cf #87: how it’s made

(in which you can watch as I write today’s intro)

You are reading contentfolks—a fortnightly sporadic blend of sticky notes, big content ideas, and practical examples. Thank you for being here! ~fio

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Hey there 👋

One of the biggest differences between humans and gen AI is the time it takes to go from prompt to prose: seconds in one case, (much) longer in the other. By now, a lot of us are familiar with the quick and linear way ChatGPT & co. can fill a page in little time—but how many of us are equally familiar with the messy, sprawling, and decidedly non-sequential way another human would do it?

To celebrate the craft of writing and the four years 🎂 🎂 🎂 🎂 since the start of this newsletter, I thought I’d do something new and show you how I wrote the first draft of today’s 100-word introduction.¹

Click here to watch the very sped up recording:

Substack won’t make images linkable. What is this, 1975? Anyway, use this link if you missed the one above. Sigh.

I think this video is a good illustration of the principle that ‘writing is thinking’—that writing is both about documenting existing thoughts and discovering new ones. For example, you can see how I start down a path, then about three sentences in I stumble upon a better entry point; my thinking changes, my direction does too, and I end up overhauling the whole thing.

This video is also a solid example of why you should let your words sit for a while. The end frame is very different from the version you read today, in both style and substance; what happened in between is that 48 hours passed, I came back with fresh eyes, and immediately noticed about a hundred ways to make things tighter and better.

And finally, this video is also a tiny homage to some of the things that make our work human: the back-and-forth inside our minds, the inefficiencies, the imperfection, the sudden bursts of creativity, and, yes, even the over-use of em dashes as punctuation.²

What makes your work human?

PS: if you feel like recording your screen as you type out your reply, absolutely go for it 🤘

1. My original plan was to write todays’s issue on paper and send you a scan of the page—I liked the idea of doing something really personal. But then I thought: hang on a second, it may not be the brightest idea to share thousands of handwritten words in a world where random AI models can train themselves to convincingly replicate them 🤖 👿 and so instead, here we are.

2. …although apparently em dashes are a sign of ChatGPT intervention. Wait, what?!