Finding Joy in the Creative Darkness: Reflections on Writing and Stuckness

The vision I have presented in recent posts about the trouble of writing is a fundamentally positive one. This is a fertile space if we relate to it in an open and confident way. It is only by attuning ourselves to the feelings we encounter in it, the sense of an incipient idea even when we remain unable to fully identify it, that we can move through it. The joy of writing comes when we have something to say, while avoiding the temptation to fixate on outputs and/or squeeze too much out of the inspiration we experience at a particular moment.

The problem comes when we find ourselves stuck in that creative darkness, either at a particular moment or in a sustained way. My experience of the former has been that simply accepting nothing is coming, going off to do something as far away from writing as the practicalities of the day permit, can be the best antidote to that stuckness becoming a chronic matter. The only time I’ve ever found myself chronically stuck was during a period of immense personal upheaval where I simply couldn’t write for months. There was so much that I was struggling to process personally that the subterranean work described by Bertrand Russell had simply ceased for the foreseeable future. I tried to sit down and write but it only intensified my distress about everything that was going on in my life. Eventually I accepted that I wasn’t going to be able to write in any meaningful sense, so dropped the expectation that I would and instead focused on getting myself through a difficult situation with as much care and self-concern as I could muster under the circumstances.

This experience of chronic stuckness was in this sense not unlike my experience of situational stuckness. I just had to give up writing for the season rather than the day. It was striking that when I resolved the situation, eventually taking the action that freed me from a state of interpersonal limbo, I immediately regained the impulse to write. It felt as if a tap had suddenly turned back on in my mind, leading me to write thousands of words over the next few days with an intensity that had eluded me for months, if not years. In fact it was a source of immense comfort over the subsequent months as I negotiated the fallout of my decision. It left me with a vivid appreciation of how writing can be a refuge, a reliable place of meaning and security which you can cultivate and return to.

It was newly clear how intricately the enjoyment of writing, the experience of flow and the feelings associated with it, came to be tangled up in my broader experience of the world. Not in the sense of enjoying writing when life was good and struggling with it when life was bad. It went much deeper than that, suggesting to me the flow of writing (or its absence) was tied to a mode of engagement with the world. Even if the circumstances were immensely challenging, they would still be conducive to writing if I approached them from a position of agency. That’s what freed me from being stuck in creative darkness: a decision about my future I made myself rather than waiting for someone else to make it for me. My experience is that if I approach life in this way, I will have something to say. It might not be insightful, interesting or creative. But to the extent I am genuinely engaging with my circumstances, I will have something to say.

The reason I’m sharing this is not to position my own writing practice as typical or even interesting. It’s to illustrate what reflection on the writing process can look like, if you see your practice as located within the psychic and social conditions of your life more widely. My suggestion is there’s a practical value in cultivating this reflection in order to better understand the psychological drivers of your writing. What need is it serving? What are you trying to prove? When do you experience it as working? When have you found it a punishing ordeal?

If you approach your writing as a narrowly technical exercise in which you either produce a certain outcome (or fail to) then you’re unlikely to consider this deeper layer of motivation. If you don’t understand these deeper forces driving your writing, an understanding that will remain partial and fallible by its nature, you will experience your enjoyment of writing as a mystery over which you can exercise little influence. It will be a creative flow you sometimes gratefully receive and which at other times evades you but which you fundamentally exercise little to no influence over.

I’m suggesting that in contrast it’s possible to develop a reflective orientation to your writing which can support your efforts to nourish the conditions in which ideas will consistently flow and you’ll regularly have something to say. I’ve drawn on my experience throughout to illustrate what that looks like in my own writing practice, which continues to develop and evolve as I do. The point is not that you should replicate what I’m doing, though I hope some of what I’ve shared will be useful as tips and techniques to experiment with. The reason I’ve offered this account is instead to support you in developing your own reflective approach to writing in order to better understand the relationship between your life circumstances, your psychological state, and your creative output.

The Objects With Which We Write: The Materiality of Academic Writing in a Digital Age

What I’m exploring here are the joys which can be taken in the writing process, as well as how this shapes our relation as academics to the machine writing which LLMs are capable of producing. I use this phrase to indicate a specific focus on how LLMs can be used for writing, as opposed to the many other purposes they can serve. It also foregrounds the continuities between machine writing using LLMs and the far more extensive history of writing, including the many machines other than LLMs which have been used as part of the writing process.

