Two gigantic forces are converging for writers, creating a strange new opportunity:
Artificial Intelligence, speeding up and expanding every day, can rearrange lifetimes of creative identity and practice, while also changing the reading habits of audiences. And, as this essay is being posted, chaos in the world-wide public sphere is changing the context and thus the meaning of stories old and new.
The special creative opportunities occurred to me in a rush of incoming news. Some stories fixated on finding true human voices in the flood of computer-generated text, and some highlighted the struggle to maintain artistic focus in the flood of disruptive events.
Voice and focus. For many creative writers, these essentials are getting blurry.
I realized, in my own case, that my ability to express something meaningful to me was most vivid in writing notes to cherished others. My whole heart and mind rose up in care for our mutual understanding. I quickly understood why several top-tier teachers recommend this approach for fiction-writing: imagine you are telling the story to one treasured person.
When I imagined writing to beloved strangers, one at a time, I felt inspiration rising from inner resources I don’t usually access, especially strangers at different ages, from five to 75, in various stages of life-bloom. Suddenly there was a coherence in the chaos, a direct focused line, linking my felt reactions with a cared-for listener, along a purposeful, relevant wish to communicate. Both voice and focus felt enhanced, and I noticed voice and focus modulating a little, for each age.
Starting with ages created a helpful structure: in transformational times like ours, changes can affect different generations in especially divergent ways. Caring for the unique situations of each age seemed too complicated till I modified a favorite model of care: attend to someone’s safety, to their access to emotional attunement with empathetic others, attend to their comfort, their enthusiasm, and their sense of possibilities. Then when I chose a theme or event to write to them about, I felt naturally tender and earnest in finding words that might offer value.
To try it, choose any topic and draft a letter about it to someone (in your imagination or real life) who is five years old. This takes you deeply into your most fundamental emotional attitudes towards what’s happening – and how you might express them in helpful, simple terms. Then write to someone who is 15, 25, 45, 75. You might be surprised by the ideas and feelings that pop up. Once you stimulate the flow, you might also discover adverse attitudes too. That’s the beauty of the page’s safe space, which lets you explore and process in private, likely deepening awareness and self-understanding as you go.
Maybe these fabricated characters and expressions will blossom into new stories for publication – whether in a fictional universe or in memoirs. At the very least, they can provide an organizing principle for staying intentionally creative in times of tumultuous change.
Photo Credit: Kateryna Hliznitsova via Unsplash