The title of this post comes from the last line of Joseph Fasano's poem "For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper", but to me, it encompasses so much more than that.

For people have always yearned for an easier way—to fudge the numbers, or to outright cheat. At times, there's a valid strategy here. Many things in life are not worth putting 100% of your effort into, and knowing when to go all gas no brakes is sacred wisdom. There are people who work hard their entire lives and have nothing to show for it because of the unlucky alignment of where that energy is focused and channelled.

But far more often, people yearn. There are dreams and written goals and recurring thoughts of taking action, but then something else happens. A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

I write this as somebody who is often remarked upon for my writing cadence and consistency. Sometimes, people ask how they can emulate what I do—they ask what the magic is to replicate my output.

With how much I've written about the craft of writing, I've attempted to approach this question from a variety of angles to give a satisfying answer. I've written before about what my unromantic day-to-day life looks like as a full-time writer, that I have a compulsion, and about the inertia problem of premature optimization.

But love is for the ones who love the work. I don't daydream about the romantic notions of being a writer. I just write. I don't think my thoughts are too unimportant or too uninteresting to write them out. I just write. I do not wish I was loafing around and doing something easier. I just write.

There is another poem that Fasano seemed to be echoing, written by Robert Frost titled Hyla Brook, which has the last line:

"We love the things we love for what they are."

Do you love the thought of the thing, or the thing itself? Do you find yourself buying books you never read, or do you read page-after-page of loaned paperbacks from the public library? Have you amassed pristine stationery and an empty gilded notebook, or do you just write and plan on whatever you can find?

Being a collector is not lesser or inferior—it can be a deeply enjoyable hobby in its own right—but do not think you are creating if you only collect. You must love the verb, not the noun.

I have been trying to write a curriculum for blogging for the past few days, and this is admittedly where I always get stuck. It is rather easy to teach the mechanics and the logistics—the platforms, the Markdown syntax, the best practices—whatever.

But how do you teach someone to love the work? You kind of have to start with that being presumed as already being in the person—a prerequisite to the class.

But how many people out there really love the work? Wouldn't they have already started on their own if that feral hunger was already within them? I could help channel and focus that drive and spirit, the way I have done with my own, but that is still a different topic entirely. And, too, I think of the question "what do I write about?" and it has the same answer. What you love. We love the things we love for what they are.

When I attempt to have a dialogue with so-called genAI "artists," I hear the same response I do to someone brand new to any craft: "I realized at some point that the breadth of what I would ideally be able to create wouldn't be attainable in my lifetime."

When we focus on the output—on the noun of the work—it can seem impossibly daunting. The truth is you need to do it ugly. There is no substitution here. You need to be bad at something before you're good at it. Trying to circumvent this with shortcuts, such as genAI, will only prolong your lack of improvement.

There is bold, colourful weirdness in the flaws of what you create with your own two hands. It is entirely unique and yours alone. Do not let your humanity be eroded by the piss-average output of a machine that, sure, looks better at first glance, but becomes painfully boring and useless so quickly.

And the truth may be that you don't love the work. That the verb is entirely different from the daydreamed noun in your head. That's okay! But you can only find out by giving it a fair start and trying.

Imagine where you'd be if you started ten years ago. Again, it is a bitter reckoning to contemplate that, I understand. But the second best time to start is now. I promise.