🚨 MULE SUMMER SCHOOL CONTINUES 🚨

Join us next Friday for another helping of HOW TO SELL, with Erika and Kristina!

This week’s question comes to us anonymously:

What do you say to someone who wants to write but struggles with writing and is tempted to use an LLM-based chatbot?

I failed high school freshman English.

Now, we can go into the cyclone of intermixed reasons why this happened, but it was mostly a combination of not doing the assigned work and also not doing the assigned work. It wasn’t that I was doing it badly. Doing it badly would’ve at least gotten me a workable shitty grade. It’s that I wasn’t doing it at all, which resulted in a lot of zeroes on the grade sheet. Which, as some of you might know, is a thing you can’t really crawl out of.

It’s not that I didn’t want to do the work, I did. At least at first.

Let’s do a little background work. Before high school I was in the same Catholic school for eight years. To put it mildly, I didn’t care for the experience. I feel like I’ve written about this ad nauseum, so I’ll pull out the salient bit: Catholic school was incredibly regimented. You were told what to do, when to do it, how long to do it for, and once you were done doing it you folded your hands on your desk and waited for everyone else to be done. In between the hand-folding I aced tests, did a modicum of homework, and mostly didn’t really have to study because stuff tended to be easy. Catholic school rewarded rote memorization more than critical thinking. And everyone nodding along in agreement to that last sentence is simultaneously rubbing their knuckles because too much critical thinking had a cost. The goal of Catholic school isn’t really to make you a good thinker. It’s to make you a good Catholic. (It failed at that, too. For the record, I consider myself an alumni. I’ve paid the lifetime dues, but no longer…hang.) (Shut up. I get to make that joke.)

All this is to say that I entered high school with very bad study habits, and not much real experience with critical thinking or a method for organizing my thoughts. And of all the high school freshman classes, math, history, etc., English was always going to be the class where these problems were going to be exposed. Which they were.

I struggled with any assignment that had an essay component. Book reports killed me. And it’s not like I wasn’t reading the books. I loved reading the books! But when it came time to write the report I would freeze. Turns out you have to learn how to write a book report. You have to learn how to write an essay. I’d never learned these skills. I was terrified, as a kid coming from a different type of situation and really really wanting to not be seen as an idiot, so I never asked for help, either. Turns out you have to learn how to ask for help, too.

The thing is, the thoughts were there. Swimming around in my head. Occasionally bumping into each other and making new thoughts, and if you asked me to explain about the character relationships in The Pearl during a casual conversation, I could probably do it. But the minute you asked me to write it all down it was like there were thirty airplanes circling the airport, and no one at air traffic control to land them. I could not get my thoughts on paper. It fucking sucked. It really sucked, because I really wanted to get my thoughts on paper.

At some point in the semester the struggle became too much to overcome and I gave up. I took the loss. Which filled me with shame.

I will always be someone who failed high school freshman English.

So I get your struggle.

I ended up going to summer school to make up the class, which—fuck me—was at the local Catholic high school. A week into the class, we were given our first book report. Catcher in the Rye. I struggled. But I was adamant that I wasn’t going to fail the class, so I got something down on paper and I handed it in. Better than getting a zero. The next day the teacher asks me to stick around after class. I see my book report sitting on his desk, ungraded. And instead of discussing the book report, he says “Tell me about the book.”

We ended up having a thirty minute conversation about the book. After which, he hands me back my ungraded paper and says “Rip this up and write it like you told it.”

I went home and tried to write up as much of our conversation as I could remember, as well as a couple of other things I figured out in the writing of it. Got a B-. Which felt amazing.

And while I will always be someone who failed high school freshman English, I am not someone who failed high school sophomore English. Passed by the skin of my teeth, but I passed. Did a little better junior year. And a little better than that senior year, eventually writing a pretty good college essay, too! Which means that while “write it like you told it” was helpful, it wasn’t some silver bullet that magically unlocked my writing ability. That shit only exists in the movies. The struggle continued! But it was a very helpful tool that got me over that first hurdle. And little by little, I got better by putting in the work.

I will always be someone who failed high school freshman English, but I will also be someone who wrote a book. No, two. No, three. Actually, six. (I’m counting one in the pipeline.) I will always be someone who sits down at this desk every Thursday and cranks out four pages (yes, I still count things in pages) of words to send to you. And look, I can’t promise you that they’ll be good. But I can promise you that I wrote every single one. From the head, to the heart, to the fingers, to the page. Do I still struggle? Absolutely. Every week I struggle. Every week I think this is the week I can’t do it. Every word is still an airplane circling an airport, piling up to become sentences, piling into each other to become paragraphs, circling until they make sense. The difference isn’t in the struggle, it’s in the knowing that every week we land these planes. Every week I sit down and remind myself to write it like I told it, and then I tell it. And every week, after I hit SEND, it feels amazing. Not just because I’ve landed those planes, but because I feel like I’ve fulfilled a promise to you, and because I feel useful. But also because I am reaching back through time and high-fiving an awkward fat little freshman boy, sitting at his desk, on the verge of tears because he’s struggling with putting words on a page, and I want to tell him that he figures it out.

As Arthur Miller said, everything we are is at every moment alive in us. I failed high school English. I am a writer. We are the same. We share a body. We share an accomplishment.

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in the dog park when one of my neighbors sat down next to me. She’s a college poetry professor, and a little nutty as poetry professors delightfully tend to be. She told me she’d been reading my book and it was freaking her out because it was exactly like having my voice in her head. “You write like you talk.” And that made me very happy because there’s no better feedback than being told that you are you. And that your voice will outlive you. And that writing, which you continue to struggle with, has gone from something that could stop you in your tracks into something from which a stronger you emerges. That’s the shit right there, man. (It’s also nice to know that you’re traumatizing your neighbors.)

At the time I failed high school English, there were no large language models. We didn’t even have Wikipedia yet. We had to steal passages from encyclopedias longhand, and we had to go to the library to do that. And, to be honest with you, I don’t know what I would’ve done if that had been an option for me in high school. I certainly would’ve been tempted. The struggle was real. Would I have used it? I honestly don’t know. But I’m glad I never got to find out. Because if I had, I would’ve remained that insecure little kid who couldn’t write an essay. Never knowing what he was actually capable of. Never becoming, but always stuck on the other side of what could’ve been. An LLM will never write it like you told it. It might give you a reasonable facsimile, and the most dangerous thing about a facsimile is that it will eventually convince you that it’s the real thing. It’ll eventually convince you that its voice is your voice.

So while the temptation to use this shit is understandable, the price is too high.

Eventually your LLM will write your child a note and their LLM will write a reply and neither of you will actually know each other’s voices. Neither of you will know what is actually in each others’ hearts. And that is brutal.

This is what we are stealing from our children, and ourselves. The sense of overcoming struggle. The growth that comes from the breakthrough. The idea that monsters can be defeated. The idea that our voices are worth finding.

But even worse, we are stealing their joy, and ours. The joy that comes from knowing that you can actually do something that once terrified you. The joy that comes from defeating the level boss. The joy that comes from being ourselves, to each other.

The struggle is real. But the joy is even more real.

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