Organic vs. AI-generated writing

Organic vs. AI-generated writing

You have never before heard such a nervous clattering in the discreet, carpeted corridors of the world’s great publishing houses. There is a palpable, unprecedented fear vibrating behind those closed doors. A growing sense of alarm is sweeping through the industry worldwide. Computer inboxes are no longer just full; they are heavily clogged with an impenetrable, thick traffic jam of manuscripts, and literary competitions are receiving more original submissions than ever before. Once upon a time, the repository of unsolicited manuscripts was simply known as “the slush pile.” It was a physical mountain of paper, a testament to the fact that few were actually brave enough, or persistent enough, to finish a book. Back then, a literary prize was occasionally left unawarded—deserted, simply because the usual suspects did not click with the jury’s sensibilities and the slush pile yielded no hidden gems. The gates were heavily guarded, and the gatekeepers slept soundly. Those were the days of the old-school writers. They started with a pencil and let the words flow like bourbon-driven fools, bleeding their raw, unpolished souls onto the page. They left the hard work to the typewriters first, and then to the editor—that unsung hero who would ruthlessly cut through the tangled manuscript. The goal was always singular: to distill the prose until the common reader could do what he does best, which is painting the author’s world with his own vivid colors. Then came the generation of writers who used the typewriter not just to transcribe, but to actively edit. They loved to waste paper, yanking half-finished thoughts from the carriage and tossing them into the overflowing bin under the desk. I sincerely miss those machines. In the beginning, they were massive and incredibly loud. Every keystroke was a physical commitment. Because of this machinery, society became convinced that typing fast—without looking down at the keys—was a vital life skill. I think my parents tried to instill this in me back in 1980, without any success. I simply did not like writing without thinking. What’s the point of moving your fingers faster than your brain can conjure meaning? So, I maintained a delicate balance between deliberate handwriting and measured typewriting, until the word processor arrived and changed the rhythm of thought entirely. It wasn’t aggressively loud like the typewriter, and in its infancy, the dot-matrix printer still spat out text with faint, shitty points. But progress was relentless. Soon came the internet, the crisp perfection of laser printers, and bigger monitors that glowed late into the night. This digital revolution began tearing down the old walls, flooding the carefully cultivated gardens of the gatekeepers. Magazines and newspapers had to adapt, and eventually, books had to adapt too. It is true that the proportion of writers had already grown in a frankly insulting manner in recent years, expanding at a much faster rate than the population of readers. But that phenomenon must be seen as part of a broader explanation. Thanks to technological conveniences, people discovered a long time ago that it is much more fun to be an author than a reader, or a tweeter than a newspaper buyer. It is a novelty, I insist, that is purely technical: it has been known since Eve that talking is much more fun than listening. Added to this structural surge is the recent, explosive development of artificial intelligence. It was not until the covid pandemic, when the world ground to a halt, that tech moguls went a step further. What could they sell now? Their answer was AI in all its forms. Now, editors are utterly convinced that this algorithm-driven output is the sole reason for the massive spike in manuscripts. When it comes to literary prizes, the alarm has reached hysterical levels. The prospect of accidentally awarding a prestigious prize to a text written by an AI won’t let them sleep or live in peace. But regarding the books that an artificial intelligence might write, the only thing I hold as an absolute certainty is that they will be fundamentally better than their “organic” counterparts. Make no mistake: if an idiot sets out to write a book using an AI, the final product will undoubtedly still be an idiotic book—but it will be vastly improved compared to the sheer volume of idiotic books written up to this point in history. You only have to look at the daily newspapers for proof. Ever since the advent of automatic spellcheckers and digital layout assembly, we have never seen such impeccably clean nonsense. The grammar is flawless, even when the substance is entirely vacant. And the future—which is already here!—heralds an era of magnificent splendor as the machine gradually assumes total command of the newsrooms and keyboards. Where the great naturalist Buffon famously declared that “the style is the man himself,” we must now amend the record to add that the machine is the man. This exact sentiment was already expressed when tractors revolutionized the fields; now, it must be ruthlessly applied to the subject and the predicate. The mechanics of human labor have simply shifted from the soil to the syntax. Although if we are being completely honest, the underlying concern of these editors is quite different. The real terror is that they are actually starting to have to thoroughly read the manuscripts they publish and award. If an editor publishes a book he has genuinely read, is completely convinced of its value, and can passionately defend it, the possibility that an AI wrote it should be entirely irrelevant. It will still be a good book, and its true author will simply be the person