21st Century Creative Writing Manifesto: Audrey Swanson

Photo by Yannick Pulver on Unsplash

As part of a split advanced creative writing workshop and graduate seminar I taught this spring on A.I. and creative writing, I posed my students a challenge in the form of a question: What would a manifesto of creative writing look like in the 21st century?

The class itself centered around some foundational explorations. What does it mean to make art in the age of machines attempting to do the same? Is art inherently a human pursuit and domain? How is the digital exploration of creativity recasting the work of art as it has been perceived? And what might we learn as artists if we engage the strengths and limitations of machine art?  

From these angles, we dug into a number of conversations surround the intersection of art, human consciousness, and machine learning/expression. These manifestos, then, are my students’ expression of what art and artists should do in our context. We referred to older examples of the form (Dadaist, Surrealist, Feminist, Fluxus, and Oulipian among others). But I left the final form up to them, knowing that I would be making them public via my blog. The following series are the of what they came up with. I encourage you to sit with their ideas over the next couple weeks.

The second manifesto in this series comes from Audrey Swanson and leans into the tradition of Orwell and Didion exploring why they choose to write in the first place. This question is even more present and personal in the age of “storytelling” machines, as Audrey’s piece indicates.

I HATE WRITING: A MANIFESTO 

I hate writing. I quit once a week. Why do I write? 

It’s tempting to say I write because I must. That I write because it comes to me like breathing, because the only way I have ever engaged with the world is through language, and thus I must process it in that manner. This is tempting because it sounds romantic and exciting, the sort of thing a real writer might feel. It is also not at all true. Writing is about as enjoyable to me as bending my fingernails backwards. It is excruciating and it makes me feel utterly inadequate. Maybe I write because I’m a fucking masochist. 

So then, why do I write? I may as well not. I am not unique in my talent or in my work ethic. Perhaps language comes to me easily, because I have been engaging with the world in that way since I was very young, but this does not mean I must write. There is nothing in the world that requires me to write. 

So why do I write? 

Anne Lamott wrote that she writes because she wants to. I suppose this is also why I write. I write because I want to. I write because the world is achingly beautiful and horrible and ordinary and magical and it requires a response. This is, of course, a ridiculous reason to write. The world will keep singing without my piddly sentences and quaking descriptions. But it is also true. That is the thing which makes art so revolutionary. It is not productive. It gives without expecting anything back. Of course, that’s all well and good for everyone else. I still hate it. 

Of course, I do not think all good art exists in the form of literature. That would be narrow-minded and ridiculous. There is wonderful art in digital spaces, and the field of digital literature and storytelling is ever-expanding. Still, though, I think the written word holds a special place in our existence that will not be displaced by these other forms of art. Literature requires that the reader give it space. It requires a separation from the cycle of breakneck consumerism that grips the American public. To write literature involves situating oneself in the world beyond the passive cycle of production and consumption. It is easy to find oneself caught in the great, churning wheel of working and buying and working and buying. This is the life we are sold: to be fulfilled is to work forty hours a week so that, on your days off, you can fill your leisure with products. Creative writing, in the traditional sense, rebels against this cycle because, really, it is not the shiniest thing on the market. There is a reason it is so difficult to sell a novel. The intention and attention required by literature is not easy to muster, particularly in a world in which there is so much screaming for our attention. 

The world spins more quickly with each passing second, and the strobing computer lights threaten to give me a headache. Still, the world will keep advancing, my grouchy complaints be damned. If art is a response to the world in which we live, perhaps the digital is a more apt medium through which to reflect our world. And yet, the machine itself does not see. In fact, it can be blinding. At least for me, the realm of digital storytelling feels more exhausting than stimulating. My experience of the digital landscape has numbed me to the world, rather than making me more sensitive to it. In the right hands, digital narrative can be beautiful, but in order to do so, it must not fall victim to the capitalist idea that the best art is that which is easiest to consume. Good art does not lull its audience to sleep. It does not lure one into a bottomless pit of consumption. It jolts one awake. It beckons one to go out into the world and live. 

All that be damned. I still hate writing. I can’t quit. There’s too many things I want to write about.