This tale of technology and writing actually begins with the typewriter.
My handwriting sucks. I composed my first book—a broadcast journalist textbook—directly on an electric typewriter.
Alterations, therefore, required retyping, and—as a sloppy typist, a lousy speller and a compulsive rewriter—my drafts underwent intensive altering. Rather than continually retype the whole page, I would retype flawed paragraphs and staple them onto the page. Some paragraphs, therefore, grew to be five or six layers thick.
And always there was the fear that the chunky draft might succumb to fire or be left on a bus.
Now, the typewriter, of course, had itself been a significant technological improvement on handwriting, which, in my case, borders on the illegible.
One fellow member of the writing fraternity, Leo Tolstoy, I have been pleased to learn, was also handwriting challenged (though in Cyrillic) and also an inveterate rewriter (though with somewhat more impressive results than I’ve had). So, in those pre-typewriter days Tolstoy’s wife, Sophia, would stay up into the night recopying in some readable form the day’s output of “War and Peace”—pages which her husband would then scribble all over the next day.
I don’t have that kind of wife, so it was lucky that the first IBM personal computer had just become available when I wrote my second, much more substantial book, “A History of News.” I could fiddle and rewrite with impunity.
Still, in those days—the 1980s—research remained very much an analog, Dewey-Decimal experience.
I had spent the better part of a summer commuting to a library at Columbia University, where I fished out all the references to news in a filing cabinet filled with microfiche containing a wonderful anthropological index: the Human Relations Area Files. (Of course, that was considerably easier than having to uncover each of those references in the anthropological papers themselves or actually having to go visit each of the tribes.) I also spent every workday for a couple of months the next summer thumbing through books and old, even very old, newspapers in the British Library.
By now computers, plus the internet, have automated and accelerated—all the way up to instant—research tasks like those, too. Indeed, a lot of the time-consuming busywork of writing—gaining expertise, locating, obtaining, checking—has been outsourced to computers. My books have gotten easier and easier to research.
And a big chunk of the worry has been removed from writing them. You can sit in front of a laptop in a coffeehouse or at your kitchen table or whatever passes for a study and worry about truth and ideas not about how to spell “illegible” or what Tolstoy’s wife’s name was.
So, friends and fellow scriveners, I bring glad tidings: we have been living through a golden age for writing.
That’s the first point I want to make.
Yeah, we could use another Virginia Woolf, another James Joyce (”The Portrait of the Artist” Joyce, not the “Finnegan’s Wake” guy). But those writers we have are able to hold forth on a machine that will instantly correct their spelling and grammar errors, with more or less all the world’s knowledge just a few clicks away. Substack will even format everything and then rush it to a list of presumably well-disposed readers.
Imagine how many “Anna Kareninas” Tolstoy could have produced today with even a six-year-old MacBook Air, with just 8 GB of unified memory and an internet provider. Or at least imagine how much more sleep Tolstoy’s wife could have gotten.
Look, I’m not saying great books—or even great sentences—are, nowadays, just there for the writing. But it is a whole lot easier to assemble the facts and make sure the words are in order then it was in the pen-and-ink, trudge-down-to-the-library days of yore.
Now, this age is not “golden,” to be sure, in the sense of paying writers a whole lot. The market is not large for lively disquisitions or make-believe tales that are not written by Malcolm Gladwell, J. K. Rowling or another star scribbler. And audiences nowadays often succumb to the siren songs of other easily available and livelier entertainments.
Currently, reading is, for the most part, a hobby for intellectuals and retired people. But, yeah, if you have another source of income, you can have a go at: if not the Vladimir-Nabokov game, if not the Joan-Didion game, at least at the Substack game.
Of course, you will still have to succeed not only in turning a few phrases but in coming up with an argument; what is known in the business as “something to say.”
Or will you? ‘Cause, as you’ve probably noticed, your artificial intelligence of choice—be it OpenAI, Anthropic or Google—is increasingly offering to handle that task, too. It not only can write serious or write fun, it can generate story ideas—pithy, of-the-minute issues, complete with a selection of possible points of view. And it has no trouble fleshing out those stories.
And that leads to my second point: this golden age of writing is probably in the process of ending for us—us humans. ‘Cause anything we can write, AI will be able to write better. That is almost true as I write—now. It will be for-sure true soon.
A human sitting down to write a story or an article is going to seem like a human setting off to walk from the Bronx to South Ferry: enterprising, maybe getting some good exercise, but a bit weird.
Machines have mostly taken over the job of getting us from place to place. We are about to hand over to them responsibility for writing—just when most of the impediments to doing it well have been removed.
This post originally appeared in Mitchell Stephens’ Substack, Ideas on Ideas. You can read it here.