John O’Donohue says in Eternal Echoes: “Analysis is always subsequent to and parasitic on creativity. Our culture is becoming crowded with analysts and much of what passes for creativity is merely clever know-how” (p. 186).
When I originally wrote this quote down in my journal, I was spending time thinking about the value of understanding a story through the hero’s journey because of a class I was teaching. Here’s a paragraph from my journal entry after O’Donohue’s quote:
“The hero’s journey has become a formula to write a story. It’s a nice way to begin when you’re intimidated, but fails to engage feelings and the soul. Formulaic stories make for forgettable writing. This connects to not only an issue of left-brain/right-brain dominance in our society, but also how some MFA programs are churning out people who follow another formula to write a good poem or story—all form, no substance. We’re inundated by instructions that say, “Follow these 5 easy steps” and you’ll be…whatever it is, you’ll have a novel, you’ll have written a summary, a poem, a screenplay. Just follow these steps. Doesn’t matter if you FEEL anything. It’s just “know-how.”
(I would like to make clear now at the posting of this blog I’m not opposed to MFA programs or the inundation of creative writers. We need more creatives. Creating heals us.)
A few months shy of a year later from this journal entry, and we’re not only inundated by following simple steps to achieve something, but also able to simply type a prompt into generative AI and have it do it for us (of course we could do this when I wrote that journal entry, but it’s becoming more pervasive and oppressively on my mind). Do you want to know how Agatha Christie wrote her novels? Just have AI analyze her oeuvre and summarize it for you (see Economist article which I didn’t read, but my husband did who told me about it.) You don’t need to “read like a writer” anymore, don’t need to spend hours laboring over word after word of sentence construction, followed by paragraph or stanza construction, by chapter or poem order. Authorial stealing never got so easy. Just have generative AI do that for you and ask it to give you a nice summary. Want to write a nice message to your mother, but don’t want to rely on Hallmark’s cliches? Give ChatGPT a few suggestions then handwrite out the sentiment (that…aren’t cliches?). Don’t have time for a community email message about the death of a loved one? Same.
I just finished reading Daniel Handler’s (aka Lemony Snicket) memoir And then? And then? What else? where he doesn’t tackle AI, but he does briefly address the idea of story interpretation through a heroic journey lens:
“There is a vast pile of commentary seeking to spell out why such literature has such lasting appeal—a pile that serves as further testament to the old stories’ power…Most of the commentaries, however, are tamer, usually huddling around some prescriptive benefit, especially for young people. The archetypical journey of the hero, a misfit at home, setting off and overcoming various obstacles building toward some great triumph and reward, is meant to model order, both in its view of the world and as a suggestion as to how to behave in it…But such nonsense also misses why these stories are appealing, which is not much rooted in the inspiring value of the hero’s journey or the other machinations of the plot—tropes which are, of course, available elsewhere. Nobody reads old stories to learn how to behave, even if that’s the reason they’re given to us. No, the appeal lies in the premise: The bewildering world presented as the tale begins, astonishingly foreign, and, because the world is astonishingly foreign, very, very familiar” (p 22).
Handler refers again and again to his own personal canon of phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and sections of books that spoke to him when he first read them and still speak to him now. They meant something to him then and as he has carried them throughout his life they gain new meaning. These bits and pieces of literature and poetry fuel him and make their way into his own writing, in the way that, you know, we writers are allowed to steal.
His book has made me think about how last semester I taught the medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight within the context of the heroic journey because of the class theme that semester “Commencement.” My students and I compared the poem to the most recent film re-telling “The Green Knight” in light of the hero’s journey, how Gawain went through more grueling change in the poem than he did in the movie. In preparation for teaching the poem, I spent hours pouring over analogues, folk tales, and analysis. The beheading game finally made a bit more sense in the context of medieval romances as offshoots of specific folk motifs. But the satisfaction of those “aha” moments, discovering where beheading games “came from” was nothing compared to the experience of wonder at being COMPLETELY BAFFLED by the premise of Gawain’s impossible challenge:
You behead me and I’ll behead you.
Just as Handler says as I quoted above, it was the premise of this medieval poem that drew me back to it again and again, it was the premise of the impossibility of it, how “astonishingly foreign” it was to me.
What happens when we write from formulas without stepping out of their bounds? What happens when we have AI write for us and miss those opportunities to stumble on something “astonishingly foreign” that is simultaneously deeply “very, very familiar”? Earlier in Handler’s book, he describes an interview he had with poet Heather Christle (who has “terrific titles”). He asked her “who they [her poems] were for, for her or for the audience, and she said, for the poems” (14, emphasis in original).
Her poems are for the poems.
Like they are something alive.
And need fed.
Who are we writing for when we write with formulas? Who are we “writing” for when we “write” with AI? (I DO think there’s a difference between formula writing and AI “writing”, but I’m not ready to articulate it yet, although I do think there are more opportunities for discovery in formula writing.) When chat bots generate a college writing prompt, the student turns in a chat bot generated response, and the teacher grades their assignments with a chat bot, what’s the point? (See NY Times article “The Professors Are Using ChatGPT, and Some Students Aren’t Happy About It.”)
Where is the human experience? Isn’t “writing” with AI just “clever know-how” (O’Donohue)? What have we become, such that we emphasize grammatical accuracy and empty content over deeply meaningful and flawed stories? (see Robert Yagelski Writing As a Way of Being) Is AI not but analysis of past content cleverly regenerating material without any iota of creativity? (And I mean creativity in the sense of turning dirt into humans. Clay into cups. Lead into gold.)
Who are we we writing for?
As a non-conclusion to this perhaps unending saga of thinking about writing as experience in response to AI being dumped in the laps of us children (and this is, furthermore, in response to the belief that writing is not a method of healing), I highly recommend reading Laura Hope-Gill’s Substack post “Questions to Ask Instead of Asking if A.I. Can Write Good Poems.”