Monday Mastery: Writing and bike riding
Keeping our skills intact and writing artifacts.
Welcome to Monday Mastery, a series designed to shift your perspective, teach you new techniques, and help you become a more effective writer, one tip at a time.
Writing is not muscle memory. It’s not like riding a bike.
Writing requires critical thinking … which can atrophy with disuse.
I’ve experienced it firsthand a few times in my life. When I went for a period of time without writing anything, I struggled when I finally got back to it.
I was rusty.
Painfully rusty.
My sense of flow and cadence were off. My brain didn’t conjure up vivid language like it used to. It felt like pulling teeth to mold my thoughts into words until I was back in the groove of writing.
Now I’m hearing this same thing from other people as they use AI to do much of their writing. They are forgetting how to do the work themselves.
Some people speculate that creative work is obsolete. The New York Times posted a lengthy article just last week about this, aptly titled The Gen X Career Meltdown.
I disagree. I don’t think creative work is obsolete — though I do think it has evolved and broken apart in some important ways.
I’ve certainly had my fair share of existential crises in recent years. Does writing even matter when my work is stolen and used to train the machines to replace me?
And I always come back to YES.
Yes, writing matters.
Yes, art matters.
Yes, creativity matters.
Because I can’t imagine a life where I’m not putting words down for others to read and connect with.
I, like many other writers out there, write to find out what I think … to reach out into the ether and hope someone grabs my hand … to bring something to life on a page for the sheer beauty, goodness and truth of it.
This isn’t like riding a bike.
I imagine, thousands of years from now, when archaeologists are digging into the ground to find out what we were like, they will find lovingly kept books. Paintings. Pottery. Stained glass. Jewelry. And they will find these things valuable.