I did an episode a few weeks back on Jasmine Sun’s provocations about independent writing in the AI era. One of those provocations: the value of polish is going down, and the value of personal style, charisma, and weirdness is going up. AI is very good at polished prose. AI is bad at voice—the particular moves only this writer would make, the typos the writer would have caught but didn’t, the metaphor that shouldn’t work but does because it’s coming from this particular mind.

Sun’s frame and the longhand frame meet exactly here. Voice is the comparative advantage. Voice is what AI cannot generate. And handwriting is one of the most reliable disciplines we have for preserving and developing voice.

Here’s why. When you type, autocomplete and muscle memory and the smoothness of the keyboard tend to push you toward standard phrasings. The fastest sentence to type is usually the most expected sentence. AI tools accelerate this further by suggesting the most predictable next phrase.

Even without AI, typing tends to homogenize prose toward the average.

When you write by hand, none of that exists. There is no autocomplete. There is no suggestion engine. There is only the pen and the next word, and the speed limit is your thinking. The sentence you write is the sentence you composed in your head and chose to put down. The sentence is unmistakably yours because nothing intervened between your mind and the page.

In the AI era, the handwritten draft is not nostalgic. It is maximally human. It is the most reliable way to produce prose that could not have been generated.Here’s something I’d like you to try. Write your next essay—or a chapter—by hand. Don’t do it for one session. Do it for a few weeks, long enough to get into a flow. See what emerges that doesn’t emerge at the keyboard.

If you do it, write me back and tell me what you found.

---

WHY THIS KEEPS COMING UP

I’m writing this partly because the original Medium article keeps showing up in my analytics every month, even though I wrote it years ago. Writers are looking for ways to think about the question of HOW THEY WRITE in a moment when the answer is contested. The longhand discipline is one answer that hasn’t gone out of fashion in the lifetimes of the writers I just named, and I don’t think it’s going out of fashion now. If anything, the AI moment makes it more important.

If you’re working on something and you want a publisher who’ll talk to you about voice and craft and the actual practice of writing—not just the production at the end—Crossroads is that press. Discovery call on the site.

Twenty minutes, free.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

—Chad

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com