A Writer’s Plight

I’ve always wanted to write something beautiful or say something deep and maybe a little searing, but that resonates. It doesn’t matter the subject, I want my reaction to it, my understanding of it, to mean something, and then I want to pass this small nugget onto everyone else. I want to share a perception or flip it upside down, clip its edges, and make it into something else.

This is who I am, who I was meant to be. I’ve always been this way, having the heart of a poet — someone who looks at darkness and is rejuvenated rather than suffocated by it.

I want to learn as much as I can, feel as much as I can, and do as much as I can to understand, no matter that Fear often has its webbed boney fingers around my throat. I want to learn about that webbing, drag my hand across those boney ridges, and learn something about myself.

It is not enough to write just anything. It is not enough to regenerate words, reassemble thoughts, spit them back onto a page, and call it mine because, to me, to everyone, words are more than that.
Words are translations of a person’s experience, triumphs, defeats, histories, past, present, and future, hopes, dreams, and nightmares. Words are a people’s collective total awareness, and they are notations of the beautiful, complex, and frightening things humans are.

A robot may be able to say what I say and how I say it. It can enhance my ideas to a point, but can it mirror their true sentiment? Can it explain why I say them or when and how? Can it understand the human experience by copying a few words — words without context, without the breath behind them?
As a writer, I am a lens, looking out over the world, blinking at the bad, tearing up at all the good, and I write about it. I give words meaning, thoughts, and abilities and use them to move the world or stop it cold.

I need to find out where the plight of the writer is going. I do not know if A.I. is necessarily bad or accidentally good. All I know is that I am a writer who is willing to speak out, to shout out, to say what needs to be said, and without me, without us, those poets, those word composers, those screenwriters, novelists, journalists, and even lawmakers, without all of us, connections between each other, learning about and building upon our shared human experience, is dead.