We asked our classmate, Teddy Corpuz of Rocksteddy, why he joined improv class. He said that he did so in order to fail.

I thought to myself, I’ve made many writing resolutions but completed less. Did I tire of it? Did I think a regular schedule was untenable? Was I afraid of being criticized or corrected, worried that I’m not good enough? That I’m pretentious and amateurish?

So many questions like these cross my head. Turns out, they cross every writer’s head. It’s a lot of material to write about: perhaps we should just write whatever happens to be there.

The Most Dangerous Writing App (Squibbler) forces you to do just that. Set a time, say 10 min. The app then prompts you with, say “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Chew on that a bit. Then hit the keys, and do not stop. If you do for just 5 seconds everything you typed before the 10 min is over will disappear forever. That’s the only way to fail with The Most Dangerous Writing App.

Not everyone has warmed to it. I know a few who jump off the cliff and since they can’t do anything about it anymore, just enjoy the flight. What I like about this app is that it changes your focus from “Can I finish this assignment in an hour?” to “Will I risk stopping for 5 seconds?”

The draft, well, should be bad. You need to polish it, obviously. And here find the real insight: editing is the true art of writing.

William Zinsser wrote in On Writing Well: “I don’t like to write; I like to have written. But I love to rewrite.” We think our heroes are such good smiths they produce good drafts. Some probably do, but no one publishes a draft. Before a work goes in print it goes through rounds and rounds of editing and review.

Traditional writing and publishing has long been changing. Grammarly makes editing much easier and can even be used to teach correct usage. WordPress, Twitter, Facebook and others allow anyone to make their works accessible to the public, from unedited tweets of a few words to whole novels. Kindle Direct Publishing allows writers to publish and sell their works online. More recently we see are seeing Artificial Intelligence programs generating novel controversies such as “Should ChatGPT be acknowledged as an author in a scientific publication?”, to which journals have answered “No.”

So, is traditional writing dead? It isn’t. I think that coaches today should emphasize that writers should write mainly for themselves and only secondarily for their audience. I know this is not standard teaching. But if you can automate the writing process almost to perfection from the get-go, the justification for people to write is because it is as good for their cognitive skills as gyms are for their bodies.

We have this concept at the gym called “lift to failure”, meaning, go for a weight that you can only barely lift, because that is the most efficient way to become strong. And so, write to fail.