What Matters?
And why?
In a month or so, I am going to have the opportunity to speak to an audience of students at an elite American university about why they should continue to learn to write, rather than outsourcing that work to a large language model.
I want to talk about reading too, as something distinct from relying on large language models to deliver text summaries.
In essence I want them to believe the opposite of disgraced former crypto mogul and now felon Sam Bankman-Fried who once famously said, “I'm very skeptical of books. I don't want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that... I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
I’m thinking about starting by showing them my annual royalty statement for my short story collection, Tough Day for the Army, which earned a grand $6.38 in calendar year 2024, and then trying to convince them why I am hugely grateful for the experience of writing and publishing this book even though the monetary compensation for the work it represents is literally pennies (or maybe even fractions of a penny) per hour.
Sometimes writers will demur when asked about their “favorite” book, and while I have fondness for most (though not all) of my books, Tough Day… is the one which I am most happy to see in the world, even though its total sales have yet to crack four digits.
The book represents an almost unfathomable amount of work, some of which I described in a Q&A with
at her newsletter, 100,000 words of fiction written a year for three straight years during my MFA program, almost none of which wound up in the book.1I want to tell the students about how, for several months after finishing graduate school I was determined to quit writing, fairly convinced that I did not have what it took to be a “writer” in terms of ability or temperament. Entering grad school I’d convinced myself that I would be much further along than I found myself after three years, so I figured it was time to cut my losses to grow up and move on.
But then, one day on my way home from work I had a strange, surreal moment during a misty, windy day on the streets of downtown Chicago, when a woman in a red raincoat, holding an umbrella and walking maybe 30 feet in front of me seemed to disappear entirely in a wave of fog that briefly passed between us. She was there, and then she wasn’t. My rational brain knew that she must have turned a corner or ducked into a building just as the fog separated us, but I couldn’t shake the uncanny feeling of the moment, and I wondered what else could have happened, like maybe she’d been swept aloft on her umbrella, Mary Poppins-style.
When I got home, this image lingered in my mind, ghostly and urgent, and so I started writing a story from the point of view of a character who had experienced something similar, but who was convinced the supernatural had occurred because other things (unknown to me at the time of starting the story) had caused him to believe such things were possible.
Fairly quickly some instinct told me that this scene with the woman and the umbrella was a middle interlude in this guy’s story, that he was coming from somewhere and then going somewhere else and figuring out what those things were would provide the story’s arc. Pursuing and fulfilling these instincts became the work of writing the story, which ultimately turned into the first story I would ever publish (“The Circus Elephants Look Sad Because They Are”), appearing in the third issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly.
It happened very quickly, a draft coming within a few hours, even as I hadn’t written a word, outside of work, for months.
It was a good story, I think, but it didn’t make the cut for Tough Day… because by the time that collection would be published 15 years on, I would have enough better stories to make up a book.
As a commercial prospect, the book barely exists, as my royalty statement testifies. But it is hard to articulate how much the fact of its existence means to me. I am not one to put too much stock into reviews as the determinant of a writer’s worth, but this from Publishers Weekly tells me that for at least one reader, I hit the bullseye.
I read that review and felt like at least one other person understood what I was trying to say to the world, and what is better than that.
I know I’ve told some version of this story here before, but this is the thing about our stories, in may ways our stories are us, and so why wouldn’t we repeat them from time-to-time.
One thing I’ve learned over the course of my teaching career is that there are no universal truths about all students, but in general, if these students are at all typical, they will have internalized a “transactional” view of school, where the whole point of the enterprise is to do things that fulfill course requirements that aggregate up to a credential that will hopefully pay off with a job and material security. This is not a flaw of student character, but a byproduct of a system of “indefinite future reward” where the benefits of education are endlessly deferred, rather than being apparent in the moment of being educated. Students are playing the game that we’ve designed for them, and at the institution where I’ll be speaking, we’re talking about some of the tip-top game players around.
They are excellent at doing school. And while it’s not that no learning happens, learning is secondary to schooling. Even the students who recognize this fell powerless to resist it.
One of the chief challenges of generative AI is that it allows students to fulfill the schooling transactions while learning nothing, or doing something worse than learning nothing, while being actively “de-skilled” as the syntax generator substitutes for what previously would have had to be written.
The challenge is to convince students that there is genuine benefit in the struggle of learning as something distinct from the steady forced march of schooling. How do I convey the genuine value of thinking when cultural messaging of the moment is the opposite?
