I am occasionally asked by colleges to give a version of a talk on how I became a writer. The easy thing to do is to give a sort of guided tour through the woods of literary self-formation: a string of anecdotes designed to elicit a few chuckles, a moment or two of reflection about the inevitable bends in the road, things that felt momentous but turned out not to matter, or things that didn't seem significant at the time but with hindsight turned out to be the most important of all. The trouble, at least for me, is that this kind of speech is mostly fiction; the path is only a path in retrospect. Telling the story this way elides, smooths over, and underestimates the role of circumstance and dumb luck. Most of what a writer experiences is failure. Developing a voice takes years. The point is not to make it out of the woods quickly or unscathed. Getting lost is not the rough part. It's the whole thing. Now along comes AI, purporting to be our GPS through the woods. Not just any...
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