Most college professors I know believe that students learn to think — critically, creatively, reflectively, tenaciously — only by writing. At Williams College, where I am a professor, writing skills are among the very few general education requirements.

It’s no surprise, then, that universities see artificial intelligence as an existential threat, and have launched an arms race of countermeasures: more proctored essay exams; test-taking rooms shielded from the internet; requirements that essays be composed on platforms that track all edits, so the word-for-word genealogy can be verified. I’ve heard professors rejoicing when they see typos or grammatical errors in an essay, as if they proved that a student wrote it without any help from A.I.

But what if we are mistaken in treating writing as the highest cultivation of thought? The evidence that supports this belief is thin at best. Writing can be useful cognitive scaffolding for memory and self-regulated learning, but the notion that it is the best process for developing thinking skills is a fairly recent idea, traceable to the 1970s writing-across-the-curriculum movement.

In 1980, James Britton, an educator, hypothesized that we discover what we think in the act of writing. “Hypothesized” is the correct word here, since Mr. Britton’s anecdotal and introspective suppositions never amounted to proof of a stronger claim, and studies since have been limited or inconclusive.

My first post on my blog. I write about my experience as a college senior and the impact of AI tools on education. I would appreciate some feedback or questions you have! Thanks for reading.

Like many offbeat ideas, this one originated in a bar.

I was drinking with a fellow author, and we were bemoaning the future of writing in a world of artificial intelligence. We nervously pondered how much of what we writers do could be replicated now or in the near future by a chatbot. We assured ourselves that our work—researching and investigating and then composing articles and books on complicated topics, which present fresh material, compelling context, and sharp analysis in (we hope) an engaging manner—cannot be supplanted by a machine. At least not yet. But what of other fare? Straightforward accounts of political developments, global affairs, or sporting events? Recipe books? Or histories and biographies? Short stories or novels? Film scripts?

What could AI produce? Generative artificial intelligence has already invaded—or infected—the world of fan fiction. I have friends who have used AI with their kids to create children’s books. Iranian meme-makers have deployed it to concoct slick Lego-style videos deriding Donald Trump.

The issue is not the ability of a chatbot to churn out algorithmically determined masterpieces. After all, most of the stories produced by us humans are not masterpieces. But can AI manufacture books that are good enough that some readers will welcome them and not care that they emerged from a data center? Perhaps even pay for such fare? Might many writers soon face an extinction-level event?

Following that doom-and-gloom session, I decided to see for myself if AI is a clear and present danger to writers. I asked Claude, Anthropic’s AI chatbot, to generate a novel. It did, and I’ll cut to the chase: The novel isn’t so bad.

Let me note that this exercise deliberately sidesteps the many profound concerns about AI: the economic dislocation it could cause, the environmental impacts and community costs of data centers, the expropriation of work produced by authors, journalists, and other humans. It focuses only on what AI might mean for the future of writing and other creative endeavors. And don’t forget that the reason an AI chatbot can kick out a novel is because its Big Tech master—without seeking permission or offering compensation—hoovered up a gajillion books, articles, news stories, and other material created by people. (The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI denies the allegations.)

To access the gift article, append ?unlocked_article_code=1.yVA.pdAn.jWyx6dpYv6wL&smid=nytcore-ios-share to the URL.

Recently, I received a strange text from a new acquaintance. “You have your own biography???” it read. “How did you neglect to tell me this?”

This was news to me. I went to Amazon to investigate. There it was. A biography of Kashmir Hill — title: “The Biography of Kashmir Hill” — had been released nearly a year earlier, in August 2025. My life story had a mottled brown cover and a publisher I’d never heard of before. It had no reviews until I wrote one, asking, as the subject of this work, if I could please speak to the author. The hardcover cost $26.99, which seemed a bit steep, but my editor splurged on a copy and I was forced to read it.

My biography is 90 pages long and should be shorter. It combines facts about me that are widely available on the internet, such as where I grew up, with generic insights that could be true of anyone, like a horoscope spread over dozens of pages. “You cannot understand Kashmir Hill without understanding her contradictions,” my biographer wrote, along with an excruciatingly long description of my elaborate coffee-making ritual. (Fact check: My husband does it.)

