The dying art of writing

In the world of journalism, I am a prinsaurus (print dinosaur). I am a millennial who takes out daily ‘pages’ – the A3-sized page that is losing its shine day by day. Anyway, I shared this to give an idea about how I work and my relationship with writing. 

I do not know how things work at school these days, but in my time, we used to read short stories, underline difficult words and try to use them in sentences. Some words/phrases presently in my vocabulary have background stories. For example, the word ‘exile’ sounded familiar when I heard it on TV as a child, in the context of a popular political leader’s whereabouts. This was so because in Lion King II, Simba, in an authoritative tone, passed his judgment on Kovu, his daughter’s friend and his rival’s son. ‘Exile!’ he shouted as a punishment for Kovu.

Then in school, I read the word ‘wrath’ in Shakespeare’s ‘The Winter’s Tale’ when Hermione’s husband left the room angrily after his best friend agreed to extend his stay at Hermione’s request. ‘Entourage’ came in when we were reading a short article on a Vietnamese girl, who was pictured while escaping a Napalm attack. The word ‘drag’ has an interesting story. There used to be a video game called Hitman. Once the job was done, if you’d click on the body, you had two choices: leave the body there or drag it.

Back in those days, when we used to come across new words, we would try to sneak them into our essays and other writing exercises. Sometimes, it would be perfect, and sometimes, the teacher would explain how we misunderstood the word. Before the computer took over and heavy dictionaries replaced CDs, learning how to find a word in the dictionary used to be a fun adventure.

So when we write, we see it as a form of prayer, nervous about using our skills correctly. We remain cautious – second guessing ourselves whether we have done justice to the words. And that’s the reason we read articles with disgust when we realise that they are AI-written – or at least that’s what I used to do previously. For me, it meant the writers – ‘prompt giver’? – bypassed the long hours spent figuring out how your piece should be.

Luckily (or is it too early to say this?), my bubble was burst when a friend in finance said AI-backed writing tools made his life easier. I protested, but he said that for him, such tools are like a calculator – why do you have to perform the calculations on a piece of paper when a calculator can do so in seconds? Remember the tiny ‘1’ we used to write before our unit value when we borrowed from the number on the immediate left while performing subtraction? Most of us have even forgotten the extra zeros we would put in to complete the division. Of course, a mathsaurus (math dinosaur) might be rolling his/her eyes, silently cursing us for our stupidity and dying love for basic mathematical operations.

AI is a reality (bonus for readers: there is a podcast called Unpressedented on YouTube where speakers have done a great job comparing the good, the bad, and the ugly of AI). And at some point, we all have to embrace it – including, yes, writers. The debate is not whether a writer should use AI; the debate is whether those who may not see writing as art can use it to present their opinion to the world. Does it really matter that their text has a huge volume of words like ‘emphasise’, ‘delve’ or ‘additionally’? Should we roll our eyes when we read the phrase ‘in conclusion’ in the last paragraphs?

I understand the need for gatekeeping, but if we look at how content is being treated, our fears and criticism lose ground. In this fast-paced, highly connected world, people do not have time to wait for writers who spend hours polishing their text. We have already gone from having a 25-episode season to a short 10-episode web series. The goal is to do things fast – and do a lot of it!

My personal best score so far has been 10,000 words in a day. I don’t know how I did it, but I sat down in front of my computer and never stopped. This best score was during the time I was required to write 3,000 words daily. Now, the minimum requirement by content houses is 5,000 words, a 66 per cent increase. If daily output is increased by over 60 per cent, naturally the income attached to it would increase by the same percentage – at least for content companies. If I insist that my creativity requires me to think and take time, why should anyone invest in me?

I want to hold on to the art of writing – desperately. But my attachment issues, frankly, have no place in an ever-changing world. We have already let machines replace great artists. So, is it time for prinsauruses like me to adopt a ‘we read and we don’t judge’ approach? Is it time to say goodbye to the art of writing?

The writer is an assistant editor at The News. She tweets/posts @manie_sid and can be reached at: aimen_erum@hotmail.com