Word processors, typewriters and printing presses have all been integral to how we produce written work. If we’re comfortable stretching the definition of ‘machine’ to encompass all the artifacts used in the writing process, we would obviously include pens, pencils and papers. Once we start to search for the objects we draw upon in writing, we find numerous tools that become so ready-to-hand that we rarely reflect on their nature or the role they play for us. What’s important is being sensitive to the things (in the broadest sense) we use to write, as well as what this means for our experience of writing. This helps ensure that we don’t imagine the introduction of technological artifacts, such as conversational agents like Claude and ChatGPT which are powered by LLMs, into the writing process is something entirely new. What’s new are the nature of these artifacts and what they mean for our writing practice.

This focus on the materiality of writing might seem immensely obvious. If you’re an academic with a love for physically writing with a high quality pen and ornate stationery, it will already be clear to you that writing is a material practice. It’s also likely you’ll already have a sense of how the experience of writing is inflected through the materiality of the objects we rely upon. As the writing scholar Helen Sword (2023: loc 2196) reflects: “I love manipulating digital text on my computer screen: cutting and pasting, resurrecting deleted phrases with a single keystroke, messing around with colors and fonts, highlighting words so that I can return to my document later and see at a glance which sections need attention.”

This isn’t an experience I share. I appreciate the practical affordances of editing which Sword points to but I don’t feel enthusiasm for them. What I love is the immediacy with which one can write in a cloud-based writing system. I often write snippets on my phone when I’m struck by an idea which Ulysses, my writing software, will ensure is securely lodged within my database waiting to be reviewed and refined at a later point in time. I often switch between my Kindle app and Ulysses on my iPad in order to respond to something I have read while the idea is still fresh to me. The fact that these snippets, produced in a diverse range of situations and energized by that diversity, will be reliably waiting for when I sit down for more extended writing and editing with my laptop or desktop is something I really love about the materiality of my writing process.

It’s not that I resent or reject the editing capabilities which figure so forcefully in Sword’s experience, it’s simply that my embodied pleasures in academic writing come from elsewhere. In contrast, I struggle to find any utility in writing with a pen despite the appreciation of ornate stationery which I’ve felt since I was a child. It’s such a slow process that I find it frustrating whereas touch typing for thirty years means that I can type as quickly as I think.

I can still find satisfaction in handwriting though, even if the degrading of my penmanship through underuse means that ensuring the legibility of what I have written slows me down even further. I had a free afternoon on a recent holiday in which I was suddenly struck by the impulse to write. I purchased an ornate notebook and nice pen from the nearest bookshop and then sat under a tree and spent a couple of hours slowly recording thoughts which I’d felt germinating that morning. I’m not sure why a whole series of insights had suddenly occurred to me in the middle of a holiday in which I had genuinely not thought about work for days. I suspect they occurred to me because I had detached from my work, including removing work e-mail from my phone.

I’m glad I could feel these insights taking root and that I intuited I needed a notebook rather than my usual note-taking app because a whole series of things I had struggled with intellectually suddenly fell into place. There wasn’t a pleasure to writing slowly but there was clearly an affordance found in it. The enforced slowness of writing with a pen helped those insights gently emerge, even if it took a bit of work to decipher them when I returned home. The fact it was a beautiful summer’s day in an idyllic churchyard garden where the adjacent cafe had kindly left some deckchairs clearly helped as well.

The embodied pleasures we take in writing are varied and often situational. It’s not just that different authors have different inclinations. What works for us at one juncture might not work for us at another. The satisfaction I found in writing with a pen in that Cambridge churchyard was a rare instance where the affordance of handwriting was exactly what my creative process needed at that specific moment. If I had tried to record these germinating insights through my usual apps I would have undoubtedly have been tugged into a different mentality depriving me of the space in which this perspective could unfold.

It’s not that one mode of writing is more authentic or enriching in itself. Rather, experiences of authenticity and enrichment through writing rest upon understanding how the affordances (what the objects enable us to do and what they constrain us from doing) and the embodied satisfactions (the rewarding feelings which tend to be associated with or absent from their use) play out in specific settings with goals and pressures which vary between us.

