Writing thoughts.

I’ve been wondering what I should write about. The general advice is always to ‘write about what you know.’

Policing, funny or factual has been written about everywhere -so that’s  out.

Cancer has been done to death, if you’ll forgive the expression.

Nature writing is everywhere. I’ve tried poetry, but again, it’s all been done before and far better. I don’t understand the technicalities and am too old to learn. 

The best writers seem to draw on some tragedy or other, or war, experienced in earlier life. Mine has been largely a happy affair, not compromised by black dogs, booze and drugs. 

Are writers out of a job now that  Artificial Intelligence platforms like chat GPT seem to be able to read every book going and plagiarise it in an almost undetectable fashion? Undetectable, that is, to the human eye. Like every public body, AI will be marking it’s own homework. I’ve heard it is too verbose and is easily led; perhaps very human-like then.

We can only write about our own experiences without plagiarism, unless our lives have become such a cliché that we could simply change the names of the characters and places and call it our own. 

Mind you, the more one reads, the more plagiarism one sees. They’ve been at it forever. 

Following the recent death of Martin Amis, I read his book Experience and in the first pages discovered half the script for the hit TV series, Outbumbered: “Daddy, who would win a fight between a whale and a Tiger?” etc. 

Musicians must have the same problem. Who’s to say what they thought was an original melody was really a half remembered tune they liked. 

Surely there is  nothing new under the Sun , as lamented in the book of Ecclesiastes. Even the writer of that probably nicked it off some other depressed soul, though it does reveal much of the human condition.

Come to think of it, what is it that I know? I mean really know? 

I know me better than anyone but who would want to hear about me, unless I was famous or something? And wouldn’t it all be so terribly vain and boring?

And who wants to be famous except those without the talent to warrant fame. I suppose you could write about being famous and how it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be- but that’s been done to death too. 

When your brother was Jeremy Clarke, the thongs of whose literary sandals I am not worthy to untie, what could you possibly find to write about?

Maybe it is in the mundane that we can find glimpses of interest. And in reading, that for a while at least, we are removed from all self-consciousness. Reading things that make us laugh or cry; or descriptions of a different or interesting place we can momentarily inhabit; or in writing that causes us to pause for thought. It’s a tough one to pull off and not all can do it all the time. 

Some of us get lucky once or twice.

ChatGPT- “write a column in the style of Jeremy Clarke.”

It wouldn’t know where to begin.