The book is flattering, fabricated and absolutely packed with em dashes. It bears all the signs of A.I. slop. I clicked on the author, one John Crane Miller. His bio page described him as a “seasoned biographer and cultural analyst,” and his portrait was a widely used stock photo of a white man in a suit speaking at a conference. “The Biography of Kashmir Hill: The New York Times Technology Journalist Who Exposed Clearview AI, Challenged Big Tech and Redefined Privacy in the Digital Age” was one of 10 biographies that Mr. Miller had published in a single week, all of them about journalists, including my Times colleague Mike Isaac; Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic; and Jake Tapper of CNN.

I could not, in good conscience, post this under "Literature."

Lately my memoir is just stuck. I've hit a difficult chapter on failure and poor decisions I'd rather not face. Reaching into the darkest recesses of my memory, at a time of renewed struggle, has not been easy.

Usually, I've bounced between two works when I find the words are not coming. Stephen King's On Writing and Thriving as a Graduate Writer. The former, fun for me, practical, direct. The later a foray into academic writing with editing tips applicable anywhere. I also try a long walk or a deep podcast like Radiolab or This American Life for inspiration. Nothing seems to work for this hurdle.

So, where do you go and what do you reach for when the words just won't come?

"You fool... You conquer a mudball and think of yourself as exceptional? You believe you can negotiate? Bargain? Perhaps you need to reassess your position more carefully. A blade of grass does not get to negotiate with the river when it decides to change its flow. A tiny grain of sand does not get to debate tides. I have to say, human. Your arrogance is quite amusing."

"So what will you have us do? Just not defend ourselves? Just allow you to roll over us and let you do whatever you want to?"

"I don't care about what you do. But I am a messenger. My only duty concerning you is to inform you of the single directive that cosmic sociology works on. And I have fulfilled it."

"Do you despise us?"

"More than you can imagine."

Logic Octavo, my book is available for download here

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/s4mihhq12zfvc/Documents

On a snowy Sunday morning in February 1808, the poet William Wordsworth was walking along Fleet Street in London. He’d just been to visit his friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his lodgings on the Strand. Coleridge was at a low ebb: stuck in an unhappy marriage, weighed down by perennial financial difficulties, mentally blocked from writing, in poor health and addicted to opium. The visit had a lowering effect on Wordsworth’s own spirits. Walking along Fleet Street, eyes downcast, “ear sleeping”, feet moving automatically, he was absorbed in sombre thoughts.

But then something made him look up. A vision lay before him: Fleet Street blanketed with snow, “silent, empty, pure white”, and, at the end of it, the “huge and majestic form” of Saint Paul’s Cathedral. It was a spellbinding moment: the great thoroughfare temporarily devoid of carts and carriages, the cathedral looming blurrily out of the still-falling snowflakes – a real-life snow globe. “I cannot say how much I was affected at this unthought-of sight,” Wordsworth told his friend and patron, Sir George Beaumont, in a letter he wrote a few days later. “What a blessing I feel there is in habits of exalted imagination.” The great London silence was another piece in his accumulating pile of evidence that intuiting something beyond yourself is the route to becoming morally magnificent.

Silence has inspired, daunted, comforted and terrified writers throughout the long course of English literature. One of the earliest English poems, The Wanderer, composed in the language of the Anglo-Saxons, communicates the sheer strangeness of silence via an alien grey seascape in which the protagonist is utterly alone. This silence is composed not of complete noiselessness, for the hail beats on the waves and a seabird occasionally mews, but of an intense and total absence of human voices.

This is way more satisfying than a book-tour excerpt. Also, it features Barton Springs. Essentially, the thesis is "write what you know" -- but it certainly helps to have led an interesting life ahead of doing so.

I often write the first paragraph of a story in a notebook, add to it every so often or leave it there to see if something might emerge from it. In 2008, in San Francisco, I went with three friends on a hike near Muir Woods overlooking the Pacific Ocean. At the summit, there was a kind of lodge where you could get a bed for the night and use the kitchen to make your own dinner. The view was spectacular.