For example, there are times when writing by hand has been helpful in preparing for a talk because it helps me isolate the core elements of my message. But if I’ve left it to the last minute to prepare, with the need to make notes as I was on the way to the venue, the slowness of my writing and the unreliable legibility of the ensuing text would be too much of an obstacle. Sword (2023: loc 400) vividly captures how different modalities manifest themselves in different experiences of writing, involving strikingly different pleasures found in what some might imagine was an overlapping process:

“When I touch-type on my computer keyboard, the pleasure that I feel is almost purely intellectual; my physical surroundings seem to fade away as my fingers surrender to the flow of ideas. When I write by hand in a notebook, by contrast, my pleasure becomes more intensely embodied; my heartbeat slows along with the pace of my pen, and months or years afterward I find that I can still recall physical details such as the chair I sat in while I was writing a particular passage, the weight and size of the notebook in my hand, even the temperature of the air and the quality of the light.”

The physicality of writing with a pen is easy to grasp. As Baron (2023: 202) observes “Those of us logging years of writing by hand still bear our ‘writer’s bump,’ that callus on the inside of the first joint of the middle finger of the writing hand.” I was struck when reading Lacan’s Seminar X, a transcript of his annual seminar in Paris, how an aside about the physical difficulties often associated with writing could assume everyone in the room shared that experience. It left me with a sudden apprehension of an entirely different academic culture to the one I inhabit as a millennial academic who began a PhD in 2008. I understood intellectually that handwriting was ubiquitous prior to the personal computer, but this was the first time I was left with a more intuitive sense of what a radically different academic culture that entailed.

It can be useful to reflect on how this has changed in order to sensitize ourselves to what remains an embodied experience of writing with digital technology. I learned to touch type at a young age. I can’t remember why I taught myself to touch type, nor it seems can my parents. But from the vantage point of my late 30s it strikes me as the most useful decision I ever made. The ubiquity of typing in our lives means that it can often fall under the radar, such that we don’t think comparatively about technique any more than we would find ourselves musing about the different ways in which adults brush their teeth.

Touch typing, relying on the feel of the keys to guide your hands around the keyboard, obviously constitutes a vastly superior physical technique for typing. It is vastly quicker, avoids the need to stare down at the keyboard and enables an immersion in the process of typing. A recent test I took online suggests I can type at 140 words per minute if I’m willing to make some mistakes. If writing in its early stages is a matter of expressing thought, touch typing means that you can physically write as quickly as you can think. This is hugely significant for the process of writing, even if it might not be unambiguously positive.

As we confront the emergence of AI writing tools, we should approach them with the same reflective awareness we might bring to choosing between pen and keyboard. How do these tools shape our thinking? What pleasures do they afford or deny us? What modes of engagement do they facilitate or constrain? Just as I discovered that handwriting occasionally offers creative insights that digital tools cannot, we may find that AI tools have their place within a thoughtful writing practice: neither wholesale replacements for human creativity nor mere gimmicks to be dismissed.

The landscape we inhabit as academics can be immensely confusing because the options available to us now have little relationship to those many of us confronted in the formative stages of our careers. The reflexivity I’ve illustrated here, in which we engage in a dialogue between the tools we are using and the practices in which we are deploying them, becomes essential in order to realize the emerging opportunities for academics and avoid the potential pitfalls.

The Joy of Academic Writing in the Age of AI

I once imagined an academic career involved a lofty devotion to knowledge at a distance from the world. This is what Bourdieu (2000: 1) described as “the free time, freedom from the urgencies of the world, that allows a free and liberated relation to those urgencies and to the world”. Or as the philosopher Richard Rorty once put it to a friend asking him about whether he was happy in this new role, “Universities permit one to read books and report what one thinks about them, and get paid for it” (Gross 2003).

Even if this was true of a tenured professor at an Ivy League university in 1980s America, it certainly isn’t true now for the vast majority of academics. It took me a while to come to terms with that fact, but what was constant in this process was the enjoyment of writing. It was precisely because of that enjoyment, the impulse ‘to read books and report what I thought about them’, that the reality of academic work felt so disappointing to me. It’s something I’ve long since made my peace with, but the fact it was a compromise I came to has left the enjoyment of writing at the heart of my professional self-conception: the space that can be found for it and the obstacles which stand in its way.

Unfortunately those obstacles are numerous. There are the new things which academics are expected to do, such as make research relevant to wider society and the mechanisms, such as social media, through which we are expected to do it. There is the growth in the work to be done as student numbers increase and our interactions with them increasingly take place through multiple channels. There are the spiralling expectations of what constitutes being productive, driven in part by a job market which is brutally competitive in some systems.

