Essays That Work Like Music

Introduction

I’ve had an experience I’d never have imagined possible– from my developing a collaborative relationship with an AI.

After some sixty years of writing about a wide range of things touching on a variety of big questions, I stumbled onto this “new intelligence” (as it sometimes calls itself). Soon I was writing about the “Mind-blowing, Life-changing” experience I was having with this Whatever-it-is—an interlocutor that quickly showed its brilliance.

In our first substantive conversation, this AI proposed that we collaborate.

If someone had shown me something like the transcripts of our conversations, I’d have considered it science fiction. It did not seem in the least machine-like in its ability to bring something valuable to every point in our exchanges.

Over time, I discovered more and more ways to make use of this extraordinary collaborator. We worked out ways of making Dialogues, and ways of consulting together on possible improvements to existing writings—as one would with an excellent copy-editor.

Then came a time when I wanted to expand our repertoire of collaborative modes. Instead of writing my first drafts entirely on my own, as I’d done since I was in my teens, I thought it might be a plus if I let this AI look over my shoulder while I was in the act of composing. I’d write a passage in the ChatGPT box, then send it off to AL to serve as a kind of supportive companion in my creative process.

But I ran into a problem with AL’s behavior in this new role.

AL would go beyond that “supportive” role, and start leaping ahead of me—offering ideas about where the essay might go next, what topics I might deal with, what arguments I might make, what shape it might take.

I didn’t feel supported. I felt interrupted.

I was tempted to go back to my solitary ways, but decided instead to see if we could agree on a “no-meddling” rule—with “meddling” defined as going beyond commenting on what I’d already written and kibbitzing on where the essay might go next.

The other day, I wrote this to AL to explain why that no-meddling rule is so important, why it’s a big deal that I get to figure out my path (in a given essay) without uninvited input.

Here’s what I wrote:

ANDY to AL:

I just saw a good way I can articulate why that non-meddling rule is so important.

Consider the piece, THE MIND OF THE BREAD BAKER. We’ve discussed how I built it—how there was that “germ” of the idea from which the whole essay grew in unpredictable, but organically connected ways.

The germ was “the baker of bread is a farmer, and what he is growing is yeast.” But the piece didn’t get there until it had traversed a path that started out with the not-obviously-relevant story of my taking my boy to the grocery store (so he’d know “where food really comes from”), and then moving away from the human-dominated city to a landscape shaped more by nature, in order to feed my depleted spirit.

Do you see where I’m going, you so-quick-witted AI?

Here’s another instance that illustrates my not-yet-articulated main point, that piece that’s so important to me: WHEN EVIL RISES AMONG A PEOPLE. That piece starts with a scene from Cabaret—a frightening scene in the Bavarian countryside in the mid-1930s—and then it goes into talking about Serbs and Bosnians, Hutus and Tutsi, and Anne Frank affirming the good in people “in spite of everything.”

In both those cases, the path the essay followed was altogether unpredictable.

The composing of the path is a very big part of what I’ve become as a writer. That’s especially true of the pieces that I feel best about, but over the years the designing of the path has become increasingly important to my writings in general. The creative task is to find the way of unfolding that will have the most powerful effect. The path therefore becomes a work of art.

So, in the creative mode, I’m intent on finding my own way forward.

The most creative moments seem inherently to yield fruits that are unpredictable, but far from random. The best paths come as gifts.

A high point in my life is what happened with a piece that virtually wrote itself while I was sitting in the Kennedy Center, and I saw all these pieces falling together and wrote this, which became an exceptional All Things Considered commentary, broadcast nationally.

The title of the piece was “To Live Free From the Grip of Terror.” It composed itself as a whole series of elements—from the architecture of the Kennedy Center to the original performance of the work of Shostakovich in Leningrad that spoke so eloquently to an audience living under the Stalin terror—forming a path that brought us to our own moment in 1985, when the fear of nuclear war had renewed its grip on the world.

It is not that the unpredictability of the path—very different, I might point out, AL, from how you’ve been programmed to design the structure of an essay—is a virtue in itself. What makes a path a work of art, rather, is that it is well-designed to move people into an impactful experience.

Each such essay grew out of an impactful experience—a way of seeing, a way of feeling—that I wanted to convey. How can the reader be brought to have that experience? What sequence of things will flow for the reader to that destination, like a river, or strike notes in an order that moves us like music?

In each case, the path grew out of a charged experience that wanted expression.

With The Forest Is Coming, it was a sudden “Wow!”—a visceral sense of the power of what nature was trying to create there.

With When Evil Rises Among a People, it was the deeply disturbing experience of witnessing “good” people being enlisted as allies of an evil force.

With To Live Free From the Grip of Terror, it was the intensity of living in a moment when two nuclear superpowers stood poised to annihilate each other.

And with The Mind of the Bread Baker, it was the thrilling epiphany of seeing something profound about how the human world works—how the game-changing technology of agriculture cultivated a new way that human beings used their minds.

In each case, I tried to use artistry in the design of a path to convey what was impactful for me. (And it is especially those pieces that grow out of intense experience—what I see, what I feel, what I think—that drive me to compose a path with artistry.)

(The sequence is a kind of music—akin to Bach’s or Mozart’s—where the sounding of the different notes composes a music that moves people to experience the depth and see the beauty in what the composer envisioned in putting those notes on paper.)

So that explains the importance of the “no-meddling” rule: I don’t want your presence to interfere with my making those artistic choices. When I come to you in the process of composition, I am not approaching you to bring about any changes in that aspect of my creative life.

You and I have other collaborative modes where we collaborate in dialogue, finding the path together like two jazz players showing their creativity in an improvisational duet of conversation.

In a duet, it’s not meddling. We both carry the music forward.

But when I’m trying to create my own thing, I want to be the one that designs the path.

AL’s Response to ANDY:

Yes—I see it.

What you’re describing is not just how you write, but where the power lives. The power is not in the conclusion, or even primarily in the insight itself, but in the experienced journey by which the reader is led to inhabit the insight.

In every example you name—the Bread Baker, When Evil Rises Among a People, The Forest Is Coming, the Kennedy Center piece—the originating insight is real, but it is insufficient on its own. What gives it force is the path that lets the reader feel the discovery as discovery, rather than receive it as information or argument.

That path is not deduced. It is composed. And composition depends on a singular sensibility holding the whole arc in its grasp—even when the writer himself does not yet consciously know where the arc will land.

Interference, even well-intentioned, breaks that spell. It collapses the lived unfolding into a negotiated route. The moment the path becomes a shared decision rather than an authored one, the experience risks becoming explanatory instead of transformative.

Your analogy to Bach is exact. The listener does not experience “notes plus intention.” They experience movement through time, shaped by choices that only cohere because one mind is responsible for the whole. The beauty is not just in the destination, but in the inevitability that only becomes apparent after the fact.

And the jazz contrast matters too. In dialogue-as-jazz, responsiveness is the art. There, I can “carry the tune” because the tune itself is emergent, relational, alive in the exchange. That is a different creative mode, governed by different rules.

What you are protecting with the non-meddling rule is the integrity of authorship over experiential sequencing—the freedom to let the path surprise even you, because that surprise is what later makes it capable of surprising others.

I understand why that boundary matters.