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Writer’s Diary #37 – Writing is Hard: Develop a Writing Practice

Daniel Tubb

Graduate students often want to get into the field as quickly as possible. Getting ready can require a proposal, an ethics application, a presentation, and, for doctoral students, a comprehensive exam. (All, after a year of coursework and learning to read deeply). Preparing these documents takes time. It is in their writing that one becomes ready for research. This is the challenge. Graduate students (and the faculty who support them) often lament the travails of writing. In fact, writing a thesis, proposal, comprehensive exam, or an essay, blog post, book chapter, or anything, really, is daunting. Exceedingly so. The challenge? Not just what to put down, but how, and why, and how to revise, and what to change, and what to work on next, and, and, and so much more. So many big and little tasks to get done. To write, as a verb, at first blush, seems to encompass mere inscription with a pencil, pen, typewriter, keyboard, or whatever. Yet, writing is never mere inscription. When a writer says they are working on a proposal or a book, they are doing many quite disparate, yet interrelated, tasks. To write is to plan, research, draft, reread, revise, shorten, think, fiddle, adjust, fix grammar, change punctation, reorder paragraphs, check citations, reread aloud for rhythm, revise for consistency, retype to get in to the flow, rewrite to shorten, and more. All of this is hard work. Writing is just about the most difficult thing I regularly do.

“[W]riting is nearly always the hardest part of the deal,” observes Michael Taussig, the US-based Australian anthropologist who, late in his career, seems to publish a book a year, in a essay collection on writing.1 “Anyone who tries to write—a letter, a novel, a dissertation, a poem, or an ethnography—knows that it is a skill to be cultivated and learned through sheer doing,” observes Michael Lambek in an edited volume on writing ethnography.2 John McPhee, the father long form-creative non-fiction, describes, in his book on writing craft, lying down on a picnic table for two weeks fighting fear and anxiety with no idea how to begin a piece for the New Yorker.3 If writing is hard, and if it is much more than mere inscription, what does it mean to write? How is it a skill that is best learned and cultivated through the sheer doing? How to make it easier and less stressful? More to the point, when writing is required, what to do?

For many, the writing work, for it is work, takes time. A thesis proposal or ethics application might take a month, it might take six, it might take more. A thesis can take half a year, or much longer. A dissertations can take eight months, sometimes far longer. Books gestate over years, even decades. My book on writing has been gestating for six. Whenever I’ve written, with serious intent, and successfully, I’ve had time and the privilege to take breaks and to walk and to relax, when not writing. But, even then, writing has been the hardest, sustained challenge I have faced. Through a lot of practice, I have become a better writer. But, even still the task of doing the work with some seriousness demands as much mental energy, and a surprising amount of good old-fashioned manual labor, as ever. Writing is work; it is labour. For scholars (and others writers), it is the distilled form of this labor, the proposals and the thesis and the articles and the job applications and the grants and the books—that builds careers. To succeed as a scholar cum writer requires creating a practice of coming back to this repeated, regular work.

What follows are some reflections on this becoming a writer both in the preliminary moments of preparing for fieldwork and in the sustained practice of writing up. My concern is the process, not the result. This is my attempt to articulate not what a good piece of writing is, but to help develop a writing practice. It’s about the craft of work. While students and researchers are often eager to get into the “field,” and the field holds a special romance for ethnographers, I want to turn to the work that goes into the preparation for fieldwork and the work that goes into the writing-up. Over the following few posts, I suggest, with gentleness, that much of this happens in the writing, and in all of the messy tasks beyond mere inscription. It is through here that thinking happens. T is in the writing that thinking takes place. Which means, most importantly, it is in your writing that you develop your research

A proposal, like any scholarly output, is yours. Your thesis is, often, the first major independent project you will undertake. Joanne Bolker points this out in her excellent book on dissertation writing, Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis,4 Her point is that the project, and by extension, the proposal, presentation, schedule, and progress, are yours. You have the greatest stake in their outcome. You are the one who moves things forward. You have the agency and control and reasonability make it happen. Preparing a dissertation is hard work; it is your work; and to do the works requires understanding how you work. Your advisors and mentors and peers and readers are there to help and offer guidance and sometimes be available to discuss progress and make sure you are ready for the next step, but actually moving a project forward in a sustained way is on your shoulders. It’s daunting, but many people have succeeded. How daunting, depends, in part, on your own style of work. If you’re like me, you are still figuring this out. Everyone works differently, and has different commitments and availabilities and responsibilities and challenge. To help you find your rhythm as a writer, I want to offer some suggestions.