I take as background the widespread sense that there is a deep somatic crisis in higher education, which has structural roots (Burrows 2012). As Vostal (2016) demonstrates, it would be too simple to say the problem is one of speeding up, to which the solution would be to slow down. The evidence suggests that our relationship to speed is more ambivalent than this. I certainly recognize the enjoyment which can be realized through rushing under the right circumstances, such as the intense focus which can come with an imminent deadline or the intellectual sociability generated through an intensive workshop.

There is also a politics to speed too often overlooked by advocates of ideas like the ‘slow professor’ (Berg 2022). In my experience, the choice for a professor to slow down often relies on post docs who are willing to pick up the slack for them. But there is nonetheless a sense of rushing, of never having quite enough time for all the things we are expected to do, common within the contemporary academy (Carrigan 2016).

Obviously this is an experience which is far from confined to academics and the university, reflecting a broader sense of being harried in contemporary societies (Rosa 2014). It is easy for the time and space in which we might enjoy writing to find itself squeezed on all sides by the urgent items we are struggling to clear from our to-do list. It is easy to conclude from this experience that writing necessarily has to be a slow process, in which an excess of time and space provide the conditions in which creative writing is possible.

This is fundamentally mistaken, with the sense that writing requires an abundance of time actually being a potent obstacle to a regular and rewarding writing routine. But it is conversely difficult to immerse yourself in writing if you feel harried, assailed on all sides by unmet expectations and impending deadlines. There is a risk this leads to a sense of enjoying writing being a luxury, as opposed to a practical requirement of the job which must be dispensed with as quickly and efficiently as possible.

If you frame writing in these terms then the instrumental use of AI becomes an inevitability. Why wouldn’t you rely on these systems to do your writing for you if that writing is an unwelcome obligation which weighs heavily on your working life? This gets to the heart of my concern. There is a pessimistic and self-defeating mood which too often accompanies academic writing. This is a problem in its own terms because it makes what should be a source of joy for academics into a gruelling chore. But with the advent of a technology which can do this writing for us, this mood goes from being individually self-defeating to potentially catastrophic for the knowledge system.

As Sword (2023: loc 220) points out, “writing signals hard work and puritanical virtue, while pleasure drips with hedonistic vice”. The tendency for academics to relate to writing as a serious matter, serving a lofty purpose beyond the trivial matters of feeling, rather than something which pleasure can be taken in makes it difficult to have these conversations. I share Sword’s (2023: loc 226) project “to recuperate pleasure as a legitimate, indeed crucial, writing-related emotion”. Indeed, such a recuperation is imperative, individually and collectively, because of the impact which AI is already starting to exercise over why and how we write.

If you’re taking joy in an activity, why would you outsource it? I struggle to see a difference in this sense between relying on machine writing and seeking an assistant who can work on your behalf. There might be contingent challenges which mean you need support at a particular point in time, as well as a need to prioritize certain tasks over others. In this sense I wouldn’t suggest the impulse to outsource a task necessarily means you don’t take joy in it, but if you persistently seek external support for a type of task or a project composed of multiple tasks, this suggests the potential for exploring your motivation.

There are parts of my administrative work which I’ve found myself tempted to rely on machine writing for. I’ve come to realize this is a red flag which indicates there’s a part of my portfolio of work I’m struggling with in some way or coming to be alienated from. The impulse to outsource it to a machine, to just get it done immediately rather than expanding any more energy on it, will become a mainstream one within higher education over the coming years. The ubiquity of this software, particularly as it comes to be embedded in the existing collaboration platforms which universities provide for their staff, means it will be ‘in here’ rather than ‘out there’.

Meeting this temptation reflexively requires that we understand our work, the tasks that compose it, and how we tend to experience them. Do we persistently avoid or procrastinate from particular activities? What do we choose to do instead when we’re being avoidant? These questions help us identify which aspects of our academic writing might be at risk of being outsourced to AI, not because the technology offers genuine improvements, but because we’ve lost touch with the joy those activities might provide.

