We’re All Struggling Writers; That Doesn’t Mean We Have to Sell Our Souls for Money
Or, Why You Shouldn’t Write for “The Algorithm”
“Well, isn’t Spain very rich and supported by the public treasury for such a man? … If necessity has to force him to write, plead to God that he never has abundance, so that with his works, being poor, he can make rich all the world.”
— Approbation of Don Quixote Part II by Francisco Márquez Torres
There is no free lunch.
This is the first basic principle of economics. It means that for every action/transaction there is not only a reaction, but also a cost. It means that no one takes you out to eat or gives you food “just because”—there’s always a reason, and always a cost.
Though this phrase comes out of the school of economics, it also touches on a far more universal truth beyond the limits of the discipline. In reality, it encapsulates one of the most important principles of life: everything, everything has a cost. Everything we do—from eating food, choosing a spouse, having children, working in the global economy, transacting on a blockchain, spending euros vs. dollars, reading a book (the list is infinite)—comes at some cost(s). Even supposedly “free” products—Google, Facebook, Youtube, etc.—impose their own cost: your attention and personal/digital information which these companies sell quickly and greedily (if you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product). And, as everything we do comes with a cost, so it goes with writing.
Writing is not free; it never was and never will be. Writing costs time, attention, reading, understanding, speaking, absorbing, walking, moving, watching, observing, editing, sacrificing, etc. In some ways, writing exacts the cost of the self and our evolution in being and becoming. The best writing, the writing that truly moves the soul, costs your own—that is, it costs your soul.
But with that price, when paid properly, you paradoxically find your soul. This is the danger of the all-holy algorithms in today’s internet age. One of the most common phrases I hear on YouTube goes something like: “subscribe and smash the like button for the YouTube algorithm [so I can keep making money off of your attention].” Well, fair enough. I do, at times, enjoy selling my attention to YouTube for both entertainment and learning. But on the creative side of the equation—especially when it comes to writing—I don’t know if this is the best strategy.
Writing is an act of cerebral intimacy. When we write, we simultaneously discover and develop the process and flow of our minds. And when we write well, we mix our heart in there too. Good writing requires much of the author-self to enact efficacy for the reader. If there is no soul in the writing, there won’t be much in the reader. And when we write for an algorithm, we lose the soul.
In writing for “the algorithm” we aren’t writing for our readers, we aren’t even writing for ourselves—we are writing for a computer. In this aim for clicks, we ultimately surrender the development of the mind to a mathematical equation. And we do so without ever batting an eye, or pausing to ask: what does it really mean to write for an algorithm?
During my master’s degree, the novelist Mike Wilson visited one of my seminars and talked about his fiction. During the conversation, a discussion ensued on the nature of Artificial Intelligence (we even reverence it with capitalization in writing). As some of us students chimed in with our thoughts, Wilson said something that stuck with me. He explained that AI was nothing to fear in terms of machines banding together to bringing forth the Age of Ultron. No, for him the true danger of AI was (and is) that we become the AI. As we find ourselves increasingly interconnected online and in the real world, and dependent on machines for knowledge, we cede much of what is ours to the math that distributes the very knowledge we gathered over millennia. In this sense, the algorithms manipulate us and find flesh and blood in our personal bequeathal. I’m sure you don’t have to imagine much of what comes next from there—we are already starting to see early (and late) signs. We give the algorithm our attention, and it takes our mind, body and soul.
In thinking about this, I’ve realized this is especially true in writing. You can, right now, scroll through Medium and find any number of articles with titles designed specifically to flourish in “the algorithm.” A lot of them aren’t worth reading. And perhaps the same can be said of mine—maybe in writing online, the algorithm is inevitable. But maybe not.
What is certain is that if we openly write for an algorithm, we incur a hidden cost that isn’t easy to quantify. We sell the soul for views, and quality for quantity. If algorithmic quantity is a game of sales (of views and clicks), then quality writing is a game of soul. When you sell that quality for algorithmic quantity, you sell the soul—that’s the cost.
The writing that transcends time reaches far beyond any algorithm. This writing is unquantifiable in any mathematical sense. When Cervantes started writing, he wrote for the algorithm of his time (theater) and didn’t produce much. Same goes for Borges, who started with writing for the algorithm of his day: vanguard poetry. Borges later regretted deeply this youthful attempt to please the trends of his day, and finally found his voice when he left it behind. Both he and his father Cervantes found themselves—found their literary souls—when they abandoned the algorithm.
Good writing is a process of self-discovery, and if during that process you are trying to discover “the secrets of the algorithm,” then that is what you’ll become. But if you write to learn, to understand what is happening in your mind, to discover truth, you will find and become those things too. You become what you write.
You’ll find plenty of people selling their souls online, don’t be one. You may not make as much money (you may not ever make any money at all—Cervantes died poor), but you will find your soul. Let me know when you find something more valuable than that.
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