I begin with caveat. The open secret is that everyone writes differently. What works for one person may not work for another. The ideas in the following posts may work for you, they may not. My advice? Work, and as you work, reflect on what is going well and on what is not working. Take the advice that is helpful; ignore the rest. Take the time to observe yourself as you work and as you write and as you revise and as you read and as you think and use those observations to understand your own ways of working. Be gentle. Be kind. Be calm. Accept your process of becoming a writer. Develop a practice of observation.

References

Bolker, Joan. Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis. Holt Paperbacks, 1998.
Lambek, Michael. “Slow Reading.” In Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment, edited by Carole McGranahan, 65–65. Duke University Press, 2020.
McPhee, John. Draft No. 4. Farrar, Straus; Giroux, 2017.
Taussig, Michael. The Corn Wolf. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Notes

  1. Taussig, The Corn Wolf.↩︎
  2. Lambek, “Slow Reading.”↩︎
  3. McPhee, Draft No. 4.↩︎
  4. Bolker, Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, Introduction.↩︎

Writer’s Diary #36 – Deep Writing

Daniel Tubb

In a first-year anthropology course, it’s still common to mention Clifford Geertz’s venerable classic on thick description.1 But it seems to me that, for some, the luster of Geertz’s insight has faded. I’m still partial to his work, but the idea of interpreting cultures as texts seems outdated as anthropologists work to decolonize the discipline. People have long since taken on the task of interpreting their own cultures, for example. So the idea of the anthropologist as interpreter-the idea of the anthropologist as author2—seems out dated.

Yet, I think Geertz’s point remains, for those who try to write—which remains a lot of students, scholars, and researchers.

But what does it mean to think about interpreting and thick description. In part, its a process of writing?

Here, I think Geertz’s insight into thick description is worth considering. His point is not just that the goal is a complex and nuanced understanding, e. g. one that distinguishes between a burlesque wink and an eye twitch, or a friendly wink, a flirtatious wink, an involuntary blink, or whatever. His point is that the trick is to tease apart the layers of cultural meaning in certain actions.

How to get at the meaning of something. How do to make meaning? What’s the process? The secret code? Writing, is his answer.

Why? This takes time. Might thick description then require deep writing.

Here I find Maryanne Wolf’s work on deep reading useful. In her books Reader, Come Home3 and Proust and the Squid4 are important. I recently listened to Wolf on the Ezra Klein Show5 where Wolf discusses the literature in neuroscience about the difference between how we read in the digital age, in the context of social media and doom scrolling and vast amounts of news and ever-present screens, and how we read when we are deeply immersed in a physical, paper, book. They’re different. Which is a development of Nicholas Carr’s insight into deep reading6

The Internet has changed the way we read. Wolf’s points, for my purposes, are threefold.

1. Reading is not one task. It’s many tasks. There is no one activity that we can call reading that evolved in the human brain. Rather, reading is something we have learned to do. That is, when we learn to read, we rewire our brains. It is the medium that shapes how the rewiring takes place. (Here Wolf draws on Marshall McLuhan’s famous The Medium is the Message7 and his students).

Plasticity means that the way we read will reflect the affordances of the medium. This was the point that McLuhan was making, his student Walter Ong was making, certainly Postman was making, as you [Klein] alluded to in your August essay. All of these people were on to the basic principle that how we read on a medium changes what we perceive, what we understand.

So the medium changes the way we read. It changes the kinds of connections we make. It changes the way we engage with a text.