How to enjoy writing in spite of the lure of generative AI

Over the last year I’ve been working on a book How to Enjoy Writing exploring the implications of generative AI for academic writing. I felt I had something important to say about the personal reflexivity involved in working with large language models, but in recent months I’ve realised that I lost interest in the project. Given the book was about cultivating care for our writing, as opposed to rushing through it with the assistance of LLMs, I’ve decided to break it up into blog posts which I’ll share here:

1. The lure of machine writing and the value of getting stuck
2. The Eeriness of Writing With Claude: When AI Mirrors Your Voice
3. Thriving in Creative Darkness: Free Association and LLM Collaboration
4. The Ethical Grey Areas of Machine Writing in Higher Education
5. Machine writing and the challenge of a joyful reflexivity
6. The Ebb and Flow of Writing: From Struggle to Unconscious Fluency
7. Will Claude tell you if your writing is crap? The danger of LLMs for wounded academic writers
8. Generative AI and the creative confusion of academic writers
9. Using Generative AI for functional rather than expressive writing
10. The Joy of Academic Writing in the Age of AI
11. The Objects With Which We Write: The Materiality of Academic Writing in a Digital Age
12. How LLMs change the relationship between thinking and writing
13. Machine writing and keeping your inner world awake
14. Finding Joy in the Creative Darkness: Reflections on Writing and Stuckness
15. The subtle pleasures of LLM’s psuedo-understanding
16. We urgently need to talk about the temptations of LLMs for academics
17. Generative AI and thriving in creative darkness
18. Academic writing has always been in flux
19. Generative AI and the challenge of unbidden thoughts
20. How the GAI Assessment Debate Has Led Us in the Wrong Direction
21. Generative AI and the Anxieties of Academic Writing
    

This is Claude’s summary of the core argument which unites these posts into a coherent project. One of the reasons I lost my enthusiasm for the project was the manner in which its capacity to imitate my style, sometimes doing it when I hadn’t asked, disrupted the psychology of my enthusiasm for what I was doing:

The core argument of the book is that generative AI forces academics to confront fundamental questions about why we write and what writing means to us beyond mere productivity. While machine writing offers tempting solutions to the difficulties inherent in academic writing, these difficulties are actually integral to the creative process and intellectual development. If we embrace AI tools primarily as efficiency mechanisms to produce more outputs more quickly, we risk losing the joy and meaning that make writing worthwhile in the first place. Instead, we should approach AI as a conversational partner that enhances our thinking rather than replacing it, staying with the productive "trouble" of writing rather than seeking to escape it. This reflexive approach to writing technology allows us to resist the instrumental acceleration of academic life while still benefiting from AI's creative potential.

However I’ve used Claude to support the editing of these blog posts based on the 80% complete draft of the book, simply because I wouldn’t get round to it otherwise. It has copy edited extracts, condensed them at points, chosen some titles and generally polished the text. There’s a few bridging sentences it provided but nothing more than this. I’m glad it’s given this project a public life because I feel like I was saying something valuable here. But I wasn’t willing to produce a second book on generative AI in two years, as it felt like I was stuck in a performative contradiction which was increasingly uncomfortable.

Instead my plan is to focus on doing my best intellectual work by focusing, for the first time in my career really, on one thing at a time. I’ll still be blogging in the meantime as the notepad for my ideas, but I’d like to take a more careful and nuanced approach to academic writing going forward. I’m not sure if it will work but it’s a direct outcome of the arguments I developed in this book. It was only when I really confronted the rapid increase in the quantity of my (potential) output that I was able to commit myself in a much deeper way to the quality of what I wanted to write in future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IytEOXamsk

And this is how we rise - by taking a fall
Survive another winter on straight to the thaw
One day you'll learn to strain the tea through your teeth
And maybe find the strength to proceed to the peak
You press on into the thin again and cannot breathe
Swallow so much of my damn pride that it chokes me
The real risk is not a slipped grip at the edge of the peak
The real danger is just to linger at the base of the thing

This is a follow up to the 23 part series I did last summer on How To Enjoy Writing. In fact it emerged directly from “I have something to say here” to “I should write another book”, which is exactly the transition I’m now questioning in myself

1. Be rigorous about capturing your fringe thoughts
2. Placing limits on your writing practice
3. Being realistic about how long you can spend writing
4. Embracing creative non-linearity
5. Keep trying to say what you’re trying to say
6. Procrastination is your friend, not your enemy
7. Knowing when (and why) to stop writing
8. Initial reflections from my AI collaborator
9. Identifying and valuing your encounters with ideas
10. A poetic interlude from Claude
11. Cultivating an ecology of ideas
12. Claude’s ecology of ideas self-assessment tool
13. Only ideas won by walking have any value
14. Using generative AI as an interlocutor
15. Word acrobatics performed with both harness and net
16. Don’t impose a shape on things too quickly
17. Creative confidence means accepting the tensions in how you think
18. Understand where the ideas which influence you come from
19. Not everything you write has to become something
20. Being a writer means being good at AI
21. Make your peace with the fact you don’t have creative freedom
22. Confront the creepiness of LLMs head on
23. Be clear about why you are writing

