https://wordsofwomennewsletter.ghost.io/what-does-he-want/
There is an energy needed to write. I’m not talking about physical or mental energy. I’m talking about energy from somewhere deep inside that propels you to dispel the noise, the consequences, the point… and do it.
Somewhere along the way, I’ve exhausted this energy. I sit down to write and cringe. I stall.
After weeks like this, I began to wonder if it’s the looming reality of AI. I am a dying breed, I think. Writing for an audience that doesn’t exist, in a lanaguage that is becoming obsolete.
Yet I must find reason to get up every morning.
I anchor my fear with history. That in 1492, abbot Johannes Trithemius lamented that the printing press would make monks lazy and degrade scholarship: “Printed books will never equal scribed books, because the copyist’s dedication adds something the printing press cannot.”
The typewriter was feared to “mechanize” thought and kill literary style. Henry James initially resisted it, saying it made prose feel “stamped” rather than composed. Mark Twain, one of the first authors to submit a typewritten manuscript, admitted that colleagues mocked him for using a machine instead of “real writing.”
Then there was the telephone.
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