We have a presidential administration that apparently generated its tariff plan with ChatGPT.
We have Bill Gates saying that in ten years, humans will not be needed for “most things.”
If I was a young person pursuing my college education would I see this as depressing or liberating? If you don’t need humans anymore, should I choose to just do whatever I want, or is a life without being needed a hollow thing?
Maybe I could tell them how, even as I was spending almost two decades working on the stories that would wind up in Tough Day… I was well aware that no one needed them, and that there was no commercial potential for them, and despite this (or because of this?) I still felt compelled to bring them into the world.
I don’t know what to call that. I’m not sure I have advice to others on how to find it, and yet I’m terribly thankful that this has been the experience of my life.
This is one of those weeks I’m hoping for a little outsourced help. Imagine yourself in my place with 60 minutes to convince students that reading and writing and the challenge that comes with those activities is worth doing, even if the world is signaling to them that these things have little tangible, monetary value anymore.
What would you say?
Links
This week at the Chicago Tribune I wrote about Fleetwood Mac: All the Songs, my early favorite for coffee table book of the year.
At Inside Higher Ed I asked myself how I’m able to go about my work even as it’s clear that these are not normal times and we no longer live in a normal country.
It’s always a pleasure and honor to talk with Bonni Stachowiak on her Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast. Listen to see how the Six Million Dollar Man, Tang, Frogger, ’s book Hidden Potential, and other topics relate to the importance of writing in the age of AI.
The Women’s Prize for fiction has announced their shortlist.
Read this
newsletter for a great accountability hack if you want to finish a long piece of writing.I’ve been looking for ways of staying informed without marinating in news of doom and
’s newsletter has been a godsend. Enough news and context to keep me going forward, rather than down the rabbit hole.Via my friends
this week, “Excerpts from a Red-Hot Right-Wing Romance Novel,” by Sara K. RunnelsRecommendations
1. Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin
2. An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn
3. Diamond Hill by Kit Fan
4. Open City by Teju Cole
5. Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver
Danielle S. - New York, NY
For Danielle, I’m recommending a book from last year for which my esteem grows every time I think about it, Godwin by Joseph O’Neil.
1. More than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI by John Warner
2. Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change by Olga Khazan
3. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
4. The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes
5. How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr
Tim B.
What excellent taste in books from this requester! For Tim I’m recommending a non-fiction title from last year that only grows more relevant by the day, The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor by
.I don’t want to jinx anything but after a rough start in Japan the Chicago Cubs are looking competitive to start the season. Sometimes I think the Cubs winning the World Series in 2016 is what opened a rift in the space-time continuum that allowed Trump to become president. Perhaps another World Series victory would close it back up.
Remember to share your advice with these students I’ll be talking to in a month’s time in the comments.
Maybe also consider buying More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI. Be like Tim B.
All for now, see you next week.
JW
Only two of the fifteen stories in Tough Day… were initially drafted during my MFA studies, both of them coming in the final weeks prior to submitting my thesis. One of them, Poet Farmers, can be read in somewhat different form at the Chicago Reader archive.
We write because we don't know what's on the other side of the line, the sentence, the paragraph, the story, the essay. A preamble can set on a country on a two hundred plus year odyssey to live up to its ideals. A list can topple kings. The work of writing, of making sense of the world, ourselves, of leaving a record, of creating possibility enlarges us beyond what we currently are, where we currently exist, transcending time and place. It's no wonder the powerful don't want people to do it. Leave it to the machines. Do not imagine what else might be. Do not follow the sentence to the other side. People emerge from intense reading and writing changed. How would that serve power?
I’m just waking up and having my first cup of tea so my thoughts aren’t yet coherent, but I would say something like only you can convey your you-ness. A machine can’t quite capture your mind and emotions and spirit in all its messy glory, and there’s a thrill in putting out something that has its origins in your uniqueness and originality even when it doesn’t pay the bills. So says this old-school writer whose short stories have been published in lit journals barely anyone reads and whose novel was written without AI over the course of a decade while working full-time and is currently on submission via an agent and hopes to be published but also knows the odds of that game are not necessarily in her favor nor will I make more than Pennie’s if and when it gets published but at least I’m giving it a shot. I wouldn’t change any of that for what it’s taught me about perseverance and about myself, something using AI never could have done. And now I sound like an old tea-drinking lady ranting with my fist in the air but I’m good with that too. Thanks for always being thought-provoking and for sharing your you-ness with us!