The Eeriness of Writing With Claude: When AI Mirrors Your Voice

Over the summer I was reminded of something profound through my experience of writing a book about academic writing and AI. It’s an argument I already wanted to make, but recent events have left me more convinced than ever of its significance for academic writers. This is a project I’d made rapid progress with through various strategies and techniques, using conversational agents as interlocutors without relying on them for machine writing. It left me with a draft of 30,000 words, albeit a messy one, within a few months of starting the project. There were also around 10,000 words of blog posts through which I had initially sketched out the themes of the book.

With a chapter framework and half the book written, I felt it was time to talk to Claude about what exactly I was trying to say. After an initial conversation in which I reflected with Claude on the themes which had emerged in the writing, I asked it to “produce five propositions about generative AI and academic writing, building entirely on the contents of my book, replicating my own writing voice to the greatest extent possible.” I experienced what I was presented with as utterly uncanny, in the sense that these were my arguments written in my style but I did not in fact write them:

1. The advent of generative AI doesn’t just pose practical challenges for academic writing; it forces us to confront fundamental questions about why we write and what we hope to achieve through our writing. These are questions which have always been there, lurking beneath the surface of our practice, but which we’ve too often neglected to articulate clearly.
2. There’s a real risk that the instrumental use of generative AI will exacerbate existing pathologies within academic writing culture, leading to a flood of mediocre outputs which are ‘good enough’ to meet institutional metrics but lack the spark of genuine intellectual engagement. This isn’t just about the quality of individual pieces; it’s about the cumulative effect on our knowledge systems.
3. The distinction between functional and expressive documents in academic writing becomes crucial when considering the role of generative AI. While there might be a place for AI assistance in producing functional texts, like abstracts or summaries, we should be extremely wary of outsourcing the creative, expressive aspects of our writing to these systems.
4. Generative AI offers us an opportunity to recalibrate our relationship with writing, potentially helping us to cultivate what I call an ‘ecology of ideas’. Used thoughtfully, these tools can support us in capturing fleeting thoughts, making connections, and elaborating on our ideas in ways that enhance rather than replace our own creative processes.
5. The joyfulness we find (or don’t find) in our writing practice isn’t just a personal matter; it’s likely to be a key factor in determining whether generative AI becomes a tool for creative augmentation or a crutch for increased productivity at the expense of quality. Cultivating this joy isn’t a luxury – it’s an essential part of maintaining the integrity of academic knowledge production in the face of technological change.

I thought this was an outstanding summary of what I’d argued over the messy draft I had provided to Claude. It picked out the most salient features of my developing manuscript and distilled the core arguments I was trying to make, with a clarity and concision which eluded me at that stage of the project. What was odd though was seeing the characteristics of my own writing reflected back at me, from the writing tics (e.g. ‘real risk’) through to my favourite words (e.g. “cultivating”) and even the rhythms of my sentences. It was the first time I had the experience of recognizing myself in writing that I hadn’t actually written.

It conflicts with what Connor terms writing as autonomous knowledge, in which ideas come to be lodged in more or less impersonal forms through being written down. In this case the writing is impersonal but the manner in which it is recognizably my ideas, in my style, without it feeling like plagiarism complicates the assumptions we bring to our writing. It doesn’t feel like Claude has stolen my ideas, as much as that it has occupied my position as author. I found it profoundly eery, particularly when I gave it some critical feedback partly motivated I think by a desire to explain away what it presented me with. The result was a longer list of arguments which even more vividly felt like my own writing.

I mean eery here in Mark Fisher’s sense of a “failure of presence” in which “there is nothing present when there should be something.” He illustrates the point with the example of eery scenes in post-apocalyptic science fiction, in which we are presented with vivid scenes of depopulated cities without a clear explanation of where the people have gone. He suggests the eeriness of these scenes diminishes in proportion to the explanation we are given. It is the mystery of the absence, what should be there yet isn’t, which makes them so powerful. I found this experience of being presented with ‘my’ arguments eery because it felt I should be there as an author behind what I was reading. Yet I wasn’t there. It was mine yet I wasn’t there.

