is all writing real writing

2026-07-11 21:33 Note Type: online-blogs, substack Tags: writing, ai, LLM, artificial-intelligence

A few years ago, someone from a creative agency emailed me asking if I had any bandwidth to take on writing a white paper on some extremely esoteric technical topic for a major technology company. I had no idea what the hell any of the materials they sent over said, so obviously I told them of course I could do it and when did they need it by. Two weeks they said, which was a slightly tighter timeline than I usually like so I asked for $20,000. They said yes immediately which annoyingly told me I could have asked for more. But the lack of hassle was always its own blessing.

The best part about this corporate work is that it never needed to be that good and everyone understood that. The people at the agency knew it, the tech company knew it, I knew it. I just needed to make it easy enough so that non-technical executives could read it and understand, like, 60% of the topic. The agency handed me some more background materials: PowerPoints, speeches, PDFs. I think the paper I wrote was about edge computing or something, but I honestly couldn’t tell you anything about it at this point.

Work like this was my living for a long time. I would have to learn something quickly and then write about it from a place of at least passable fluency for a general audience. I did not consider that work part of my creative oeuvre, and in fact made significant efforts to partition it from how I wrote for newspapers and magazines.

Now that I don’t have to do it anymore, I wonder if that commercial writing should be treated the same as, say, this blog? Is all writing real writing?

References:

https://post.substack.com/p/i-had-become-haunted-by-the-simplest