Is the whole caboodle serious? One comes here and talks a pack of bosh, and perhaps some sense as well, but I should think very little of a man who didn’t keep something in the background of his life that was more serious than all this talking—something more serious, whether it was religion or only drink.¹

What’s it about?

All those things that make up the horror, wonder and delight of life.

Who am I and what do I want?

I’ve been a freelance writer and editor since 2014; previously I worked for more than a decade in publishing and the book trade after variously trying to be a civil servant, a waiter and an oddjobber on a building site.

I’m not an activist, I’m not looking to spend my time with people who share a package deal of opinions with me (which never happens anyway), and I don’t want to convince readers to agree with me about x, y, z (which would also never happen anyway).

What I do want is harder to define, but if I say that I generally view life not as a project with a fixed destination or set of goals, but as an experience or a conversation or an exploration or an adventure, and that for me writing is the same, then that at least suggests something.

I write for the same reason that I read, walk on the fells, eat and cook, mix cocktails and drink beer and wine; and for the same reason that I played at all those games when I was a boy; because it’s what I do.

The way I best like writing is to step outside the front door and see where I end up. Even when something I’ve written looks organised, purposeful and certain, the likelihood is that it’s wandered and taken wrong paths and circled back on itself before it found its way.

Why Substack?

An ever-larger share of what’s published is either written by humans for machines (SEO) or by machines for humans (AI).

My writing may or may not be any good, but it is written by a human for humans in a human way. Substack allows me to do this. I also hate pitching. And I have some freedom to try different things.

Why subscribe?

It’s free, so you can see if you like it or don’t at no cost. Unless, of course, you want to perform an act of faith and strike a blow for humankind at the same time by paying. You can cancel any time.

The same at greater length

I discussed AI and the future of freelance writing with a friend/colleague recently, and he said he’d already largely given up:

I mean, even without AI, it’s just all SEO-driven now, which I absolutely cannot be doing with. ‘Here’s your commission. These particular words need to appear in the first line in this order. In the rest of the first paragraph, these words need to appear twice each.’

He’s a talented, knowledgeable writer, successful in more than one field.

It’s not just composition that’s affected, but also, for example, pitching ideas:

The rule that came down from above was that, whatever we were thinking of writing about for the website we should compare the current Google searches and trends against searches for ’chicken thigh recipes’, and if the subject in question was gaining less traction than chicken thigh recipes then it wasn’t worth writing about. There was a number value that it wasn’t deemed worth going below. You couldn’t write about something that was interesting for no other reason than that it was interesting anymore. ‘Interesting’ had to equate to ‘generating as much or more interest than chicken thigh recipes’.

Isaiah Berlin² wrote that one of the most influential early Romantics, Johann Georg Hamann, was against (among many other things) everybody “who wished to prove … that creation was really the same as the obtaining of certain data … and their rearrangement in certain pleasing patterns” — for Hamann “creation was a most ineffable, indescribable, unanalysable personal act, by which a human being laid his stamp on nature, allowed his will to soar, spoke his word, uttered that which was within him” and “the whole of Enlightenment doctrine AI appeared to kill that which was living in human beings, appeared to offer a pale substitute for the creative energies of man … It seemed to him … that the human being as painted by Enlightenment thinkers Silicon Valley was … some kind of artificial toy, some kind of lifeless model, which had no relation to the kind of human beings whom Hamann met and wished to associate with every day of his life.”

The parts of that I agree with, I agree with to the point of thumping my fist on the table³.

Please consider subscribing to my Substack. If you’re an existing subscriber to this website, fishmandeville.com, note that most of my future pieces will be published on Substack, or at least that’s the plan.

Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, August 2024)

1. G K Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday. ↩︎
2. Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism. ↩︎
3. Ineffable, indescribable, unanalysable personal acts, I’m all in for. And I don’t want to associate with artificial toys and lifeless models. Talking about your soaring will etc seems a bit weak to me, though it’s a poor heart that never rejoices. ↩︎