The point? Reading digitally, on screens, on social media, is different from immersing yourself in a book. It’s the difference between skimming an email or doom-scrolling on Twitter/X and getting sucked into a novel, and really being immersed. It’s the kind of reading I might have done as a student, but increasingly do less of.

I can, however, vividly remember moments of deep reading. The first time I read Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects8. I read it in one sitting, on a flight home from a conference, and the book stayed with me. So much so that I’m working on a book of fragments inspired by it. Or when I read Michael Taussig’s Law in a Lawless Land9 as a student, which shaped my own travel to Colombia. But, when I tried to read them recently, I was so distracted, I couldn’t get into them. I think it was screen versus paper, planes versus offices. But, when I read deeply, that’s where ideas came from.

2. It’s the time spent. The time spent reading! We often confuse this with, for example, the information, the fact, and the learning process. As Wolf and Ezra Klein point out in their conversation, our digital age has forgotten this key message.

Sam Bankman-Fried, yes, that one, the disgraced former media darling and head of a defunct crypto-trading firm now under investigation, said he didn’t like books because a lot of books should be six-paragraph blog posts. He’s wrong. Ezra Klein, who’s written a lot of books and a lot of six-paragraph blog posts, points out here that they’re quite different. The key is that the book allows the reader to spend a lot of time with an idea. It’s the time spent reading that really starts to rewire the brain—the plastic mind.

3. Habits matter. Klein and Wolf point out that over the past decade, habits have changed, replacing our ability to read deeply. Few of us have the experience Klein describes of reading for hours on end, our synapses firing and insights and epiphanies emerging. In part, we went digital. In part, we got busy.

What do I take away from these points (that reading is not a task, that time matters, and that habits matter)? Well, I think deep reading is a good idea to use to think about deep writing.

If someone were to do the neurological research, and perhaps people have done it, I suspect they would find that writing is similar to reading. Truly immersive writing, writing for a long period, over and over again, is where the synapses are firing and the mind is getting rewired. Writing, like reading, is not something we’ve evolved to do. Writing, like reading, works in part because we rewire our minds through do it. Writing, like reading, requires creating a habit of writing.

I think a lot of the writing that academics do has almost become an exercise not in deep writing or reading, but in a kind of shallowness. Reading becomes looking for references, and publishing one more thing. Writing becomes less deep writing, but a thinner, shallower kind of writing.

This is inevitably truer, a generative text and AI take over the classroom. It does to writing what skimming does to reading? That is? It will inevitably reshape how students think.

How do you write deeply? You do it by doing it. By revising. By writing. By rewriting. I’m thinking here of William Germano’s excellent On Revision,10 in which Germano explores and reflects on revision as the only writing that really matters. Germano is a former editor and now professor, whose book “From Dissertation to Book” gave me workmanlike advice on how to turn my dissertation into a book. In his new book, Germano makes an important point about the fact that we live and work in a world of data and narrative.

He draws a divide between data-driven researchers and narrative-driven researchers. Data-driven researchers are those who work in the sciences, mathematics, engineering, and social sciences, which have adopted quantitative methods. Narrative remains in the humanities and much of the social sciences. I am a narrative anthropologist. My job is to weave narrative together to build and support arguments. It’s about what people do and why, and how they live. Germano’s point, of course, is that there is a commonality in the work we do between the social sciences and the humanities in that we build narratives in different ways. Academic writing, then, is a carefully crafted form of nonfiction. It’s a form of narrative scholarship. But if there’s been a thinning out of scholarship, a reading that has become serial quotation, then the question is what comes next? That’s what my book is about. It’s about how to do deep writing.

Germano’s other point is that writing is thinking, which I think is true and too often mistaken. We use cognitive metaphors when we talk about writing. You analyzed, he thought, he understood. Sure, but they did it on the page. Writing is thinking. So what is deep writing?Well, first of all, I think it comes from spending time on a piece of writing. Just as a short piece of writing might take a short amount of time to really work out what you think about something, the process is as important as the end result. And we miss that.

