ome writers, like
Stephen King,
are prolific. In his
book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, he writes about his process, which includes a routine of writing 3-4 hours daily, trying to produce about six ‘fairly clean’ pages. “You must not come lightly to the blank page,” he writes.
In Bird By Bird, Anne Lamott writes, “The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are.”
I spend much of my time each day writing and ‘dealing with words.’ My job overwhelmingly consists of writing, editing, and planning. I love it. I have always been an avid reader and lover of words. I first labeled myself a writer in the fourth grade when Ms. Tucker pulled me aside after class. She told me how much she enjoyed a creative writing piece I had turned in, and her words warmed me to the core.
I’ve been chasing that high ever since.
The thing is, as a writer, I love to learn about the process of other writers. And we have something in common: The search for truth in writing and the struggle to get that truth on paper (or pixels or whatever). Today, there are many assistants to help you along your way, such as Grammarly, Copilot, Apple Intelligence, and so on, and it’s tempting to say that technology replaces human creativity or it’s cheating.
I use some of these tools not just because spelling is not my strong suit but because it’s expedient. I don’t think I’d find too many people – writers or not – who would say that the spellcheck feature in MS Word gets in the way of their productivity (homonyms be damned) – but there’s a new technology in town that’s changing the game: ChatGPT.
S