As we climbed, I began to imagine a character, an Irish guy who had made up his mind to go home. This was his last big outing in the landscape. He had been working as a plumber. Dotted in the Bay Area were houses where he had repaired pipes and installed new sinks and toilets and washing machines. This was his legacy in America. He was someone who could be depended on in an emergency. But he was illegal and he was going home.

Over the next few years, the story became more solid. If my character left America, he knew that he would never be allowed back. He had a daughter from a marriage that had ended. He was crazy about her. If he left, he would lose the connection with her. I imagined him having one last day out with his daughter in that beautiful place. I wrote some more of the story and then I left it aside.

Sixteen years later, the story came back into my mind. It occurred to me that the election of Donald Trump for the second term and the prospect of him taking it out on illegal immigrants would be the actual spur to make my character really decide that he had to go home. He would leave on Monday 20 January 2025, the precise date of Trump’s inauguration. The hike with his daughter, almost a teenager, would take place on Saturday 18 January.

I'm curious because I want to expand my reading into new works and new voices, but in an essay format.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/41813739

Hello to everyone visiting this community!

I just wanted to apologize to everyone, as I didn't want to spam here.

After communicating with several members of the community, I've decided to stop posting for some time, until I make an article that suits this community better.

My last post remains the "No title writing challenge!" , which is a writing prompt for a contest organized by me. And sposored by me. The deadline for submissions is 17.6.2026. and the first prize is 100€ and a featured story in my publication. So check it out if you want to share a personal essay.

I've come to this community in order to get feedback and share my work, as well as to promote my publication and reach more readers and writers. I don't sell anything. I just want to find real people who like to read and write and to build something together.

I wish the best to all! :)

Hello! This is my first writing related post in Lemmy, and I decided to practice writing with a fun challenge to myself and others. I wrote a scene or part of a scene, and if you want it to continue my scene or someone else's continuation, write in the replies!

If you don't know what to aim for in writing your own continuation, that's fine. Just try to keep the character voices and emotional evolution consistent. Challenge yourself to, not just tape on more prose, but make an organic continuation!

TL;DR: Jonas, feeling lonely, awkwardly asks his sister Julia for dating advice, while they're both sitting at a lake, watching the sunset. She playfully jabs at his request for "tricks", before expanding his notion of what it truly takes to find love.

I'm super curious to see where this goes! Try your hand at a continuation!

​

​

Jonas, sitting at the edge of the waterfront, takes in a deep breath, next to Julia, who is casually distracted sketching in her sketchbook. The reddish glow of sunlight refracting and bouncing on the water filters into their eyes; their muscles seem to almost melt as it does. Each line of the sketch feels easier than the last, from relaxation.

Soon, though, something seems to tug on Jonas's cool from within his mind, right now. His tail wriggles more stiffly than before. He hesitates coyly for a moment, before gathering some courage and finally parting his lips.

— Hey, sis... — He gulps, as if trying to hold back vomited words. — You should teach me some tricks or something, so I can, uhm, find a nice partner too, just like you did, or something!

His voice, smitten with a sandy lack of self-confidence, pierces through the waterfront like an interruption in reality, a cry from an invasive species, something out of place compared to the washing up of the waves and the people and dogs walking behind the duo. The surprised glance she gives back is briefly followed by a loud chuckle of hers, somehow even more piercing. He takes in a deep breathe, feeling utterly embarrassed for even daring to let that question escape his intrusive thoughts to begin with, a feeling that clearly leaks to his face in redness.

A knowing grin spreads through Julia's face, as she locks eyes with Jonas. She closes her sketchbook suddenly, with a thud!, trapping her mechanical lead within it like a Venus flytrap would its supper.

— 'Tricks'? Jonas! You... you know tricks are for training dogs, right? — she pokes, in a playful voice.

— Well, it's just—

Julia covers his mouth with a finger across his lips, which doesn't really help him feel less coy.

— Shh! I get you. Look. It sucks to be lonely, I get that. You see...

She pauses for an almost uncomfortable moment. Jonas doesn't press on or ask anything; maybe he feels like he's way overbudget already, or his face does not fit any more redness in it.