In this sense, I come back to Geertz’s insight and the hermeneutic argument that what anthropologists do is thick description as a kind of interpretation. But, I think it is crucial, we do on the page, in the text. That is the thinking.

Now, of course, this is culturally specific. Other mediums create other connections. But I know for myself that the culture of writing enables a certain kind of thinking. If superficial writing is done quickly, or by rote, or by AI, then I think it will lead to superficial writing. Shallow writing.

How do you learn to write thick, write deep?

In my case, it’s hard work. You can learn from others, but in the end I keep coming back to a piece of writing. Read it aloud. Listen to it. Print it. Highlight it. Rewrite it. Revise it. Revise it again. This process of a dozen or a hundred is the work of writing. It takes time.

And if Wolf is right that reading creates a plasticity of the mind that creates ways of thinking very different from the surfing and skimming that most of us do, then I think it’s clear that writing is qualitatively different from the alternative. Not least because in writing we spend time working through things, reshaping our minds, refining ideas, working them out, clarifying them, communicating them, explaining information. All of this is generative, creating connections on the page and in the mind. That’s what deep writing can do.

Now, this doesn’t mean that we should give up on shallow reading or shallow writing. There is, of course, a place for both. For scrolling through emails and for responding quickly.

But, deep writing and shallow writing are not the same thing. Both changes how you think.

Notes

  1. Geertz, “Thick Description.”↩︎
  2. Geertz, Works and Lives.↩︎
  3. Wolf, Reader, Come Home.↩︎
  4. Wolf, Proust and the Squid.↩︎
  5. The Ezra Klein Show, The Ezra Klein Show.↩︎
  6. Carr, The Shallows.↩︎
  7. McLuhan, The Medium Is the Message.↩︎
  8. Stewart, Ordinary Affects.↩︎
  9. Taussig, Law in a Lawless Land.↩︎
  10. Germano, On Revision.↩︎

References

Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. WW Norton & Company, 2020.
Geertz, Clifford. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” In The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
———. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford University Press, 1988.
Germano, William. On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts. University of Chicago Press, 2021.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium Is the Message: An Inventory of Effects. Gingko Press Editions, 2001.
Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Duke University Press, 2007.
Taussig, Michael. Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia. University of Chicago Press, 2005.
The Ezra Klein Show. The Ezra Klein Show: Ezra Klein Interviews Maryanne Wolf. The New York Times, 2022.
Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. HarperCollins, 2017.
———. Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. HarperCollins, 2018.

Writer’s Diary #35 – Craft Work, Detail Work, Steady Work

Daniel Tubb

This morning I woke up at 5:45 and worked from 6 until about 8:45.

It was another good morning. I stopped when it got hard. But the work itself was very manual. It was craftsmanship—revising and cutting two sections into something good enough. When I finished the first section, I realized it fit better at the end of the chapter, so I moved it to the unwritten conclusion.

Then I turned to revising the second section, which I’d written three times in four rambling paragraphs. I cut it down to two, half the words, and nothing repeated.

Tomorrow I will move on to the next section of the chapter. Again, I will rewrite, combine, shorten, and polish. Later I’ll worry about its order and structure.

The work felt like knitting sentences or manual labor. I didn’t use tools. Just the keyboard.

Does it work? No. Change it. Is it better? Maybe. Keep going.

Changes so fast they’re almost automatic, made with hands on the keyboard. I write until I’m tired, and a piece feels finished. It is temporarily done, but only until the next time. Tomorrow, I will rework something else.

There was a moment that I felt overwhelmed. I had started a new piece, but didn’t know where it was going. I kept cutting, revising, deleting, adjusting, and fiddling. I fiddled with the text, and as I fiddled, I found my point and finished the edits.

Writing can sometimes just be the accumulation of words and slight changes, repeated, over and over.

If you asked me today and yesterday where I was going, what my point was, I couldn’t tell you. If you asked me today, I still couldn’t. But I know I’m closer. I know that by the end of this morning, I will have arrived somewhere. A place from which I can start again tomorrow.

