The struggle! Every climber knows the struggle of climbing. We all pretty much suck when we first start, we fall, and fall, and fall, and fall. And then, all of the sudden, we send. We may not always recognize it, but it’s because of all those falls that we improve. It’s through failing and repetition that we become stronger, more calloused, more seasoned. We get better at recognizing our weaknesses, we come up with tricks to overcome our shortcomings. Through failure and repetition, we get better.
Not that I am a great climber by any stretch of the imagination, but anytime I’m asked how to get better, it’s always the same answer. Failure and repetition! It is so powerful to work really hard on a difficult route, and then seemingly out of nowhere, finish it. The reenforcing mechanisms at play when we send a project are unmatched by nearly any other activity. This is precisely why so many of us keep coming back for more.
The failure to success ratio is off the charts when it comes to climbing, but climbers don’t tend to be overly bothered by it. We learn pretty early on that failure should be celebrated as an opportunity for growth.
I don’t imagine many of us would stick with climbing if we were criticized and punished in the early stages of our climbing journeys. This is one of the reasons I try to celebrate the failures of new climbers. Failure and repetition! Fail and fail some more! In climbing, we actually have a word for failure, we call it progress! That positive spin on what amounts to a synonymous reference does wonders to the disposition of a climber!
While failure and progress aren’t completely synonymous, there is what I believe to be a supervenient relationship.
In philosophy we rely on the notion of supervenient relationships to describe a dependency between two sets of properties, where a higher-level set depends on a lower-level base set. Meaning that no change can occur in one set without a corresponding change in the other. Progress supervenes on failure, or rather change doesn’t occur to progress without a corresponding change in failure. In other words, without failure we don’t progress!
The world of climbing has something important figured out. Namely, failure is good, because failure means progress, and progress is good because progress leads us closer to success.
There is a point to be made here about almost anything but specifically about writing.
The world needs more bad writers!
I am telling you from experience, that we are at the cusp of a writing endemic. More and more students are writing less and less. The blame for the reduction of writers and in turn the reduction of writing falls on a million different causal conditions, but chief among them is the notion that failure is bad. Students are punished for poor writing, most particularly through lower grades. The message that progress supervenes on failure is lost on our students, and it’s pushing them in the wrong direction. Rather than ending up in writing labs working with writing tutors and mentors, students are turning to AI in droves. And for those teachers/professors who believe that they can catch any student using AI, you’re wrong. The sophistication of student prompts and the ability of generative algorithms to comply just keeps getting better and better (complete with the inclusion of common writing errors, and just enough mistakes to clear the bar for originality).
Writing is very much like climbing in that you only get better by doing it. However, AI is not primed to replace climbing. People want to climb because while it’s difficult and painful and frustrating, it’s also rewarding and fun and celebrated. In climbing, the failure is part of the progress, and it too is celebrated rather than punished. There is the rub. In writing, our failures are not celebrated1 they are all too often punished, and because of this, AI is primed to replace it, and in many ways it already has.
This then is my plea…please write, write poorly, fail often, there is joy in writing, not only for the writer, but also for the reader. The world is losing writers by the buttload (I’m not sure exactly what a “buttload” is, but by volume, but I suspect it is significant), and less writers means less art, and less art means… well that is a road I really don’t want to go down.
Writers like Joyce, Thoreau, Muir, and Dostoyevsky for example are rare enough in a world where writing was still done by humans. As silicone-based authors proliferate, the scarcity of greatness will only increase.
I have heard a hundred different ideas to get students to write, but from my point of view, the best one is to treat writing like climbing, i.e. we should all encourage and reward failure.
So, to all the poets, novelists, scriptwriters, bloggers, journalist, and journalers, that is, to all the writers, I say congrats on all your failures, errors, typos, run on sentences, and “mistakes”. I say thank you, the world is better because we write!2
- This is not a universal statement, I work with and know a lot of very creative, encouraging, and supportive professors and teachers who are doing amazing work with student writers. However, with that I know of just as many who couldn’t be bothered by the changing times.
- To celebrate your failures, I want to offer our platform to any writer, aspiring or otherwise, who wants a venue to publish your work. If you have anything climbing, adventure, or nature related that you would like to share with our audience, send it our way. Short or long, good or bad, it doesn’t matter. As long as your work is respectful and in line with common courtesy and acceptance of others, we are here for you!
thedihedral.com 
That is one of the joys of climbing. As you said, it can be difficult and painful, but success releases endorphins that make the effort worthwhile. Reinforcing that is the constant and universal support from a whole group of disparate cheerleaders.
Age does not enter into this equation. Young or old, we cheer everybody on. Even in failure, we compliment the climber on the run, how they negotiated a difficult move, on overall control, etc.
