writing by the quality of what you cut.”
It’s hard to let go of our brilliant turns of phrase, or our tightly crafted paragraphs. It’s harder to let go of whole narrative arcs. But Sullivan confirms that quality writing requires us to recognize that what we’ve created will almost always benefit from what we can cut.
To make it easier, save your cuttings as clips. The benefit is practical—you can consult your clips to develop new darlings. It’s also emotional—you can keep what’s not currently required, saving it for another creation.
Big Problems with Big Projects
Books are big projects. They require time and effort and can be consequently quite difficult to complete. Many (many) writers have to work hard just to make the time that allows us to put forth the effort.
So, when we finish a draft of a big-project book, we want to be done—done with the time-finding and done with the effort-expending. We want to be done done. Yet, despite the meaning of “finished,” a finished draft is never The End.
Instead, it’s usually the beginning of implementing the big changes that move a draft from finished to accepted. Big changes are often suggested by critical readers, developmental editors, or hands-on agents and often include the following:
Suggestions like these can feel big—too big. It can be overwhelming and demoralizing for authors to realize that their manuscript requires even more time and effort for completion.
But big changes don’t always translate to big effort. Revision, even major revision, is far easier to complete than the hard labor of producing the draft.
In the same way that carving a stone is challenging, while mining stone is backbreaking, shaping a draft into manuscript form is part of the process of artistry. Once the backbreaking work of creation is finished, refinement often feels like relief.
Authors asked to implement big changes can take heart: The request is often a testament to the reader’s confidence in the author’s craft.
Why Write?
How have we come to live with the arrow of death in our collective heart, asks Elizabeth Dias in a recent New York Times essay. In the aftermath of the shooting of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, as well as the nearly 20 mass shootings that have occurred since then, the question is painfully relevant.
Yet, right now, we don’t need answers. We already know that Senators and Representatives, mostly Republican, insist—over the will of most Americans—on frictionless access to guns. We also know that gun manufacturers, gun lobbyists, and others who benefit from the easy access to guns work relentlessly to associate guns with a violent brand of freedom and protection.
There are other answers, too. But, right now, they don’t matter. Right now, all that matters is that we pull out the arrow.
To do so requires our collective action, which is hard. At its base, collective action asks us to recognize others as precious—precious in ways we don’t understand, precious in ways we can’t articulate—precious beyond words.
Is it ironic that communal power depends on individual respect, even reverence? Maybe. But, according to Rabbi Mychal B. Springer, it’s a reflection of a simple spiritual truth: Each person, every one of us, contains the whole world.
We may not be aware of it, but we already understand this truth. Our feelings of wrenching despair, of agonized abandonment after such brutality testify to our recognition. We sense that we’ve squandered preciousness. We grasp, however lightly, that we’ve lost the whole world.
We sense, too, that we cannot wrest it back. But if we pull out the arrow, we can at least start to heal.
So, vote for council members, local officials, state representatives, and national leaders who support real responses to out-of-control gun violence, including federal laws that regulate access to guns. Participate in local, statewide, and national conversations to advocate for gun regulation. Support initiatives like Wear Orange. Join groups like Moms Demand Action and Sandy Hook Promise. Acknowledge, out loud, the terrible burden on survivors of gun violence, who must remind us—again and again and again—what has been lost.
In short, do everything you can, and even things you think you can’t, to pull out the arrow, so we can heal our heart, and begin the work of rebuilding the world.