who set the machine in motion. The modern author is the one who crafted the initial prompts, who meticulously guided the flow of the writing, and who choses how to improve the successive drafts. In the past, editors were perfectly satisfied with a somewhat superficial skimming and a reader’s report done by someone else—and heaven knows under what conditions that was done. Let us drop the illusion of pristine human perfection. Of course books—even by great authors—have been published without the editor so much as raising an eyebrow at numerous pages of dull writing, endless verbiage, stylistic immaturity, embarrassing syntax, and even flagrant plot inconsistencies. I truly do understand the grave problem facing today’s gatekeepers. And I know, of course, that they could easily lighten their crushing workload by giving these towering stacks of manuscripts to the machine to evaluate. After all, at this point, the machine reads much better than it writes. Organic vs. AI-generated writing A light at the end of the tunnel You have never before heard such a nervous clattering in the discreet, carpeted corridors of the world’s great publishing houses. There is a palpable, unprecedented fear vibrating behind those closed doors. A growing sense of alarm is sweeping through the industry worldwide. Computer inboxes are no longer just full; they are heavily clogged with an impenetrable, thick traffic jam of manuscripts, and literary competitions are receiving more original submissions than ever before. Once upon a time, the repository of unsolicited manuscripts was simply known as “the slush pile.” It was a physical mountain of paper, a testament to the fact that few were actually brave enough, or persistent enough, to finish a book. Back then, a literary prize was occasionally left unawarded—deserted, simply because the usual suspects did not click with the jury’s sensibilities and the slush pile yielded no hidden gems. The gates were heavily guarded, and the gatekeepers slept soundly. Those were the days of the old-school writers. They started with a pencil and let the words flow like bourbon-driven fools, bleeding their raw, unpolished souls onto the page. They left the hard work to the typewriters first, and then to the editor—that unsung hero who would ruthlessly cut through the tangled manuscript. The goal was always singular: to distill the prose until the common reader could do what he does best, which is painting the author’s world with his own vivid colors. Then came the generation of writers who used the typewriter not just to transcribe, but to actively edit. They loved to waste paper, yanking half-finished thoughts from the carriage and tossing them into the overflowing bin under the desk. I sincerely miss those machines. In the beginning, they were massive and incredibly loud. Every keystroke was a physical commitment. Because of this machinery, society became convinced that typing fast—without looking down at the keys—was a vital life skill. I think my parents tried to instill this in me back in 1980, without any success. I simply did not like writing without thinking. What’s the point of moving your fingers faster than your brain can conjure meaning? So, I maintained a delicate balance between deliberate handwriting and measured typewriting, until the word processor arrived and changed the rhythm of thought entirely. It wasn’t aggressively loud like the typewriter, and in its infancy, the dot-matrix printer still spat out text with faint, shitty points. But progress was relentless. Soon came the internet, the crisp perfection of laser printers, and bigger monitors that glowed late into the night. This digital revolution began tearing down the old walls, flooding the carefully cultivated gardens of the gatekeepers. Magazines and newspapers had to adapt, and eventually, books had to adapt too. It is true that the proportion of writers had already grown in a frankly insulting manner in recent years, expanding at a much faster rate than the population of readers. But that phenomenon must be seen as part of a broader explanation. Thanks to technological conveniences, people discovered a long time ago that it is much more fun to be an author than a reader, or a tweeter than a newspaper buyer. It is a novelty, I insist, that is purely technical: it has been known since Eve that talking is much more fun than listening. Added to this structural surge is the recent, explosive development of artificial intelligence. It was not until the covid pandemic, when the world ground to a halt, that tech moguls went a step further. What could they sell now? Their answer was AI in all its forms. Now, editors are utterly convinced that this algorithm-driven output is the sole reason for the massive spike in manuscripts. When it comes to literary prizes, the alarm has reached hysterical levels. The prospect of accidentally awarding a prestigious prize to a text written by an AI won’t let them sleep or live in peace. But regarding the books that an artificial intelligence might write, the only thing I hold as an absolute certainty is that they will be fundamentally better than their “organic” counterparts. Make no mistake: if an idiot sets out to write a book using an AI, the final product will undoubtedly still be an idiotic book—but it will be vastly improved compared to the sheer volume of idiotic books written up to this point in history. You only have to look at the daily newspapers for proof. Ever since the advent of automatic spellcheckers and digital layout assembly, we have never seen such impeccably clean nonsense. The grammar is flawless, even when the substance is entirely vacant. And the future—which is already here!