A Letter Of Defiance:  Grammarly, ChatGPT, and the Hemingway Application Are the Sworn Enemy Of The Writer

There was a time when the serfs went to work no matter how they felt. Mental health days, personal time, and human resource departments were unnecessary. Everyone knew the rules and abided by them under the pain of death. We were a proper people.

Necessity grounded day to day life firmly in reality. Everything was nose to nose. Especially armed conflict. There was none of this 5th generation warfare or color revolution nonsense. Kings would let other kings know that they had a beef openly and without apology. Ultimatums would be issued, and if not met, giant flaming stones would fly.

Release the trebuchet!

One of the ways you would publicly declare a lack of comity was with a "letter of defiance". This was a formal declaration of the severing of feudal ties, and most importantly, the reasons why.

People didn't just scream obscenities at each other and start fighting. They took a stand, publicly stating what they believed, and why they were willing to die for it. It could be between leaders of nations, or between lords, vassals, or serfs. The word for this was diffidation.

Diffidation: the formal renunciation or dissolution of a relationship of amity, trust, allegiance, or fealty.

I have taken a poll of the Bards in The Understory and we are in unanimous agreement. Grammarly, ChatGPT, and the Hemingway application are our sworn enemies. They must surrender without condition, or face the wrath of our wordsmithing.

Creative Agency Is Under Attack

If you are a creative person, you are in the middle of a war whether you know it or not.  You did not seek it out.  You did not sign up for it.  The conflict has come to your doorstep and it demands your attention, lest you be destroyed by complacency.  

You see, there is a force that is trying to wrest away the world’s creative agency.  It seeks to keep the massive power of personal discovery for itself.  Our enemy is composed of those who live on the far side of the arbitrage line.  Entrepreneurs and corporations that would gladly trade creative power for technical efficiency.  They think that the primary function of creativity is to make money.

It is not.

The primary function of creativity is discovery.

For writers this means that hacks, shortcuts, or anything that removes iteration from the process of writing is personally degrading and metaphysically violent.  

Oh, it may seem like dipping your toe into AI tools is “no big deal” and “it makes things so much faster and easier” but it is a drug of creative convenience.  The ultimate destination for everyone that goes down that path is to become a prisoner in The Gulag like a 1970s rock band signing an adhesion contract that results in the record company owning everything but the ice trays (<---a ghastly run-on sentence but ignore it at your peril). 

Yes, you need money to eat as a creative person.  But that is not what feeds you.  Your body will be nourished with the gains of ill-gotten silver, but your creative soul withers and dies.  

Venturing into the unknown and pulling order out of the chaos is the only sustenance that will work for you long-term.  It does not matter if you wish it were different, or that it seems unfair.  The person who was born a diabetic can complain but it does not change that no matter what they do, their body is built in a specific way.  That reality must be contended with.  You must also accept that you are built differently.

There are massive benefits in doing so.  Discovery becomes your most powerful weapon for the battle at hand.  Those who live across the arbitrage line are experts at ‘the math’.  You are not.  You cannot defeat them at that game.  Your expertise lies in ‘the music’ of creation.  Do not sacrifice it on the altar of expediency. There is another way forward.

Volume Creative Reps = Earned Discoveries

Historically we have lived in a complex world, surrounded by an even more mysterious universe, wrapped up in a blanket of malevolence.

(That got out of hand quickly!)

Do not fret. All is not lost. Human beings are excellent at trying out different shenanigans to overcome whatever obstacles are in front of us because we are not slaves to instinct. However, almost all of these attempts fail. But a very small amount of these tries result in the discovery of solutions with leverage. As a group, we have survived long enough to generate enough leverage to launch rockets into space.

I call this "Leverage Darwinism". Ideas with great utility survive at the expense of dumb and silly machinations. When our ancestors made big mistakes it typically resulted in their death. This carnage was the price of discovery. Unfortunately, the stakes are always this high whether we want them to be or not.

The same principle holds true for the writer. Almost everything that is put down on paper, or that is the result of going clickety clackety on the computer, is abysmal drivel not worthy to adorn a used napkin from the lowest dive bar of hell. But sprinkled among the refuse of incomprehensible sentences and muddled ideas there are discoveries that give the writer leverage over the reader, but most importantly, over themselves.

Volume writing reps are the key to everything the writer wants in life. This is not hyperbole. This is a truth of nature, but she does not give up her secrets easily. Most people are unwilling to do the work required. These poor souls will unknowingly make their way to The Gulag soon enough. Pity them.

The Bard avoids this fate by boldly going into the dark Understory of ideas and caterwauling around like a saber tooth tiger in heat, until they find something of worth to drag back into the light while their fragrant prey struggles to get away.

It is a weird, scary, and amorphous thing to do. It takes courage. But you only have to do it successfully one time to experience the certainty of an earned idea. Do it repeatedly and you will carve out a creative clearing where you can stand fast in clarity. No one will be able to move you to their ends without your measured consent.

I do not know you dear reader, but I assuredly know one thing about you. You have the power of agency. Use it. Join the fight on the side that seeks to discover what is objectively beautiful. Reject the seductive entreaties of technological assistance in your writing. Proclaim loudly that the process of volume reps is the path of the righteous and that all who oppose us will fall before the power of our creative discoveries!

Sapere aude!!

(Thank you for attending my apocryphal Letter of Defiance.)

More in a bit . . . Wade, The Understory Bard

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