Writing When Your Reader is Watching You Write

After reading about DeltaDB, I was inspired to experiment with building a process by which I could show someone what my writing process was like, in the same way I used to sit next to someone building software and watch them type every keystroke or invoke every shortcut.

Unfortunately, I won’t be available to sit next to you if you have questions about the approach I take (what my actual thoughts are) when writing and editing this piece, but I think it could provide some insight into the messy, typo-prone, unstructured process that I follow to put words on a “page”.

It’s a little nerve-wracking to know that every pause, typo, keystroke and mid-piece edit I make here will be shown to the reader of the final draft. But it also feels more honest. Reading the final draft of a written work hardly captures the effort and energy the author (and maybe even their editor) invested in getting the writing to its final state.

In a world where AI slop has inundated most of the internet, I consider writing like this a partial form of proof of work. It’s not that an AI model can’t replicate the production of written work in this way. If this approach became popular, I am sure they would be trained so they are able to (maybe they can today, I haven’t tried yet). It’s more that I hope someone watching the reproduction of this work finds that seeing me write it enriches their experience and the connection they have with the words and the ideas I have while writing them.

A couple of thoughts and learnings as I went through this process:

1. Editing has to occur where the writing occurs to capture all the changes.
2. Sometimes there are very long pauses between when I start and finish writing something.
3. If I find typos in the post (after the export to my blog where you are reading it), I have to go back to my writer app to make the edits, then re-export so it is captured for the replay.
4. A changelog is no longer necessary in the same way. It’s all here for you to see (though it is truly a mess).

Lastly, I used an LLM to edit this piece and to find and correct typos (a feature that, as you see from watching me write this, I desperately need). I make a ton of typos when I write (type?). It is what it is. Anyway, for this post, you see me highlighting and copying out sections as I write them for proofing, then manually making the edits I want.