— Finding love is a funny thing — she continues, in a suddenly much softer voice. She relaxes back upright, letting the excitement of amusement wash off like the bits of exposed sand near them under the tides. — It's weird, 'cause the more effort you put into it, the less you'll get in return. You can't really see it like a job. — She grins playfully, almost like a mischievous cat about to knowingly knock a cup of coffee off of its saucer. — Or, definitely not tricks! Unless you want a 'puppy-girlfriend'!

— Yeah, yeah... — he shrugs off the joke. — Well, it just... It just looks a lot easier for you! Like, one day you run into Priscilla, you find out you like her, and then, something something magic steps, boom, you two like each other and are dating or something!

Jonas is no longer even looking in Julia's face. His gaze diverts into the glowing red horizon, which has slowly begun to settle into a civil twilight. Directed at the sea as if calling for a sea monster to his aid, he sighs in frustration. His body almost shudders in repressed energy. Feeling that, he finds a rounded rock on the bank, right next to the log on which they were watching the sunset over the Guaíba, and he begins to fidget with it between his fingers and pawpads, feeling its roundness. For a second, an impulsive thought crosses him to throw it across the lake and try to make it skip; but he scaredly pushes that thought away, switching to merely making biscuits on the rock instead.

She just watches him be himself for a moment, adjusting her vibrissa with a hand.

— That — she suddenly interjects. — You're doing the trick now. You're being yourself.

Before he knew it, she was joining a shoulder with his, as if to give him a little sustaint. But it didn't seem to soothe him very much.

— But I already do that every day! And where did that get me?

At this wonderful time of year, as we transition from our past hardship and look forward to all new hardships, I’d like to thank my supporters who have got me through many hard days, and acknowledge the holy books, without which life would have been even more difficult.

Announcing the #FediWriMo Journaling January event:

The event schedule is as follows:

🖋️ Dates: Jan 1st - Jan 31st, 2026.
🖋️ Daily writing prompts will be supplied, but are optional.
🖋️ The goal is to write a minimum of three pages a day.
🖋️ Writing daily is more important than meeting the goal.
🖋️ Posting excerpts is optional, but encouraged.

If you are interested in participating:

➤ Sign up on https://feddit.online/ and join the FediWriMo Community, or

➤ Join !NaNoWriMo2@feddit.online from any Lemmy, Mbin, or PieFed instance.

➤ Follow nanowrimo2@feddit.online from Mastodon, GotoSocial or other platforms for daily prompts and updates.

➤ Use the event hashtag: #FediJournJan

I hope you decide to join us this January! More information to come soon.

@writing Hi, I'd appreciate feedback on some stories I've written recently:

- "Between": https://thebeautifulprison.com/stories/between/

- "Abigail Sterling": https://thebeautifulprison.com/stories/abigail-sterling/

- "The Beautiful Prison": https://thebeautifulprison.com/stories/the-beautiful-prison/

- "La Petite Mort": https://thebeautifulprison.com/stories/la-petite-mort/

I openly disclose that they are AI-assisted in character creation, development, and in their writing, but they're emphatically not low-effort AI slop.

All have appropriate content warnings and estimated reading times.

Thanks for your time.

A dark, fantastical tale that is intended to unfold a paragraph, or thereabouts, at a time.

On Publish0x:

https://www.publish0x.com/storytelling-in-paragraph-proportions/fragment-118-xplpdlp?a=X7axkJW3ey

On Wattpad:

https://www.wattpad.com/1592023116-storytelling-in-paragraph-proportions-fragment-118

On Minkly:

https://www.minkly.io/series/chapters/1053

so lately I have been wondering what I would do while waiting for chapter releases of some of my favorite novels(and I swear to the amighty God this is really difficult) like: SS

So in the mean time i decided why not write my own novel and thats when I knew this sht demands talent. its not easy to read and reread your own crap while revising it hoping that maybe just maybe someone will find it good enough.