There needs to be a paradigm shift in how writing is taught. Penmanship is an essential skill that is being marginalized. For example, my granddaughter has trouble reading cursive handwriting because penmanship was not emphasized during her primary education. Everything is printed or texted. Look at the penmanship of those who signed the Declaration of Independence. It is completely alien to the semi-literate scrawls that one sees increasingly today.
How writing is graded in schools needs to be more like how it is in the climbing gym. Failure would not necessarily be rewarded with a low grade. It is one thing if the wrong answer is given in an essay question on an exam. It is another thing altogether if the assignment is a creative essay, i.e. story. In that case, no grade is given except for completion of the assignment. Instead, encouragement is given and constructive criticism rendered to hopefully teach the student how to better express thoughts through writing.
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So true. AI should never replace us or our efforts to communicate. Bravo!!!
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The first day of every writing class I taught, I asked, “How many of you like writing?” Maybe one person raised their hand and that person could have been sucking up; no way to know. Writing is hard, especially in school largely, I believe, because students are always trying to figure out what the teacher wants which is like driving to Cheyenne from my town in Colorado and driving through Santa Fe to get there. It’s self-defeating because writing in real life isn’t about a teacher, but about an audience that actually exists in reality.
I believe in writing labs (I ran one); I believe in tutors, and rubrics that spell out the simple stuff and put the burden on the student who IS working for a grade; I believe in writing in class together with the students — especially in remedial classes; I believe in cheering the kid who comes to me with a thesis statement that will work — I cheered that, “Yay! We have a thesis statement” Why the thesis statement? Because I believe that writing DOES establish a writer’s position and a little Greek never hurt anyone.
I’ve had some fun investigating how AI writes and it follows the stragedy that was often employed in freshman comp at the time I retired, a very formulaic system. I asked it how it writes and it said — and I like this; it’s what I’ve perceived in AI writing, “The Loss of “Intent”: While a human writer starts with a “why” (a desire to express a truth or emotion), I start with a “what” (a statistical target). My “formula” is essentially a sophisticated game of Platonic Shadow-Play—I am projecting the most likely shape of a thought based on the billions of thoughts I’ve seen before, without ever experiencing the thought itself.”
Intent and experience are human, so very beautiful, and the very qualities that hold up ideas.
I have come to understand AI as a vast array of stuff it’s trained on and when given a task, it charges into that array to find the response with the highest probability of completing the task.
If I were teaching writing now, well, I’ve thought about what I would do. I would probably handle it as I handled plagiarism in antedilvian times. “You want to do this kid? It’s on you. You have ONE moment in your whole life learn this stuff on the off chance you’ll use it someday or it will make you a better thinker. If those aren’t your goals? That’s not on me.” I have actually written something along those lines in my syllabi.
I agree with your idea that supervenient relationships are key, absolutely. I have failed a LOT at a lot of things, even picking up dog shit in my back yard. That was a serious failure (cracked femur). Samuel Beckett’s oft’memed misquote is right. “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” But failure frightened my students as it probably does yours.
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I may have to plagiarize your quote and put it into my syllabus next semester! So far I haven’t had much of an issue with students in the classroom, but the online students who are just faceless ID numbers according to our software are the students who tend to use AI to read the assigned reading, write the assigned writing, and replace the assigned thinking.
I’m not sure anyone would listen, but I would absolutely eliminate online classes outright, unless there is some widely acceptable reason due to extenuating circumstances. Telling students that this stuff matters to their faces carries much more weight than having them read it on an online announcement.
Graduation is tonight, and a new semester begins on Monday, I’ll keep trying to encourage this unique crop of students to write in the off chance that they will use it someday!
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I liked the hybrid classes because they allowed the shy kids to communicate with me, but yeah. If I were teaching now I would not undertake one. I don’t know if I sent you this link before or not, but it’s about an offer I got to market my books. It’s ironic as hell.
Good luck with the new semester!!
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Some professors I know are returning to the blue books and pencils of old to make students write. When I was a student (pre-AI) I had a professor who had us write about music. One essay was to analyze the music and place it in a cultural and historical context. The second essay was a personal response to the music. He warned students that some who were used to straight “A”s might have difficulty with the second essay. They couldn’t spit back when someone else had told them. He said (more or less) “If you write an essay that could have been written by anyone, you won’t get an “A”.
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That is awesome!!! I love that assignment! I think now is a good time to buy stock in Blue Book! Who could have predicted their rapid return!
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No way a writing (lack of) endemic, so much writing due to logging, journaling.
Then is send a word more belonging to the clip route than the gear placing one?
Mind you I write as a note taker, diary maker who loves reading. A journal may not be a live blog but use of the technology to order and store writing.
Notes tended to get lost if not in the bound paper version. I have lost my best poem and short article like that, filtered away, though am aware of the strong influence of the British Library, you have heard of it: From the Paper masters series exposé. aka R.O.D the TV; powerful books get removed, perhaps good ones then by another definition. I have seen books disappear from my world.
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