Writing good

 Forgive the Blob if it goes off on a non-Sportsball World toot today, climbing aboard the stump for some old-fashioned geezer ranting about writing and what it is, and most of all what it isn't.

I say this because I saw another of those ads the other day for some artificial intelligence (AI) program that will do your writing for you, if writing is your job. Except it doesn't frame it that way, of course.

The way it frames it is this Skynet deal will enable you to more quickly pump out Blobs or whatever copy it is your job to write. The question, of course, is if Skynet is doing the writing, what are you doing? Playing World of Warcraft on the company dime?

You're certainly not "writing" Blobs or anything else. So why are you there?

As Stephen King once said: If you want to write, write. If you'd rather take the lazy way out and just load all the pertinent facts and figures and stylistic flourishes into some AI program, fine. But don't take credit for the finished product, because it's not yours.

And, hey, maybe that's not exactly how this works. I don't know. As someone who spent an inordinate amount of time in his career cursing at his STUPID BLEEPING LAPTOP, I claim no standing in the technological realm.

But what these ads do seem to promise is reduced toil on the part of the "writer." And that means it isn't writing at all.

Look. I don't know much, but I did do a little writing in my 40 years in press boxes, so I do know a few things. I know writing is a process -- a uniquely human process -- not a widget factory. As such, it's hard, and it's supposed to be hard. To paraphrase Tom Hanks in "A League Of Their Own," it's the hard that makes it writing.

Every deadline warrior I know, and I've known some pretty good ones, has experienced that moment of terror when you stare at an empty screen and the screen stares back at you. All you can see is that tiny goddamn cursor, mocking you with every blink

Blink. Come on, Jim Murray, dazzle us with your verbiage. Blink, blink. Whassa matter, Shakespeare, words won't come? 

And then the kicker: Man, do you suck.

Of course, when the words do come, finally, there's an enormous sense of either satisfaction or relief.  It's hard to say which, or at least it always was for me. It's why when I finally wrapped the column and hit send, I'd break out the best deadline quote I ever heard: "Yours might be better, but mine's done."

Of course, if all I did was load data into some AI program ...

Well. I can imagine opening the paper the next day and seeing some vague parody of my style under the byline "By Skynet." And my column bug would be a headshot of Arnold Schwarzenegger at the end of "Terminator," his face half-melted and one red eyeball glaring at the reader.

What a treat.