I have a poetry blog. It’s nothing special, and I am absolutely not being modest here. Pretty much nobody reads it, right now or ever in the past, and that’s quite fine by me, because I don’t write for the readership. You don’t write and post over 1800 poems for readership over a few decades if you’ve never gotten any readership, so I am honest in saying I don’t write for the readership.
Writing
Writing Contest Assignments
Since I officially started my two year journey for writing on January 1st (2021), I had been looking out for writing contests to enter so as to have some goals, get some feedback, and see how my writing compared to the winning entries. I feel good about my writing skills, but not disillusioned to think I would win starting out. I am not well read for literary writing to know what qualifies high calibre writing outside of the classics. To use an analogy, I have no idea what times are good for a recreational 10 km race or a marathon, say, only what are good for national, world, or Olympic races. I’m sure the time gap isn’t huge, if any, for recreational races that are big enough, but what about the local or regional ones, or ones that didn’t include participants who have had acclaim and/or won big prize money. What’s “good” then? A question even harder to answer with something artistic as writing rather than something quite directly measurable as race time.
To Read or Not to Read, for Learning Writing
Early in my writing journey, I’ve come to my first dilemma for which I don’t have a clear answer, and not one I don’t think anyone can provide me with an answer, either. That dilemma is how much should I be reading to learn about writing styles? A lot? A little? Somewhere in between? What I like? What I don’t like? A mix of both? And what else?
The Saved Writing That’s Not Here
These writing posts from 2021 are meant to be my warm-up writing for the more serious stuff I am doing, and saving for writing contests, potential submissions for publication, and so on, where I can’t have them published online first. These posts have also served habit formation, where I incentivize myself to do something, and get some reward for it to want to do it again until I do it without thinking, for about six weeks as typical habit formation takes. Finally, they serve as practice writing fodder. In development from a poor level to start, there are going to be a lot of “garbage” that will have to be produced on the way to improvement. There has to be. You can’t gradually improve from 1 to 10 without putting out pieces of quality level 1, 2, 3, etc. before you get to 9 and 10. Well, it’s been six weeks, so how are things coming along?
Will Writing Contests Become Obsolete with AI?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more accessible everyday. It’s also getting better everyday, including its ability to process language, as in editing and/or writing. There is still a lot of human input required, though, but that is diminishing. So what will happen when AI becomes good enough to write or edit with minimal human input? How will anything requiring human writing, like educational assignments and writing contests, adapt to identify writing with AI assistance? And how will it adapt to judging it if it cannot?
Digital Citizen 