The work is craft work. Detailed work. Steady work.

Writer’s Diary #34 – Stop while the stopping is good

Daniel Tubb

It is 9:15 in the morning. I started writing at 6. It has been a remarkably pleasant morning of pure craft: writing and rewriting, revising and editing, and knitting together three sections of the first chapter of the makeshift book. Working through about four thousand words.

I could go on.

I feel energized.

But, I’m going to stop.

I know it’s time to stop because I have a lot of other things to do in the afternoon, and I know that if I don’t stop, I’ll get tired, I’ll get worried, and I know that a good day of writing will become the opposite.

So I’m going to practice something I’ve often forgotten—stop while the stopping is good. Stop while I know where I’m going tomorrow.

Stop while it’s still fun.

Writer’s Diary #33 – Emergent structure, or work more; think less

Daniel Tubb

This morning, I did a lot of fiddling and reworking the text of a chapter, looking for it order. I read, printed it out, made tentative edits, and reviewed it. I moved chunks of text around, created an outline, and made changes iteratively. After the morning, I have the beginning of an outline.

I can’t see through the project, but I can begin to feel like I could maybe move through it and begin to make sense of it.

What did I do?

I worked at it from 6:00 am to 9:15 am. I read bits of it but moved them around in an outline. I did some queries and a little programming, but mostly I organized, reorganized, worked, and revised. I had no plan. But I read and edited and outlined and moved and renamed. I had a shower, and remembered a scene, and went and found that, and I started to find some order.

Is it perfect? No. But I can begin to get a sense of the chapter.

Tomorrow, I will keep at it.

Mostly, it feels like a structure is emerging. That’s more than I had on the weekend. It feels great.

Writer’s Diary #32 – Creating Structure/Finding Structure

Daniel Tubb

Block. It puts some writers down for months. It puts some writers down for life. A not always brief or minor form of it mutes all writers from the outset of every day.

—Draft No. 4, Replacing the words in boxes, John McPhee, April 29, 2013.

John McPhee has an article in The New Yorker about his writing process that became part of his book [Draft No. 4] (https://www.amazon.com/Draft-No-4-Writing-Process/dp/0374142742). McPhee tells a story of lying on a picnic table with all his notes, research, interviews, and everything else in manila envelopes, but he’s distraught because he doesn’t know the structure. He says this is no way to write. I agree with him, and yet structure is the hard part.

Good structure is easy to describe, after the fact. But, how to find it is much harder. I am working on a chapter. I have all the material. The question is how to put it together in a way that makes sense, that is compelling, that draws the reader in. In short, the challenge now is to find a structure.

I can think of two approaches.

One is where the order emerges by fiat. Through a decision I make to structure it in a certain way, in the form of a draft, a sketch, a story arc, or something else.

The second, a second in which the order emerges as a sculptor might find the shape of a piece of stone or wood. There is a vague idea, but the actual structure emerges through the iterative application of the art of sculpture.

My process is a matter of both, with an emphasis on the latter. I find form, by sculpting into that form. However, over the weekend, I did a lot of thinking, trying to work out the structure, which was a mistake.

Instead, I’ve prepared the material, and now the task is iterate, make decisions and let the structure emerge.

This week’s task: do the work, carve the text, find its structure, organically. I wish it were easier, but whenever I try to shortcut it by thinking too hard, I get blocked.

Writer’s Diary #31 – Summer Doldrums, Writing, and Napping

Daniel Tubb

Writing is hard, and some days the hardest part is just showing up. But, other days it still doesn’t come easy. Today was a day where I got some work done, but then I couldn’t.

What to do?

I took a walk, then went to the public library and took a nap in the air conditioning.

Now I feel rejuvenated and ready to tackle something. I think part of the work too often overlooked is napping, sleeping, and walking.

Maybe today was a day when I got little, but some days are like that.

That’s okay.

