Back in early-mid June, I found myself watching a Youtube video about how to detect A.I. text. And it reminded me of one time, I think it was last year, when a relative showed me one of these programs and insisted that I tried it out. Nervously, I wrote one test prompt (“Heavy metal lyrics in the style of Shakespeare“) and then found myself genuinely frightened at how quickly it belched out the results. And, to avoid shaking my confidence in my own writing any further, I left the program well alone after that!
(On a side-note: From what I remember, the lyrics were fairly bland and generic. Lots of comma splices in the middle of sentences and rhymes that were a bit too “perfect”. If you’ve ever heard slightly older examples of A.I. “music”, it had that sort of rhythm or cadence to it. There wasn’t that much Shakespearean English in it either and it was mostly just a song about castles and thunder and stuff like that. Very “Macbeth”, I guess… but not really what I was expecting.)
Still, although A.I. can “write” inhumanly quickly, it isn’t like we humans have to write slowly. Yes, this article has been slowed down by tiredness and constantly going back and editing things whilst writing it and getting distracted mid-sentence by the internet, but I can write pretty quickly when I feel focused. And I was going to write an advice article about this but then I wondered how much of it was specific to me.
Do other people have a fast-paced inner monologue barrelling through their mind like a freight train a lot of the time? Do other people find things like diary-writing to actually be a satisfying hobby? Did other people read old second-hand 1970s-90s general fiction novels for fun when they were a teenager? Did other people read ‘Sherlock Holmes’ when they were seventeen and find it both cool and hilarious to write in that sort of pompously formal style? Are other people more articulate in writing than verbally, where things like body language or ‘where to look’ or worrying about the un-editable immediacy of speech don’t guzzle up your mind’s processing power? Am I just weird? Yes. Probably. Certainly.
A lot of boosting your writing speed just comes down to practice. But not in the way you might think. Having even a moderately fast typing speed can be useful, but the real skill is psychological. It’s having the confidence to “just write”. To write badly until you don’t. It’s the skill they taught you at school when you had to write essay after essay – back in the good old days when you actually had to write your own essays. It’s knowing that you can always go back and edit later. It’s using a basic word processor (the first draft of this article was written in an old version of WordPad) without a distracting spell-checker. Most of all, it’s practicing thinking of what to write next.
There’s also the whole thing about how, like drawing or painting, actually writing something yourself can feel satisfying because it demands that you focus on it and make tons of small decisions all of the time. It’s a similar “flow state” type thing to playing a fast-paced videogame. One where you have to be “in the zone” and constantly dodging or fighting or reacting or whatever. It’s that sort of feeling and it is a lot more satisfying than just letting an A.I. do all of it for you. It requires more effort and practice but, once you’re even vaguely good at it, there’s just something satisfying about it. And this makes you want to practice more. It’s a virtuous cycle.
This might differ from writer to writer but there’s also the rhythm of writing quickly too. Whilst one of those creepy A.I. programs will just belch out a wall of generic-sounding text at a consistent speed, like a belt-fed machine-gun, I’ve found that fast human writing is more like “burst-fire” (to continue the military metaphor...). You fire off a sentence or two, your fingers flying across the keyboard almost by pure instinct alone. Then there’s a brief pause when you think about what to write next. Then another burst of words. It has a rhythm to it.
Again, writing even relatively quickly is a skill that takes thought and practice. It’s more about your mind than it is about “words per minute” typing speed. It’s about being able to think of what to write next fairly quickly. Case in point, I once tried to learn touch typing from an old Mavis Beacon CD many years ago and I remember some of the jargon – like the “home row” or whatever – but I mostly just learnt to type from just typing a lot. I’m not a slow typist, but also not a super-quick one either. But, again, the important part is actually just thinking of what to write next.
And you learn that from actually thinking. One of the downsides of people over-relying on things like A.I. chatbots is that they do your thinking for you. If you don’t practice thinking, then you won’t be as good at it. You might be able to type at 100 wpm or whatever, but if you can’t think of what to type, then that skill is useless. So, you need to have practice with actually thinking. With daydreaming and introspection and diary-writing and either reading essays or watching video essays (eg: seeing other people thinking and learning from this), with forming your own opinions, with having un-distracted time when you can just let your thoughts flow for a while etc…
But eventually, you reach a point where – when you’ve only had four hours of sleep eleven hours ago – you can just sit down and blurt out an article like this within maybe an hour or so. Using nothing more than your own Mk.1 human brain – old-school organic technology – without even a hint of A.I. And it’ll all feel perfectly normal when you’re actually writing but then you’ll look back on it and feel impressed with yourself. Or, at least that’s how it works for me. But I might be weird.
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂
