Notes on Writing (in) the 21st Century
Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash
At the end of each term, every creative writing student I have gets a letter from me. It carries specific advice for their own next steps and a summation of my takeaway regarding what we explored over the term. I picked this habit of from my doctoral committee chair, Liam Callanan, and have been writing these letters for the past 12 years or so.
This semester, I taught a split class of advanced undergrads and masters students on what it means to be an 21st century artist whose medium is words. This is a somewhat precarious position these days, or so it would seem as people claim at every turn that machines will, in the words of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, “come for the writers first.”
So what’s does this mean for writers’ sense of identity? Despair? Acquiescence? Resistance? Cyborg collaboration? Nihilism (like we don’t live there anyway)?
This was the ground we tread for 16 weeks. Here’s a version of where it took me. Want more of this? Meet me in London in mid-July for the Great Writing conference where I’ll be talking a little about what this means in more pragmatic terms.
Dear Student,
A note from the edge of an ending…As most of you are veterans of the semester’s end letter from me, I’ll replace a more general preamble with a provocation. Who are you? This is the profound and maddening question one must contend with every time they engage in the process of art. This course and the work you completed over its term is—regardless of the time and relative level of care that went into it—a concentrated exploration of your identity. The focal point of art and technology’s intersection is merely another mirror in which to search yourself. Your motivations. Your choices. Your values and intent. Your hopes and aspirations as a writer and human.
And before I’m accused of making the process more than it is, let me double down. Few endeavors strip away the artifice of the ordinary like an attempt to convey the mirage of meaning circling in an artist’s consciousness. And yet, this is what we choose. There is no demand for art so much as a need, first yours as an artist and then that of the audience who finds value in what your need produced.
Technology, then, is like any other tool for expressing that need, but it is also a confusing conflation of needs that masquerade as necessary. That pull at our time and attention. That conflate the human soul with an earnings report or profit margin. Art is and must be resistance to this impulse, a vaccination against being consumed by the consumerist prescription that meaning must be material in value and nature. This means the work of the artist is rejecting content for contentment’s sake.
That resistance—like the work in this course—has no singular genre or form or style or voice. What is universal is the artist in the midst of the swirl, offering a stable point from which readers are confronted by some truth they know they need but cannot articulate on their own. If technology aids in this truth-telling, it must be employed. If it occludes truth, it must be critiqued. As an implement of creation, it must be respected. As an impediment to human expression, it must be reimagined. And all of this is the work of the artist as much as the computer scientist. Maybe even more so.
If that last note sounds like an overreach on my part, I think I’ve worded this correctly. It is our task to continue developing the human code of creativity, to write the 21st century equivalent of Hamlet on the current 21st century equivalent of the holodeck. This class was merely to make you aware of that in a way, I hope, clings to you when next you look at yourself in the mirror of your work and ask, “Who am I?”
…
And that’s what I have for you at this point. I hope our semester together has given you a better sense of yourself as a writer, challenged you to see and interact with technology in meaningful ways, and encouraged you towards whatever art lies in your future as an artist or audience member or something else completely located somewhere between the two. My sincere wish for each of you is that the course has been valuable and challenging and maybe even just a little annoying in the best of ways. Let irritants become the seeds of transcendence in your art and readers will benefit from your willingness to embrace discomfort on their behalf. That’s where the joy in the process resides.
Sincerely,
Michael