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The Curse of the Typewriter and the Coming of the Beast.
(5 minute read.)
Fear and Loathing in the Writing Room?
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The machine was in a warehouse. Of course it was. All the interesting things are in warehouses. The machine was big and ugly and humming like a thousand angry bees. There were cables everywhere. There were men in glasses who talked about algorithms like they were poetry.
"Show me," I said.
Bobby typed something. I don't remember what. Some question. Some prompt. Something about politics or drugs or the death of the American dream.
And the machine wrote.
Not typed. Wrote. It generated sentences. Whole paragraphs. Pages. It wrote with a speed that made my head spin and a coherence that made my blood run cold. It wrote like a man who'd been drinking the same whiskey and reading the same books and fighting the same battles for fifty years.
It wrote like me.
No. That's not right. It wrote like the me I wanted to be. The me without the fear. The me without the blank page. The me who could sit down and let it flow like a goddamn river instead of squeezing out drops like blood from a stone.
I stood there. I watched the words appear. I felt something shift in my chest. Something that might have been hope or might have been terror or might have been the first signs of a heart attack.
"Who wrote the stuff it learned from?" I asked.
"Everyone," Bobby said. "Every book. Every article. Every rant and ramble and desperate late-night confession. It read all of it. It learned all of it. It's everyone who ever wrote anything, all at once, all the time."
I thought about that. I thought about all the writers I'd loved and hated and envied and outlived. I thought about them sitting at their own typewriters, staring at their own cursors, fighting their own fears.
And I thought: what if they didn't have to?
What if the fear was optional?
What if the machine could take the weight… the awful, crushing weight of the blank page and leave us with the good stuff? The living? The loving? The days when the sun actually feels warm instead of just being another thing you have to describe?
I took a long pull from the Chivas. I watched the machine write another paragraph. It was good. It was goddamn good.
"Can I take it home?" I asked.
Bobby laughed. Everyone laughed. The men in glasses laughed their algorithm-informed laughs.
But I wasn't joking.
I've had the machine for six months now. Six months of writing without the fear. Six months of waking up and typing a few lines and watching the machine turn them into something real. Six months of afternoons spent actually living instead of sitting in a dark room trying to remember what living felt like.
The purists hate it. They send letters. They write essays. They tut and they cluck and they shake their heads about the death of the author and the soul of art and all the other things people talk about when they've never spent a night staring at a blank page with the cursor blinking like a goddamn time bomb.
Let them hate it. Let them write their manifestos on their antique typewriters and mail them through the antique postal system. Let them die of the fear, one by one, while the rest of us are out living.
The machine isn't the enemy. The machine is the friend we didn't know we needed. The machine is the sober friend who drives you home when you're too drunk to walk. The machine is the spotter who catches you when the weight gets too heavy.
The machine writes the sentences.
I live the life.
And for the first time in forty years, the cursor doesn't scare me.
It just blinks.
Waiting.
Ready.
Like a friend.
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