Words Unwritten

TL;DR: Seems like all it takes to beat writer's block is giving my brain permission to ramble.

No words came out.

Laptop opened, file created, date added, but still, no words came out. That's how it's been for me over the past two months. I've created dozens of files, each time having all the different thoughts emerging. "God, I gotta write this down." "That's such a sophisticated perspective!" Yet, no words came out, and at the end of the day, some files with a few hundred words were still kept, while the others had flown away with my thoughts.

This feeling sucks. It's like you're stuck at the beginning. You knew that you had already come up with lots, and you knew that once you start typing, nothing's going to stop you (definitely not mango juice). Yet now comes the hard part – to actually transcribe the spontaneous words in your head into actual letters. You want to start the blog with an interesting hook and grab the audience's attention, but you don't want it to look too fancy. And while you're debating with yourself over whether this is an appropriate opening or not, the previous ideas vanish. All of a sudden, you're overwhelmed.

On average, I experience this once every two minutes while trying to write, where I go from having a bunch of ideas to losing them, and then coming up with a new set, and so on. I can't last in this cycle for ten minutes.

Still, there are other times when I manage to write a successful introduction paragraph, but over time, I start reading over it again and again, and eventually decide to rewrite it.

Am I losing my writing ability? I wrote four blogs in August, and now you're telling me I can't finish a single one over the past two months?

Just write.

I truly believe that I'm not the only one who's had this feeling, where you feel overwhelmed by the things you want to express but don't know how to organize them into words and phrases. One common attribute of this frustration is our familiarity with the language used. For example, I've once thought that it was not my brain responsible for all this, but my English (as a second language) skills. You certainly can't write fluently in Spanish if you've only acquired basic skills over two weeks. However, when I was reading Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" last week, I came across the claim that thought is not dependent on the language used. If you think in the language you know, how can new words be coined? Therefore, the language barrier becomes almost negligible once you overcome a certain threshold of vocab and reading.

If so, what exactly is it that kept me from fluently writing out a passage? This is the question I've been pondering, and the conclusion I've reached is a generic term: habit.

One of the most common types of phrases you'll see in articles motivating you to write more is "I've never seen a good writer who writes few." When I read about it the first couple of times, it looked like the author was only trying to make the article seem longer. It is literally one of those obvious "practice makes perfect" arguments. However, when I kept seeing it repeatedly in different authors' posts, I paused my assimilation. These authors are good writers because I feel comfortable following their arguments, but why would so many good writers all write the same obvious thing? It has to be crucial, and I started to accommodate it.

Being able to write lots is probably the most important part of a good habit. It's almost like sensory adaptation, where you'll eventually get used to writing, and notice something different if you stop. Wow, first conclusion reached.

How?

Next question: how should I practice writing? Is simply completing your English homework considered practicing writing, or are there comfort zones that you have to step out of?

To be completely honest, I have no claims for this one. However, one thing I'm confident about is that I'm practicing writing right now as I type out these words because it makes me think. I have to constantly reconsider my previous arguments and evaluate the logical connections between them. I also have to plan my upcoming parts so that this current section can lay a foundation for them. There's a lot to think about, and I pause often. Quick side note, I think that's also a reason why I like BERT, which uses a bidirectional encoder and considers both the previous and the next.

What about those school assignments where you're given a worksheet with questions listed out for you? Is responding to free-response questions considered practicing your writing habits? My claim on this is no. I like to use the analogy of coding here. If you are participating in a competitive programming competition, you'll see a set of problems with inputs and expected outputs. All you have to do is write code to solve the task. However, when you are working on an open-source project, such as an LLM chatbot, there are no fences along the road. All you have to do is write code, but not to solve some specific task. Collaborating on open-source projects, in our case, is simply writing freely on your own terms, and it will be considered part of the habit because you are finding a direction yourself. However, when given a specific prompt to write for, you are not expanding your creativity. You certainly can still write in organized structures and practice your writing techniques, but you are not further shaping the habit of writing freely.

Now I'm going to talk about something more unique to my own journey: comfort zones.

I never liked the concept of this term. Many love using it to inspire others to "push beyond their comfort zones," and I agree that it's useful. However, what I don't like is when people start telling themselves, "I'm pushing beyond my comfort zone right now." It sounds self-deceiving. I don't believe I can walk far enough by simply calming myself when I feel challenged, repeating that I'm not in my comfort zone. You should always have an actual motivation to do things, and interest is a great example.

Yet this term resonates with me a lot when it comes to writing habits. It turned from an internal motivation to an external tool. There's a prototype in my visuospatial sketchpad of this term: large language models. Take ChatGPT, for example, a tool that has replaced most of my simple tasks – from filling out blanks in English class and validating each answer I chose to building the website you're reading right now. It has helped me revise many works, but it directly wrote more. Now, the framing may make ChatGPT sound like something negatively affecting me, but I actually enjoyed most of it, especially becoming a prompt engineer on my own. But when it comes to writing, I simply became too obsessed with this tool, and the process of withdrawal is the first barrier to developing a writing habit.

How did I overcome this barrier? I didn't. This barrier disappeared on its own.

When I initially found out about using AI tools to help with writing, I was amazed, like most of us, and shocked by its profound sentences. I soon became addicted to it and used it to write a lot of my works. During those days, I would carefully read the sentences it wrote and learn from them, which is probably what kept me improving at the same time. Then comes the twist. I suddenly hated the way ChatGPT wrote. I can easily distinguish between human-written text and machine-written one – the latter lacks a sense of fundamental consciousness. Therefore, I turned back to normal writing, where I confidently type out each thought, and I started feeling a sense of accomplishment. I'm still using ChatGPT and other AI tools such as Cursor every day, and I'm grateful for them for letting me realize what I truly want.

It was also during this exact time, in August, when I started writing my own blogs.

Oops, I didn't realize this blog is already this long. Things are starting to get out of control. Initially, I simply followed the "write down whatever comes to your mind" advice instead of following my traditional approach of crafting a nice introduction. It worked! Let's hope this is not the only blog for November.

Appreciate you reading it.