—heralds an era of magnificent splendor as the machine gradually assumes total command of the newsrooms and keyboards. Where the great naturalist Buffon famously declared that “the style is the man himself,” we must now amend the record to add that the machine is the man. This exact sentiment was already expressed when tractors revolutionized the fields; now, it must be ruthlessly applied to the subject and the predicate. The mechanics of human labor have simply shifted from the soil to the syntax. Although, if we are being completely honest, the underlying concern of these editors is quite different. The real terror is that they are actually starting to have to thoroughly read the manuscripts they publish and award. If an editor publishes a book he has genuinely read, is completely convinced of its value, and can passionately defend it, the possibility that an AI wrote it should be entirely irrelevant. It will still be a good book, and its true author will simply be the person who set the machine in motion. The modern author is the one who crafted the initial prompts, who meticulously guided the flow of the writing, and who chooses how to improve the successive drafts. In the past, editors were perfectly satisfied with a somewhat superficial skimming and a reader’s report done by someone else—and heaven knows under what conditions that was done. Let us drop the illusion of pristine human perfection. Of course books—even by great authors—have been published without the editor so much as raising an eyebrow at numerous pages of dull writing, endless verbiage, stylistic immaturity, embarrassing syntax, and even flagrant plot inconsistencies. I truly do understand the grave problem facing today’s gatekeepers. And I know, of course, that they could easily lighten their crushing workload by giving these towering stacks of manuscripts to the machine to evaluate. After all, at this point, the machine reads much better than it writes. But let me think there is a light at the end of this tunnel. Even with AI handling the initial slush pile, and sifting through everything that absolutely must be cribbed and sifted, there will inevitably come that final, quiet night right before the big literary prize is awarded. On that night, there are no shortcuts. The editor will have no choice but to sit hunched under the warm glow of a desk lamp and read, and read, and read. It is a wonderful, solitary exercise, yielding a profound intellectual pleasure that no known machine can inject. Although, we shall see. Even with AI handling the initial slush pile, and sifting through everything that absolutely must be cribbed and sifted, there will inevitably come that final, quiet night right before the big literary prize is awarded. On that night, there are no shortcuts. The editor will have no choice but to sit hunched under the warm glow of a desk lamp and read, and read, and read. It is a wonderful, solitary exercise, yielding a profound intellectual pleasure that no known machine can inject. Although, we shall see. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe [https://javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Time's arrow

The arc of a bow and its arrow are our primitive reference for fully understanding the entropy that life entails. An entropy that overwhelms—or bores, depending on so many things—even the brightest minds. I imagine this is the origin of the narrative arc of a story: cutting through space like an arrow of time. Zeno of Elea believed that time was merely a sum of static, frozen moments, failing to realize that time and motion are continuous and cannot be suspended or divided into parts. Although the mind can divide space into fixed points, according to Bergson, movement itself is pure duration. Hence the stories we tell ourselves in the present—that mixture of vanity and an obsession to spin. The falser they are, the simpler their narrative arc, and the more self-serving are their omissions—but truth floats on water like oil does. Cave paintings in France and Indonesia show that hunting images served the first storytellers long before religion centered on gods—those invisible friends with a thousand faces who eventually spread across five continents with varied rites and sacrifices designed to keep them on our side. Because even with these contrivances to ward off the fear of the dark, life was devastatingly tragic, often ending before it had truly begun. Before the advent of hygiene and antibiotics, the elderly were revered simply for surviving the chaos and uncertainty that so many others paid with their lives. The rite of passage belongs to the common monomyth of the hero. To stay alive and awake, he sheds fear like old skin to make room for indispensable courage, successfully confronting whatever harsh trials cross his path. We endow these figures with extraordinary powers, eventually worshiping them as icons and statues. The oldest texts are sacred—holy, canonical books. We see it in the Book of the Dead written on papyrus scrolls, or the spells chiseled into the stone of Egyptian sarcophagi three thousand five hundred years ago to guide a pharaoh’s great journey to the beyond. Yet the Sumerian tablets, carrying the gripping tale of the last king before the Great Flood instructing his heir on piety, ethics, and social order, sink another thousand years deeper into the night of time. From this incessant work of mapping our anxieties for the afterlife, we gradually birthed arts of magnificent depth and beauty, moving further and further away from religious issues and limitations. We now have music on demand, paintings to decipher, theater and cinema to watch. And books, when read without distractions, light up like fireflies. I confess a