At the heart of this website, the core of this little creative project I’ve been working on here, there is but a single message burning with the inner heat that drives the whole damn thing: it is one piece of advice. Start writing.
Oh, I get it. You don’t have the passion or the time or the urge or the patience.
That device in your hands is so great at capturing your attention and entertaining you with the ideas and thoughts of other people—or maybe now I should include algorithms and slop—that you can’t be bothered to use it to make something.
But writing is at the core of creativity. It is the uber-skill that shapes and refines all the others.
Writing is the materialization of thoughts—reflective and critical, personal and communicative, coherent and scattered—upon the page.
Writing makes you better at evaluating yourself and whatever you do.
Writing closes the loop and fills the gap and bridges the points of something you cannot articulate is missing in your soul until you start writing.
It’s not difficult.
Open any app that takes text: your notes, your word-processor, hell, write yourself an email… but write something. And then write some more. And keep writing after that. It will improve you in ways you cannot fathom until you’ve written enough to see it for yourself.
Terms FROm this POSt
- algorithm
- The modern internet in all its forms is far too large for people to fully manage anymore without the help of automated systems. Any time an unseen calculation weighing our public profiles against what an app, website, or service chooses to show us, one of these automated systems is at work behind the scenes recommending product, ideas, politics, and friends. The invisible hand of fate has turned into a digital calculation so big we can’t understand it, and so complex it is often hauntingly accurate. If you are not afraid of the algorithm and what it has done to our society, you are probably not paying enough attention.
- slop
- Maybe I’m just leaning into it, but it seems like this has become the de facto term to describe anything generated by an algorithm coupled with the soulless pursuit of creating for-profit content. Artificial intelligence is a complex technology with many positive uses, but making inhuman replacements for human expression is not one of those.
