I’m in my mid-forties and I have an old head on my uneven shoulders, a head with a hairline even more receded than Count von Count on Sesame Street. Like a lot of old(-headed) people, I’m largely uninterested in tech, content to stay in my lane when it comes to what I will do and what I won’t do with my electronic devices. I certainly don’t pay much attention to the latest advances, and really, I probably should, because it’s beginning to look like they’re coming for me, and for everyone like me.
To reach for one obvious example — ChatGPT is popping up everywhere at the moment to write things on people’s behalf, from students blagging their way through essays, to people wanting help to compose arsey emails that don’t sound arsey, to government ministers asking for policy advice. The extent to which we’re expected to not mind about this is genuinely disturbing to me. I despise the generalised claims that these tools help people to express themselves better. They don’t do anything of the sort. The AI gets to decide on the words that are used as the very means of expression — it effectively puts its own words into people’s mouths. And so because the choice of expressive terms has been outsourced, because those people have largely absolved themselves of the effort and responsibility that comes with making such choices, I would argue those people are expressing themselves more poorly, more inauthentically — more artificially.
AI is now being trained with renewed vigour to write creatively, too. Why someone would be remotely interested in reading a novel that a chatbot had produced, though, is beyond me. (Philosophical question — can we call what the chatbot is doing “writing” in any meaningful sense?) I am not at all sure why this is even happening in the first place, let alone with such seeming enthusiasm from so many people. Is it as simple an equation as tech bros wanting to find yet another way to make easy money without involving any humans who will have the impudence to insist that they have rights, and insist on being paid? And as for the audience for any such work — do we really have a reading public who are so undemanding that they don’t care about what they’re consuming or how it came into being in the first place?
To add insult to injury, the present Labour government — UNFORGIVABLY — seems hellbent on abandoning copyright principles to enable AI to scrape as much as it can from people’s hard work without any acknowledgement or recompense. Yet again, we’re being made to feel unreasonable for objecting to the fact that this is what they want to do. But it’s not just my livelihood at stake with manoeuvres like this — it’s my very creative identity.
Luddite that I am, every time I hear the word “digital”, I think about fingers first, rather than anything to do with computers or the internet. Actually, those concepts are more interlinked than they might at first appear. The laptop I’m writing this post on operates through the tips of my fingers (only three of them, usually — I’m not an accomplished typist) making contact with letter, number, symbol and function keys. The phones and tablets used so ubiquitously across all age groups are also fingertip devices, for the most part — making especially significant use of the thumbs. (I still hear stories about how human thumbs are supposedly growing and evolving as a result of prolonged texting and scrolling.)
But there’s a lot more to our hands than just the tips of those digits — and I will forever be a big advocate of people using their hands as part of their creative process wherever they can. I posted something on writing by hand back in June 2024, and it’s been on my mind again a lot lately. Creative endeavours of all kinds are often looked down upon because they are perceived (by some) to lack the dignity of “proper work” — and it’s not just differences in the movement of money that influence that judgement — there’s also a sense in which work is only deemed “proper” if it makes demands on the body, rather than the brain — in particular, on the hands.
So maybe I’m doing my little bit to reclaim the concept of manual labour for myself and for creative people in a very literal (and literary) fashion. I’m aware, as well, that there’s a creeping bit of class and status anxiety sloshing around in this for me. Perhaps I’m somehow trying to legitimise my life choices from inside the long shadow of a working class upbringing. Even now, I am occasionally told by a family member that I can always get a job stacking shelves instead. Worst of all, that same person told me (as recently as 2023) that “it’s time to give up on my dreams.” No, thanks.
But anyway, I digress.
I’ve been rewatching Dr. James Fox’s three-part BBC series The Art of Japanese Life for the umpteenth time. (It’s returning to BBC iPlayer soon and I urge you to keep an eye out for it.) In the third episode, Home, we meet Tomoko Kawao, who is a leading and radical practitioner of shodō. She spends many hours each day copying ancient calligraphic texts to practice her own writing technique, tracing her brushes in patterns used by generations of artists before her. But in keeping with the principle of shu-ha-ri — “to learn, to break away, to transcend” — Kawao doesn’t just confine herself to replicating traditional approaches or to producing small works. She also creates massive pieces as well, on immense sheets of paper laid out on her studio floor, using a brush that must be three feet long, its bristles steeped in a bucket of black ink.
Kawao says something in that episode which I love — every time I watch it, I scrabble to write this down in the Notes app on my phone (using my fingertips, of course) because it always hits me with the impact of a new revelation:
“Shodo is said to express the human heart. What you feel in your heart flows through your arm and is expressed on the paper. It’s as if you can see your heart on the paper.”
I love to think that’s what I’m doing when I hand-write the first drafts of my novels now. I genuinely believe that there’s a quality in the words, in my word choices and my phrasing, that is richer and better and more expressive because I’m writing them by hand, which would not be there if I was writing them solely on this laptop. Maybe it’s a product of time — the slowing-down of the interval between thought and expression, which is itself a product of the limitations of my hand, my arm, my brain, even my blood sugar levels. And it’s my whole hand I’m using, too. Hours and days of writing like this can be exhausting, even painful. Remember, I’ve got that pen dent on my right middle finger…
The laptop lets me set thoughts down more quickly, but also, I am sure, in a way that is more shallow and less considered. I know that any text I’ve written by hand will need less editing in terms of refining its sense and its evocative qualities than text I’ve written on a laptop. It’s a product of time again — I spend less time thinking about laptop words before they come into existence on the screen, so it stands to reason that there’ll eventually be further for me to go to make them say what I really want them to say.
Many creative people don’t need to have the virtue of their manual labour pointed out to them, of course. Gardeners know. Bakers know. Draughtspeople know. Sculptors know. Drummers know. But not everyone’s creative work is as directly channelled through their hands as this. So I think it’s worth us all reminding ourselves and each other, as often as we can, of how special our work can become whenever we get our hands dirty, even if that dirt is purely metaphorical.
If you’re reading this and your creative practice is mostly or wholly digital (in the electronic and fingertip sense), maybe you’d be up for trying to find some time this week to have an Analogue Day — or an Analogue Hour, if a whole day feels too forbidding. You’ll know what the relevant manual tools will be for your practice, and hopefully they’re within your reach or else will be easy and inexpensive for you to get hold of. I’m convinced you’ll not only enjoy yourself immensely during this day/hour, but that you’ll also be surprised and delighted with some particular unique quality in whatever you produce — a quality which you’ll know you couldn’t have achieved by staying firmly in the digital realm.
Of course, Austin Kleon has written about many aspects of this before, but the thing I’d love to point you towards is his habit of maintaining two adjacent workspaces — an analogue desk and a digital desk. Lovely, if we’ve got the room for it, but even if we haven’t, we can always find a comparable solution within the resources available to us. We’re creative people, remember. Most of us haven’t outsourced our creativity yet.
So — what might your analogue and digital stations look like…?