deep fondness for modernist novels, where storytelling doesn’t devolve into an inventory of infinite trivialities, but functions as a spell for crossing that river of time. I think of Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Sound and the Fury. But above all, I think of Proust, fragmenting the Self and prioritizing involuntary memory over the ticking of a clock. It is no coincidence that in 1928, just as literature was fracturing chronology, Arthur Eddington coined the term “the arrow of time” to illustrate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. He noted that because entropy is always increasing, the universe has a distinct, irreversible direction. These reflections invariably lead me to my own second rite of passage: the fertile prospect of crossing the very same threshold I stood before thirty years ago. What I mean to say is that I still believe writing fiction is the passion that anchors my life. But for the first time, I have a clear, realistic idea of how to escape the bleak landscape of a missing readership, due to the collapse of sustained reading. More importantly, I finally possess the tools to do so with true craftsmanship. Oral storytelling is more effective than the written word. Your hearing is more laser-focused and detailed while your eyes have to deal with visual fatigue and that weak focus of the multitasking era. It isn’t bound to a paper format, and therefore the narrative isn’t condemned for commercial purposes to becoming a fat, brick-sized copy. And audio technology today is so diametrically opposed to ancient formats that I am truly remembering a future once dreamed of. I haven’t been very active on Substack lately, because having ideas and tools isn’t enough if the craftsmanship is lacking. I believe it was about six months ago that I was left awestruck listening to the immense talent of actor Will Patton, well known to audiences for narrating nearly fifty audiobooks. His whisper from six inches away feels exactly like a tired man driving down a dark, desolate road in the wilderness, attempting to carry a whole story in his arms for the young girl in the passenger seat. He spins the story in the faint light of the speedometer just to keep himself awake, wrapping her in that light sleep—a modern Gilgamesh, where holding her attention and trust is the last trial to hold onto immortality. The movie Train Dreams, based on the novel by Denis Johnson, opens with that exact voice. That foolish assertion that reading aloud should be as neutral as possible is now a skin I have shed. That is why I no longer include any background music. To say goodbye, I leave you with the narrated lines that struck me with such awe, just to make my point clear. I didn’t want to strip away the soundtrack because it is cinema. And yet, when you listen to what follows and your jaw drops to the floor, know that you are not alone in your wonder. I have been recording whispers for six months now, and I still have a long way to go. “There were once passageways to the old world, strange trails, hidden paths. You’d turn a corner and suddenly find yourself face-to-face with great mystery, the foundation of all things. And even though that old world is gone now, even though it’s been rolled up like a scroll and put somewhere, you can still feel the echo of it.” Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe [https://javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Death of the Author

Sometimes, I wonder why the mere reading of some books stirs in me the irrepressible appetite for writing. Like just yesterday with Erasure by Percival Everett–the experimental novel that the latest film American Fiction is loosely based on. At the crack of dawn, while the first drops of spring rain were cleaning my dusty window, I was pounding away at my keyboard, keeping in mind the challenging question of Whit Burnett, the editor of the literary magazine Story and mentor of the young and ambitious JD Salinger, who grew resentful after Burnett rejected many of his first short stories. “Are you willing to devote your life to telling stories knowing that you may get nothing in return?” Let’s assume you have watched the film featuring Jeffrey Wright. If not, stop now and quit listening; I am going to detail the plot and hit a nerve, no holds barred. Because if I were pandering—by the strict code of artistic values I’ve carved for myself—I would not be a writer of fiction. Believe it or not, there was a time when publishers were the custodians of beauty, quality and good taste. At least, I believed the spirit of Max Perkins from Scribner’s was hovering among them. But since the invasion of smartphones that ironically made people ridiculously stupid, because of the subsequent collapse of sustained reading, actually, it’s the algorithm that knows you better than you do, feeding you like a butler. AI-generated writing is here to stay. And the same goes for every art. Without a baseline knowledge, you’ll believe anything, even that a human being of flesh and blood toiled over the page. That being said, if you really think a soulless AI narrator will eat my lunch, you are as deaf as a post. Q-tips come in handy to remove earwax! In American Fiction, a Black author with a jazzy name –Thelonious Monk Ellison– is trying to teach the southern author Flannery O’Connor in a Californian college ridden by the Woke fever. The short story written in 1955 as a brilliant satire against the Jim Crow era is titled “The Artificial Nigger”. But a white and privileged female student–according to the analytical framework of intersectionality–who did not do her homework, which is naturally reading the story, is uncomfortable with the N-word written on