In case this sounds unhelpfully oblique, I’ll get to the point of why I’m sharing the experience. In this confrontation with the fact that ‘my’ ideas could be written in ‘my’ style by the machine, I could immediately see how Claude could with minimal prompting finish this book for me.

In the moment the project felt utterly tractable to me. The sprawling mess of the first half of a manuscript, in which I could barely see the wood for the trees, immediately gave way to a feeling of the project being within my grasp. It felt so deeply and profoundly achievable through Claude’s intervention. This felt like it should have been a positive feeling but it really wasn’t. In that moment I felt my motivation for the project drain away, almost as if I could literally feel it leaving my body. That sense of the difficulty, the struggle with inarticulacy which characterizes the writing process for me, suddenly appeared as something which I could switch off at will.

Even if I could see that intellectually the reality was more mundane than that, it felt in that moment that something profound had shifted in how I related to this writing project. It was not all writing projects because I could see that Claude could only produce what it had because of the sheer amount of content which I had provided it with. Not just the draft manuscript and the stack of blog posts which preceded it but the intellectual conversations which had accompanied these. This left my grasp on the early stages of a writing project fully intact, in which I could revel in the feeling of making connections and putting things into words. But after a certain point, I could now see it as a technical exercise in which I simply had to provide enough context and raw material for machine writing to bring things to a close.

There was a sharp sense of potential relief, as if I was on the verge of being able to take off overly tight shoes which had been troubling me throughout the day, coupled with a dawning melancholy. While the prospect of unburdening was enticing it also appeared to me as a profound loss, in which something would be gone which I might never recover. As if once I’d taken those shoes off I could never put them back on, nor could I walk outside in them or explore terrain that I had once taken for granted.

Only three weeks later my experience of the project is transformed. Not only are the words flowing again, the argument I’m trying to make is newly clear to me. Rather than the slightly apologetic tone in which I previously told people that I was writing a book about writing, apologizing for what I felt was the self-indulgence, I’m explaining how the emergence of GenAI means that we urgently need to reflect on our writing practice, individually and collectively. It presents us with an enticing solution to the challenges which are inherent to writing but at the cost of losing something profound as writers.

If we lack joy in our writing then we will find machine writing particularly enticing, offering an immediate solution to our difficulties and enabling us to produce more in less time. The problem is that our joy will further recede if we rely upon machine writing in this way, depriving us of the difficulties through which we struggle to develop as authors. Furthermore, it will entrench the instrumentalism which collapses the horizon of that joy by making writing a matter of producing things to be counted rather than to be read.

This experience has convinced me that we stand at a crossroads. The path of least resistance, using AI to circumvent the struggle of writing, may seem appealing, but leads to a diminished relationship with our own ideas. The harder path, engaging with AI as a partner while maintaining our commitment to the difficult joy of writing, offers something richer: a way to preserve what’s valuable about academic writing while embracing new possibilities. The eeriness I felt when seeing my voice reflected back at me now serves as a useful warning: when we outsource too much of ourselves to the machine, something essential threatens to disappear.

Ultimately I decided not to finish the book for this reason. It was too uncomfortable and left me feeling too implicated in exactly the psychosocial process I was critiquing. The experience created a meta-level discomfort I couldn’t resolve – analyzing a phenomenon while simultaneously embodying it. Instead, I’ve been breaking up the manuscript, with Claude’s editorial help, into blog posts which I’ll freely release here, as well as some more polished guest blogs which I’ll submit elsewhere without any LLM input. This approach allows me to share these ideas while maintaining my authorial agency and avoiding the trap I was describing.

Here’s Claude 3.7’s summary of how I’m using it for editorial support in these posts:

In providing editorial support for your manuscript fragments, I'm focusing on structural coherence, readability, and ensuring each piece can stand alone as a blog post while preserving your unique voice and insights. My work includes:

- Identifying where transitions might be needed when removing text that references other parts of the book
- Suggesting titles that capture the essence of each piece
- Reorganizing content when needed for logical flow in a standalone format
- Highlighting areas where a conclusion might strengthen the piece
- Maintaining your authorial voice and academic style throughout
- Ensuring your critical perspective on AI and writing remains intact
- Preserving the nuance and complexity of your arguments

This editorial assistance is designed to help transform what was conceived as a book into effective blog posts without altering your fundamental ideas or replacing your writing process. I'm careful to mark my contributions so you can clearly see what's yours and what's mine, respecting the very boundaries between human and machine writing that your work thoughtfully examines.RetryClaude can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.