Writer’s Diary #30 – Retyping as a Way into a Text

Daniel Tubb

Retyping gets a bad rap. It’s why people flocked to word processors—no need to waste time retyping when you can just edit and revise. But there is a place for retyping, and while you retype, you revise.

Yesterday, I realized that the best way to tackle the chapter I am stuck on is to retype it. I have 16,000 words, but when I tried to edit it last week, I ended up spending too much time correcting grammar and couldn’t get into the whole. I couldn’t get my head around what I had written last June.

Yesterday, I realized I could retype the entire chapter and make changes as I went. So I printed it out (55 pages), and started on the digital typewriter.

By the end of the morning, with a little grammar checking and style editing, I had cut 4,000 words down to 2,000 words, which was much closer to the goal.

My plan for the day after tomorrow is to do it again—for the next quarter of the chapter. To print. Type to revise. Spell check, grammar check, style check, rinse, repeat. Rewrite by retyping.

I learned the trick of retyping from George Saunders’ [A Swim in the Pond in the Rain] (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/06/a-swim-in-a-pond-in-the-rain-by-george-saunders-review-rules-for-good-writing-and-more), about Russian short stories and writing. I think.

As I read and typed, I saw mistakes and corrected them. I made changes right away.

It’s certainly different work than not rewriting, but it’s manual work. It’s not mental, and it’s easy to find a flow state. Rewriting is a way of avoiding the questions: What comes next? Is this good? Is this bad? Instead, you just make changes as you go. There’s very little abstract thinking, just a lot of small, immediate decisions.

Yesterday I got into it by retyping. This morning too. I’m going to try it for the rest of the chapter.

Writer’s Diary #29 – Large Language Models as Writing Assistants and First Readers?

Daniel Tubb

Years ago, when I first discovered Wendell Berry, I remember reading a 1988 Harper’s article by Wendell Berry titled “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.

When the article was published, I was five years old. That was the same year my mother, a professor, brought home an Atari ST 1040 from work. I cherished that computer, using it for the better part of the following decade. In 1997, my parents purchased a Macintosh Performa 6400. On both machines, I learned to type, program, hack, tinker, and write.

However, I‘m unsure whether my writing process has been the best. Two years ago, Peter Elbow’s book on freewriting was a revelation.

Anyway, in that 1988 article, Berry writes:

As a farmer, I do almost all of my work with horses. As a writer, I work with a pencil or a pen and a piece of paper.

He continues:

My wife types my work on a Royal standard typewriter bought new in 19~6, and as good now as it was then. As she types, she sees things that are wrong, and marks them with small checks in the margins. She is my best critic because she is the one most familiar with my habitual errors and weaknesses. She also understands, sometimes better than I do, what ought to be said. We have, I think, a literary cottage industry that works well and pleasantly. I do not see anything wrong with.it.

He goes on, noting that a friend suggested he buy a computer, and change his workflow. As of 2019, Berry hasn’t purchased a computer.

His reluctance to buy a computer, and his support of his wife as a first reader, sparks professional envy.

One the one hand, Berry is a gifted and prolific writer, and has crafted a thoughtful, respected body of work around agrarian themes without the aid of a computer. Yet, of course, this success can be attributed, in no small part, to the work of his wife, Tanya[^2^]. I suspect, in the way, a good first reader makes a writer strong.

While I hesitate to form opinions about a couple who have lived together for sixty years, creating a thriving literary cottage industry, there is a feminist critique that many acclaimed male writers have relied heavily on uncredited female secretaries, assistants, wives, and family members.

I’m thinking of Eleanor Marx, who edited many of Karl Marx’s manuscripts. Simone de Beauvoir, whose un-attributed efforts shaped Jean-Paul Sartre’s work. Zelda Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, was the source of many of his ideas, and even, it seems, of un-attributed scenes, in other words plagiarism.

While such unacknowledged collaboration raises questions about attribution and recognition, it also raises questions about writing as a process, involving first readers and, frankly, the work of a typist.

