On the Future of Writing, Letter One

What Writers Need to do to Keep Writing Forever

This is part 1 in a series of letters between

reinancruz

and me, Zach Roush. I’ll be sharing my letters here on Realms while Reina will share hers on her Substack,

Indie Fiction Digest

. Here’s a bit about Reina: Reina Cruz is a writer and middle school teacher from California. She is the writer of the Daughter of Isis series and Marredbury. You can follow her on substack and on her website.

We’re talking about the “future of writing”, which also touches on other things like the future of creativity, how creatives stay creative, and how we do or not stay competitive with the rise of AI. This feels timely, oddly enough, with the release of Google’s Pixel 9 phone, which is being marketed as a vehicle for the AI future.

Subscribe today to catch the whole series! We’ll add links here as we publish more letters.

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Dear Reina, 

This is going to be interesting. I don’t normally write letters or nonfiction, so I’ll be flexing new creative muscles here. I’m also someone who tends to ramble and lose track of the points he’s making, and I predict this will happen. I’ll do my best to tie things together succinctly!

These days, it’s hard to feel like doing the work of writing is enough.

I, like many others have pined and longed for the day that the results of my writing would justify the work, say, by getting published or gaining a huge following and turning on my paid subscriptions for Substack. We all want our time that we spent in the dark comes back to us. And when it doesn’t? What do we do? How do I future-proof my passion for writing?

Another problem I face is that writing and reading don’t feel all-consuming like they used to. Many readers have such vivid imaginations—much more than my own—but there is no comparison to how visual media presents stories, from social media to video games. It’s why we can’t stop looking at screens. Recently, I took a course in video game writing from The Narrative Department, and this opened my eyes to an entirely new medium that is quite future proof (on paper, anyway). The game industry, from 2019 to 2024, has grown in revenue from ~150 billion dollars to over 250, according to this report from pwc.com. That’s incredible growth. The same can’t be said for the book industry (which, contrary to popular book doomsayers, is still growing).

That said, let’s take our minds to the distant future, say, over a hundred years.

It’s 2151, and almost everyone receives an implant that gives them access to a personal AI assistant as well as a virtual world. People have to be hybrid human-computers to keep up with technology replacing them and the increasing number of individuals living online. Creators—storytellers, writers, filmmakers, musicians—don’t create their work in physical spaces anymore. It’s all done in concert with their implant. Creators can now pre-visualize what they want to make, let the AI create a framework, and then take over to make their masterpieces. The sheer volume of art made is incessant, and in tandem, this art is consumed exponentially. There are still people who read, watch films, etc., but the methods to make the art is completely virtual. It’s a reality of thought, not one of carbon copies.

Okay, back to the present.

The way we enjoy stories is always being expanded, not replaced or destroyed, which makes me hopeful for storytellers. We as humans won’t change too much, I hope, over the next 100 years, so it’s believable that the same mediums of storytelling will exist. It’s my hope for this future that drives me to evolve my own storytelling skills. I used to be so down on myself for being born in this era, where “no one reads anymore” and “even if you get published, the publisher doesn’t help you market your book anymore,” when really there’s more readers and writers than ever, and there’s always room in the ring for more of us. In other words, I’m sick of all the doom and gloom around creativity (even though it’s a very real hardship and reality right now). 

There’s this metaphor I learned about from a teacher friend that she uses to help students change their behavior. She asks them whether the issue they have is a rock or a clay problem, basically, what can they change and what can’t they? I can’t change the world or the time in history I live in, but I can change the reasons I write. 

Bringing it back: How do I make my time clicking away at these keys worth it? How can I future-proof my passion?

My focus is moving away from the results (getting published, trying to build a following), and into what really matters: caring about the craft. I’ll paraphrase Elizabeth Gilbert from Big Magic (an excellent book on creativity and writing): whatever you do creatively will always be hard, in fact, it’s like eating a shit sandwich. You have to decide which shit sandwich you can eat day after day.

My shit sandwich is the work of writing. I believe the work has to be everything. I can say this so strongly now because I spent so long pining after the typical things writers desire: I will get an agent and get traditionally published have bestsellers. I wanted my time in the dark, tapping away at my weird characters and awful stories, to matter to other people. I gave away my power to love the work because I wanted to be seen. Being seen does matter, but not as much as getting the work done. This is something Ann Lamott in Bird by Bird (another excellent book on writing) talks a lot about.

Let me digress. The future I laid out above may be a hundred years in the making or just ten. Who knows what technology will bring to our world, or what’s going to happen in general! That’s why writers and creatives in general need to find the shit sandwich they can tolerate day-in, day-out. All writers need to a way to love the work more than any results or eng-goals. Whether you want to be published or work on licensed novels or be a creative director doesn’t matter unless you can get down into the weeds. 

I guess you could sum up my thoughts like so: forget about the future and show up every day to your work.

What do you think? Where’s your mind at with all this? Are you more goal-focused or work focused?

Can’t wait to read your response!

- Zach