What I Talk About When I Talk About Writing

The easiest thing to do is to not write at all and just let your ideas pass through your brain into obscurity, often, to be completely forgotten forever.

This morning, I was thinking about a film I watched yesterday called Westworld, a renowned series of ideas about the future, told through the vision of Michael Crichton, now transformed into an HBO series. It’s well worth the watch. Many of the ideas within the film have inspired writers and filmmakers over the last 5 decades, with remnants of the movie’s creators found in such works as The Truman Show, The Terminator, and a whole variety of films that deal with a world in which artificially intelligent beings become sentient. It’s the sort of movie that makes me wonder how I have never seen it before and why it is that the prospect of autonomous machines fills us with such dread, but that’s the topic for another essay.

As I watched, I used a voice-to-text app on my mobile phone to think through what was going on in the film. I’ve become a huge fan of voice typing, it feels like the best interface for me to get thoughts out into the world, especially as my typing isn’t fast enough (80 wpm) and swiping across a mobile keyboard is painfully full of errors. Writing by hand is even worse; my…