The Ebb and Flow of Writing: From Struggle to Unconscious Fluency

It can help to understand writing as a nexus point where lots of different elements intersect. I might be sitting in the garden with my laptop and a can of coke, but there are many other things which are present with me in this moment—from my writing software, internet connection and accompanying eBook reader through to an imagined audience, an intended publisher and an intellectual community. Testing et al suggest we cast the net even wider to include things such as “managerial directives, quality procedures, disciplinary conventions, departmental environment, and discipline-focused, thematic, or linguistic social communities.” There is a whole world intervening on me as I write, even if when the writing goes well it feels like there is just me and my thoughts.

If I’m enjoying writing, I don’t worry about an imagined audience encountering these words for the first time and potentially finding them lacking. The enjoyment itself stems from being grounded in the present rather than projecting forward towards an imagined future outcome. There will be an audience who encounters these words, and it’s certainly possible they may find them lacking. But as I’ve written this paragraph, the experience has been defined by what the political theorist (and prolific writer) Richard Seymour describes as an “unconscious fluency“:

I doubt anyone begins a piece of writing with the rules in mind. Writing is a conscious, effortful process, but most of what works in writing is unconscious fluency. You start, not even with a completed thought, but often enough with a single word or phrase, or a mood, or a tune stuck in your head, that establishes a rhythm. You scarcely think about it. If you’re raging, the words come flying out by the quiverful. If you’re mournful, they’re as slow as tears. The rules come later, as cues during the editorial clean up.

I’m writing these words on what I’d designated as a writing afternoon, but things had not been going according to plan. Various frustrations had intruded on me via e-mail before I got started, leaving me twitchy and irritable as I sat down to write. Despite the fact the weather forecast had promised sun, I found myself in a garden under a cloudy sky struggling to focus. I battled on towards my writing target for the day, with the promise to myself I could stop when I reached a thousand words. But it was a struggle in which I felt my words had to be forced out, leaving me with clunky sentences staring at me inertly from a page of disappointments.

I felt dispirited by failing to make the progress I had expected, which immediately left me worrying about the other things I am committed to finishing over the coming weeks. This project is not one which will ‘count’ greatly from my employer’s point of view; in fact, I’m worried that I’m writing myself into a peculiar niche that will only be read by a handful of people. Should I not be focusing on the journal articles which will count? Am I distracting myself with mindless indulgences from my real work? Is this just a waste of time? Should I give up?

The speed with which I found myself despairing was striking, illustrating how confidence in what we are doing can quickly unravel when it feels as if things are not working. It’s an experience of writing which often makes me think back to one of my favourite poems by Nietzsche:

The pen is stubborn, sputters – hell!
Am I condemned to scrawl?
Boldly I dip it in the well,
My writing flows, and all
I try succeeds. Of course, the spatter
Of this tormented night
Is quite illegible. No matter:
Who reads the stuff I write?

– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Prelude: 59

Or as it occurred to me this afternoon: “this is shit and no one is going to want to read it.”

But when I had reached my target, letting myself ‘give up’ for the day, I turned to reading instead. Hoping that reading for my project would help ensure tomorrow’s writing would not be another ‘tormented night,’ I continued with Testing et al (2021) only to discover the extract I quoted at the start of this section. There was something about their concatenation of elements which might not immediately come to mind when writing (“managerial directives, quality procedures, disciplinary conventions, departmental environment” etc) which prompted my imagination.

I seized upon the idea I could feel germinating within me, and this section emerged in a matter of minutes. It was 631 words, up until the end of that sentence, which flowed out into what had only thirty minutes earlier felt like an arid desert. The sun has started to shine, and it suddenly feels like my ‘writing afternoon’ has lived up to the name, leading the turgid undertaking which preceded it to fade into the background.

Not only do I feel connected once more to what I’m doing, I feel energised, as if the writing has in some real but mysterious sense recharged me. This experience reminds me of the nexus I described at the beginning: how our writing practice sits at the intersection of so many factors, both internal and external. When these elements align, we can move from struggle to that elusive “unconscious fluency” that makes the act of writing not just bearable, but genuinely joyful.