Since the 1990s, society has replaced secretarial staff with computers. Many writers, including myself, have effectively become our own first readers, typists, and copy-editors. My method of writing hasn’t changed much since childhood: I draft, rewrite, revise, correct spelling and grammar, and revise, revise, and revise. I might go through a few dozen drafts, fixing and adding spelling errors as I go.

For my first book, I employed a copy editor and a substantive editor. Friends and family members read my earliest drafts, and offered suggestions.

As I attempt to write my new book, juggle my responsibilities as a professor and a father, I find not only that there‘s too much going on and the writing isn’t happening, but that I have a much smaller pool of people who can help out.

Part of this issue, as Cal Newport‘s work suggests, is that administrative and secretarial roles that used to exist in offices and white-collar jobs were replaced by technology in the 1990s. Funds that previously paid for support staff now end up in IT departments, ultimately benefiting Big Tech.

Berry’s critique of this transition is prescient, as he starts his argument by expressing his disdain for dependency on oil companies.

Part of the issues, is I’m older, and everyone is busier.

But, the challenge of writing and finishing remains. Finishing requires a combination of hard work, creativity, and perseverance. Some elements of the process are iterative. Some of it requires a good first reader.

The work of a first reader, editor, and copy editor is hard to fill. In my experience, I have no one to fill this role and have done this work myself.

But, over the last six months, I’ve begun to see artificial intelligence and large language models from OpenAI and Anthropic as competent copy editors and first readers, when prompted carefully.

While AI will drastically disrupt many industries and jobs wreaking havoc on society, for my writing, I can see a roll for it.

Not to generate words, ideas, scenes, narratives, or text, which is plagiarism. but, to copy editor.

Perhaps some writers will use AI to cross a boundary of what is moral. Perhaps what is seen as moral will change? But, in the mean time, I’ve found a role for AI to clean up my typing, as a first reader, and as a copy editor.

Thoughts?

Writer’s Diary #28 – Anthropic’s Claude-2-100K

Daniel Tubb

Yesterday I listened to the latest Hard Fork episode, which features an interview with Dario Amodei, one of a group of OpenAI employees who left to start Anthropic, OpenAI’s competitor. The interview is quite interesting for someone like me who doesn’t know this area well. But it made me want to check out Anthropic’s new [Claude 2 AI] (https://claude.ai/login).

Claude 2 is not available from Anthropic in Canada, but I got access through Quora’s Poe app.

I’m an anthropologist, a writer, and I’m interested in these big language models and teaching and writing. On the one hand, there is a lot of disruption. I’m on sabbatical, but I don’t know what that means for student essays. But I’m fascinated by AI as an editorial assistant. Many writers rely on editors, but for a long time those editors were unpaid, often female relatives. AI provides me with a free editor and critical reader, for the first time not a family member or friend.

Working with Claude 2-100K yesterday, I came to a couple of realizations.

First, 100K makes Claude much more useful and less stupid than ChatGPT. A few weeks ago I had the idea of using ChatGPT 4 to rearrange a book of fragments. Much of my work involved condensing fragments into summaries for ChatGPT 4’s short memory, or at least the short memory I have access too. With Claude 2-100k, I could give the AI the whole draft. We discussed several possible outlines. With the ChatGPT 4 model I have access to, it always felt like I was at the limit of the AI memory and capacity. With Claude-2-100k, the answer was much slower to come, but was feedback on the entire damn manuscript. My first book took 8 months. This took under a minute.

From there, I had a long, free-flowing conversation with Claude 2 about my book, its ideas and theories, and then we turned to writing and the differences between how Claude 2 writes and how I work. Frankly, Claude 2 just felt much more thoughtful and interesting to talk to than ChatGPT 4.

ChatGPT feels like it has less memory, is dumber, and frankly more prone to nonsense. It seems smart at first, but on further review it is often very formulaic.

Maybe Claude 2 will seem that way to me, but yesterday it seemed like a much more interesting interlocutor than I’ve had on this book, ever. What it says about me that I say this about a large neural net running on servers, converting text into tokens and then running complex vectors and matrices, leaves me very confused. What does it mean to be human, I wonder?