“It’s only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly… You cannot rip away caterpillarness. The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.” 

— Ram Dass

——————————————————————————————————————————————————

Working for a small organization means we can make and implement sensible decisions for our staff. My office shuts down for the days between Christmas and New Year, which makes a great deal of sense since most people are pretty checked out during this period anyway. It’s great to be able to forget which day it is, order takeout and binge-watch entire Netflix series without having to feel guilty about it. It’s not so different from what our ancestors did during the long cold winters without heat or electricity.

But of course I feel guilty anyway. I told myself that it was fine to just relax into these days, and see what comes up, but of course I hoped that what came up would be a short story or two and at least a few thousand words on my current WIP. Alas, that was not to be, probably because all I wanted during this cold, snowy, dark period was to be comfy, and some days writing is the opposite of that.

Other days, it can be kind of fun, working through my personal process, scribbling down notes in my WIP notebook, wading through research, mind-mapping plot points, straining to hear the whisper of intuition telling me to go in one direction or another. Adding and deleting paragraphs until the bones of the story emerge. All while wrestling down an inner voice telling me I have no business doing any of it at all.

Now there’s a new voice, one that says a few conversations with an AI chatbot could be all I need to bypass the whole thing, the long process and all the discomfort. It could be as easy as ordering a pizza, and maybe even faster. Over the years, I’ve fantasized about having a creative magic wand, but now that something like it really exists, I don’t want it. I can’t help but think about a story I heard years ago, about a child who thought she’d help a butterfly emerge from the cocoon by cutting away the husk. She thought she was saving the poor creature from a painful struggle, but it turns out that butterflies need that struggle to help their wings form properly. It’s an essential part of the process.

That’s how I feel about my old-fashioned writing process. It’s the process, the false starts and dead ends, that makes the final work mine, and hopefully able to connect with another human mind.   While I love AI for certain office functions, like creating meeting minutes and summarizing large, dry documents, I’m pretty sure my stories wouldn’t fly without the struggle.