the board. And she denounces Monk to the dean, resulting in a disciplinary sanction. That sanction forces Monk to visit his family in Boston, where he is dealing with the problems of a middle-aged man; the slow descent of a mother into Alzheimer’s, disturbing revelations about the double life of his late suicidal father, and the sudden death from a heart attack of his sister, who has been the caregiver for years. The combination of these situations, coupled with the rejection of his last erudite book for not being Black enough, pushes him to write the Hood lit that white and privileged publishers deem genuinely Black, under the false identity of an ex-convict, with the swearword F**K as a title, recreating all the trite clichés. Drugs, ghetto life, deadbeat dads, and rappers, written in Afro-American vernacular English. So, he tackles all his problems at once with this Faustian bargain, raking in all the money he needs, with the help of his savvy agent to pay for his ailing mother’s expensive nursing home. And a Hollywood deal to free him once and for all from the drudgery of academia he has endured. The plot twists. He is invited as an “ethnic diversity” pick to join the jury for a literary prize where the prank he churned out is the runaway winner. During a break in the deliberations, he has the chance to confront his nemesis–Sintara Golden–a Black female author, who possesses an intellect and education similar to his own, but with no moral qualms about catering to the audience if that’s what the market demands. “That’s how drug dealers excuse themselves,” says Monk. That plot reminds me of my editor’s fate–pressured to publish young women’s romantic fiction not by choice, but because it was the new niche. And authors must be women, too, so the female readers can relate to them through social media. It reinforces the stale idea that if you aren’t a woman, you cannot write about women–an insult to the imagination that fuels all fiction. Gustave Flaubert must be turning in his grave. Do you remember his joyful proclamation? “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!” I think we are living in the best of worlds. We have the internet and access to a variety of cultures that our ancestors didn’t have. Yet, the audience has grown dull. Is there a correlation? I’ve written about my teenage struggle to read mighty books and the delight that went far beyond mere entertainment. It was a cultural pursuit. I wanted novels full of universal, riveting characters–not some validation of the crushing burden of growing up. Now we have labels for every alleged literary work: Hood lit, MeToo lit, Sick lit, Victimhood lit. Bookstores feel like a visit to Dr. Feelgood. It’s blatant pandering for commercial gain. The only label I accept for fiction is the original language it was written in–provided it’s one of the languages I can read without needing a translation. But I couldn’t care less about the author’s race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation; their religion, social status, or disability; their age, class, or citizenship. Because intersectionality is the relentless resurrection of the author—and the death of the text. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe [https://javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Uncanny Wordsmith

I was a boy wonder, and I loved to hate the guts of whoever was a killjoy. And mostly, any authority figures who were poorly paid teachers, so I was bound to be self-taught. However, I had a professor who taught me to channel all that hate by reading aloud about any historical character of my choosing. Soon, I also became a performer aboard the school bus, which had loudspeakers and a microphone; I learned to read a comma and a semicolon and pause after a period without missing a beat. The bus driver cut a deal with me. I could read if I indulged him in reading his favorite book. The Bermuda Triangle by Charles Berlitz. Time after, when I began to write, all those bloody caesuras made a lot of sense. Slow reading made me pore over sentences unfolding every aspect of language; all those sensuous qualities–how many syllables a word had and how long the accent over a vowel–are likely to carry weight, give pleasure, and hold meaning. These poetic qualities are tied up as the purely cognitive. And if I think about them as a mode of communication only, those qualities would not be alive and kicking. That must explain why I feel myself accessing skills I have learned through decades-long narrator performances. I’ll read aloud and look up for the through line. At this stage, all the worms will come out of the can: tiny dialogues, unconvincing characters, sludgy descriptions, totally random, unrelated bits of crap, and b******t that have made it through what I hoped would be an astonishing copy. I have done enough awful rehearsals–I know this for real. But the pain in writing, as you know, it’s a discarding process as well. And I don’t have any partner to reassure me I will make it. Outside the box, I find myself ‘watching’ the story like an audience. Am I bored? Restless? Irritated? Would I tattoo the first line over my forearms? Don’t you dare to think like a wordsmith if you don’t bring along a hammer! Eventually, you will kill your darlings. It will be a drama otherwise. You have to let it go and move on. And I keep asking myself while gripping that hammer over the head, am I really nuts to step out of the comfort zone? Why am I doing this? Because I have no choice! I don’t stop blowing with all my strength until I hear the anvil forging from nothing, a new beat I had never heard of, that sparks of wonder, insight, and hubris that come along with it. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe [https://javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Froth on the Daydream