anyways enough of that, so the novel i started is called "The Crimson Eclipse"

its both on royalroad and webnovel, it's an isekai novel about a serial killer who gets reincarnated into the Kingdom of Aurelia there he is forced to join the law enforcement going on the side that he fought against the most.

it explore themes of morality and redemption.

personally i think i did an ok enough job since its my first, for anyone interested the links are:

royalroad: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/138698/the-crimson-eclipse

webnovel: https://www.webnovel.com/book/the-crimson-eclipse_34395164100604905

Sorry for posting so much. Another character in my Kanami's Safe Haven story universe is a character from the Rosewater Kingdom on an island off England, Princess Chloe Rosewater. She is one of three potential love interests since there will be three endings, the other two being childhood friend Mike Roberts and Kanami Yamamoto, that ending being she overcomes or at least her abandonment issues become less severe and she is a good girlfriend to Y/N.

Being a princess and all who's next in line for the throne, she is a very kind, sweet, and loyal young woman who is not at all dishonest about her intentions or romantic feelings; she is exactly who she says she is when it comes to love and she is sweet from the start. However, she is hiding a side to her that doesn't affect how she treats others or her love interest, and that is her mental illness. She doesn't love Y/N so much she goes insane, but rather, she was mentally ill from the start as well and is hiding her depression and constant panic attacks. She hasn't left the house in over two years so Y/N only messages her online, and she is prone to maniacal laughter when she snaps though she is desperately trying not to snap. She values helping others, work, and her Kingdom over all things and is a bit of a workaholic who works from home.

I feel like she would be Hikikomori and Broken Bird. Maybe also Mask of Sanity.

I've set up a new NaNoWriMo2 Community for those that are interested in participating in the tradition: !nanowrimo2@feddit.online - https://feddit.online/c/nanowrimo2

There is no connection with the previous organization that founded / ran NaNoWriMo. This is an independent effort based on: https://nanowrimo2.com/

I've also set up a TrackBear leader board for those that are interested. Details are in the description of the new community.

I recently (finally) moved a bunch of my poems and short stories and other writings off of Google Docs and into a git repo of text files. Right now I'm editing them with VSCode or Zed, which I just found and like so far. Both are fine but not really geared toward writing not-code. What have y'all found that you like writing in?

I'm excited to start at midnight tonight, but not sure if there's an active fedi group for it.

Still in the early early stages. Can be a little slow going since I'm treating this like a training project to strengthen my Python skills. Typing mechanics are nailed down, basic UI is in place.

Next is to get the functionality working for new-page, save, export, etc... and the correction tape mode.

Hi everyone, just wanted to share – I've finished the Shavian cover for my novel, Blue Are the Hills. The full Shavian transliteration is complete, and it's almost ready for release (now I'm just doing battle with Scrivener to compile it properly). There are almost no modern novels in Shavian, so I'm looking forward to sharing mine. It's a literary sci-fi novel about identity, hope, and transhumanism. Only a couple of things left to do and it will be ready. This has been a very fun project!

What's Shavian? I'm glad you asked! It's an alphabet created by John Kingsley Read in response to a challenge by George Bernard Shaw, intended to make a lexicon specifically designed for English, in order to make reading and writing English easier.

Here's more info, including many resources (lexicon, guidelines, fonts): shavian.info.

It's fun if you're into linguistics or cryptography at all.

I want to go back to the absolute basics for a while; to see if there's something from my old pre-computer life that I have lost.

When I was a teenager in the early 90s, I wrote like crazy on a giant, loud, electric typewriter. It whirred. It clacked. It needed me to manually hit the carraige return just like the older manual typewriters that it had come from.

The old days. No backspace deletion, no italics. Bold meant backing up and typing over the same word twice for effect.

There are apps like focus writer, etc... But I'm looking for something more

There is an online app called typewritesomething.com, and it has the option of installing it. But when I do, it's sluggish and imperfect. So I was hoping someone knew of something just like that, but in a locally installed program (Linux would be ideal, but WINE allows me to run Windows programs just fine and dandy)

Blank Page. Typewriter sound. No deletion on backspace. When you backup and retype, it has the effect of typing over the previous text. Manual carraige return. Literally no other features.

Any ideas?