This is number 149 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
Those words that you found on the written page
That sounded so wise, the thoughts of a sage,
They weren’t really mine—I confess to deceit,
They just came from my pen as I sat in my seat.
The words and the thoughts of someone, I think,
Who works in a lab mixing India Ink.
I know that each bottle I buy at the store
Is filled with great words of wisdom and lore.
Great poems, a novel, a play, and short story,
Fantasy figures and tales of glory,
Thought up in front of a stainless steel sink
By the chemist who mixes India Ink.
THOSE WORDS, I confess, were penned by me back in the 1970s or 80s. And in large part, I believed them. It was all I knew about inspiration and having a muse. The ideas just flowed from my pen without being beckoned. When I was in high school in the 60s, I wrote volumes and volumes of poetry, and I continued to write poetry volumes for at least two more decades. I was filling books with poetry when I courted my wife in the late 80s and even had a few penned later.
After all, I was once told that if a man doesn’t write poetry in his twenties, he has no heart. If he’s still writing poetry in his forties, he has no brain. I almost believed that, too. After all, John Keats died at 25. Percy Bysshe Shelley died at 29. Lord Byron at 36. Alexander Pushkin at 37. Emily Brontë at 30 and her sister Anne at 29. Sylvia Plath at 30.
Need I go on? I’m 76 now. Writing is my life, but poetry not so much.
I’ll put together a collection of all the poems I wrote that were worth anything one day and publish it. I expect it will be a thin volume. Just writing it doesn’t mean it was any good. However, many of my own poems were credited to Nate Hart in the first five volumes of Living Next Door to Heaven, read in speech competitions by Brian. Some others showed up in my most recent work, The Inheritance Paradox.
I glanced through the box of poetry I’ve managed to retain over the years, and there is one thing they all have in common.
Not one was composed at a keyboard.
Yes, I’m going to continue talking about what it means to write on paper with a pen and ink—like the poet at the beginning of this post suggests.
Ink on paper is a medium that requires some degree of inspiration. One actually needs to think through what one is about to write. The connection from the mind to the writing hand is much stronger than the connection of the mind to the keyboard. It requires a more complex set of muscles than typing and therefore is much slower. In my heyday, when I earned my living as a typist, I could type at 110 words per minute or more, error-free. The age of my muscles and tendons have slowed that considerably. My handwriting speed is somewhere around 20 words per minute, give or take.
I admit that sometimes my thoughts race beyond the speed my fingers move. Not so much on the keyboard as with a fountain pen. Typing at that speed can sometimes outrace my thoughts.
On the other hand, my handwriting is not interrupted by squiggly red lines and autocorrect. My errors are committed to the page. I don’t backspace. I don’t rewrite as I compose. The worst I can do is scratch something out or make a mess writing over something.
What does all that have to do with handwriting? I can genuinely say that AI has no interface with my fountain pen. In spite of what the opening lines of this post suggest, there is no connection between any outside force and what I write with a pen.
For that reason alone, I am writing more and more with my fountain pen on paper. It isn’t archived and searchable in the cloud. It’s archived in a box under my bed. Some things that I write are transcribed onto my computer, but even in the transcription process, they are edited, revised, and disconnected from the original thoughts.
It’s not artificial intelligence. As an author seeking to maintain integrity of my writing and not to render it over to an automaton to compose for me, the pen is truly becoming mightier than the sword—or the keyboard.
If you are an author, I encourage you to consider returning to the pen. I know not everyone will see this as I do, but consider how much of your creative work you are turning over to a non-creative entity. Artificial intelligence is based on data. Data is all past. It cannot look forward beyond what data tells it. In other words, generative AI is not creative.
And if you depend on it for your writing, neither are you.