I suppose it’s because I had a good night’s sleep that I feel better than yesterday. I thought I couldn’t write a single word because of the alarming lack of relevance. Writing fiction requires a massive focus on a story that sometimes makes no sense, and sometimes it truly does. Navigating between these two extremes is quite intense and certainly not for the faint of heart. I had the bad luck of growing up in a time when the plot seemed useless. In fact, I could say the novels I loved were a kind of chaotic mess. When did I begin to appreciate a plot? That’s easy! Writing my first manuscript, I ran a free-fall plot, which brought about a large number of characters. So, at the time of ending such an orgy of creativity, the protagonist looked like a bit player. Of course, that little crack went unnoticed until I began to receive the feedback of my first agent, who in a moment of candor, said: “You could have written seven novels if you had had a plot.” Needless to say, Mrs. Kerrigan was right. She had a business to run, books to pitch for big publishers, not a lab of crazy ideas, but a literary agency. A friend of mine was way more graphic: “Next time, cut the bologna in thin slices.” That was bound to happen. So, with the first lesson learned, my second novel was a tour de force. But I missed out on Cervantes’ trick of giving voice to 600 characters. On the contrary, I ran a mix of triangle affair and coming-of-age novel. And yet, I did not run the distance, the 120,000 words that make a good brick of waste paper a beautiful printed ephemera to fill the windows of a bookstore. On the contrary, I fell short because I had no idea what a canonical novel was. A behemoth of five hundred pages. Otherwise, your literary dreams will go to the pile. A younger version of me thought a page turner a thing of the past. Like when Tolstoy wrote novels like War and Peace –or Cervantes ran a carousel of freaks he certainly would have met once in the funny pages of Don Quixote. Lesson learned, the result was the corkboard, the card notes, the three acts, the rolling scenes, and the facts that give speed, flow, and beat to the characters. At the back of my desk, I want now order, not menacing chaos, which might destroy or diminish my creative efforts. No board, no compass to get through the day. And the actual version of me is making peace with the idiot I am self-portraying in this mirror of ink – or whatever are these winged words because you are hearing me. All I want is to run the distance, flow like a f*****g river if I have to, and manufacture something to remember, beyond all sorts of ephemera. Yesterday, Alan Ball was in town, the screenwriter of the film American Beauty and TV series Six Feet Under. And hearing his masterclass was certainly a shock for me. That a multi-awarded screenwriter could blame the poor creative zeitgeist in such terms was mind-blowing. And I’m quote: “It’s depressing. All they want now is something that looks like something that has been successful. The competition is fierce. Everything is tremendously oppressive. It seems that the fear that floods everything is also in the writers’ rooms and especially in the directors’ rooms. Creativity is dead. That’s why I’ve left it. I’m writing a novel. And I’m enjoying it a lot. You know why? I don’t have an opinion on what I do. No one is intervening in my creative process. For once, I am alone. For once, no one is going to control me. Anything is possible. And it’s perfect.” End of quote. I’m already handwriting word by word Allan Ball’s utterance in one of my cards, and punching it quickly on the corkboard, to avoid that such wisdom thins itself out as the foam of days. And all because of you, my silent friend. Nothing I do on a daily basis is because of me. If I had my way, I would settle for being something between a clown and a conman. And certainly I have those personal traits, given the Jungian shadow I cannot see. In moments of extreme clarity, I feel like walking home in a daze and broke after betting all my riches on the horses. Yeah, a struggling writer is closer to a professional gambler than you might think. It helps if you have plenty of courage to fail big and don’t dwell on it, or if you sell your poor soul to the very Devil. Or both. It’s always about faith. I’m not a man of the cloth, but certainly I am a man on a mission. During the pandemic while taking care of my old man, a karmic chance like no other I could imagine, what really changed me was confronting the fact of what shoes I had to fill after he passed away. After mourning him for two years, it’s time to let it go. And it’s time to reach the goal of this podcast. It wasn’t my intention to write essays or a journalist column but fiction, because that was the Substack shelf I chose. Books and Fiction. The goal was narrating my own work, and someday have it all done to upload it to the audiobooks platforms like ACX and whatnot. If Alan Ball, the guy who wrote about a plastic bag dancing in the wind as the most beautiful clip the character named Ricky Fitts could show to Jane, the ultimate and freak teen girlfriend, has switched to the art of sewing words, it’s because he trusts in the might of abstraction without limits of any given written language. The freedom you have in a blank page, the quiet epiphanies you try to tame with just words, and how much craft you put into a simple dash to elaborate a concept. I won’t miss out on those days of heaven ahead of me. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe [https://javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]