Writing Should Be Hard

As a writer, I am aware of the long and pervasive discourse about the difficulty of writing.

Writing is arduous and enervating, frequently frustrating, wrought with failure, and also, I believe, a fun and enjoyable activity.

“I hate to write, but I love having written”—a sentiment frequently but erroneously credited to Dorothy Parker—is widely shared by writers, and it’s my view that too much time is spent on the hate part and not enough on the love part.

The hate part is actually inextricably entwined with the love part. I’m partial to Thomas Mann’s famous quotation on writing, “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than other people.” This is often taken as a suggestion that the act of writing is somehow tortuous, as characterized in another well-worn quip from Gene Fowler, “Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a blank piece of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”

But I read a different intention into Mann’s quote. I believe he is saying that writing is more difficult because a writer recognizes the challenge and the stakes of writing and in so doing must wrestle with the challenge and those stakes at a deep level.

To the writer, writing matters, which makes it more difficult.

I was spurred to start writing about teaching writing not because of my students’ deficiency of writing skill, but because of their increasing indifference to writing. For these students, writing was not the kind of hard Mann or Fowler invoke, but something closer to boring. Writing was hard because they hadn’t been given an opportunity to do anything interesting through writing. There was no blood to be wrung from their foreheads because so little had been asked of them when it came to their writing.

The fleeting reward of a good grade after having followed a series of prescribed steps to produce strings of text to satisfy the game of academic cosplay was thin gruel, denying the students the opportunity to experience the ways writing can nourish our minds and our spirits, how we can come to love the thing that is difficult and sometimes hateful in its difficulty.

Asking students to demonstrate things like the ability to regurgitate something they’ve heard or read, or to follow instructions, and equating this with writing has been a mistake made plain by the fact that a technology that can generate syntax—but does not write in the way we humans do—can do all these things faster and better.

Attaching a framework of “proficiency” has been a mistake. It suggests that the goal is for writing to become easy, but this is not a goal we would ever associate with good writing. By suggesting that the product (having written) is the most important aspect of the process, we have allowed what is meaningful about writing to be warped in ways that are terribly counterproductive.

I’ve already written at book length about the various wrong turns I believe we have taken as a society when it comes to how writing is viewed and taught in school contexts, but I believe the advent of generative AI technology has brought into sharper focus the deep, conceptual errors we have made around school and writing.

The primary selling point of integrating generative AI into one’s writing is to make it easier, to streamline the process along the way to a final product. Rather than waiting for blood to drip from the forehead onto the blank page, let the LLM fill that space for you and then “revise.”

In my most recent previous blog post exploring students’ transactional mindsets towards schooling, I argued that this mindset and lack of student agency are inextricably intertwined. Why should anyone be surprised or appalled when students turn to generative AI to do their writing when the writing we ask them to do asks so little of them as people, as thinkers, as writers?

The love part of having written is only meaningful because of the hate that preceded it. The challenge is the fun. The difficulty is a necessary precursor to enjoyment and satisfaction.

Where did the notion that eliminating challenge is a good thing come from? I struggle with writing every single day, but it is a struggle I have come to value because of what it requires of me to succeed. This is what I wish for when it comes to students and their writing, to give them a foundation of practice that allows them to engage in productive struggle, the kind of struggle from which we learn.

Something like a gazillion words have been spilled on the necessity of integrating generative AI into our classrooms, and I’ve tried my best to see what role this technology has in terms of helping students learn to write, but I honestly have yet to see a use case that effectively increases the productive struggle we should wish for students.

The difficulty of writing is the point. If students don’t find the writing hard, something has gone wrong.