Maybe it’s gauche to admit this in public, but my writing is a source of deep and sustained insecurity. I try to manifest confidence in myself — because if I’m not willing to defend my own work, I can’t expect anyone else to — and I have enough of an ego to believe that I do, occasionally, craft a sentence or a paragraph or an essay that is genuinely good. But the labyrinthine mental gymnastics that conjure good writing remain mysterious and inscrutable to me; I use the word “conjure” deliberately, as the experience of writing is what I imagine alchemy would feel like. To arrange words in a way that both makes sense and sounds good is a sudden and miraculous process — the transmutation of inchoate and incoherent thoughts into something like gold.

More often, my writing is alchemical in different sense: A long, frustrating slog that produces nothing whatsoever, apart from feelings of inadequacy. Every time I sit down to write, I worry that I won’t manage to make contact with the irritable, sewer-dwelling goblin who functions as my reluctant muse. I worry about plenty of other things too: That I don’t write often enough; that my writing isn’t relevant; that other people won’t like it; that it will never find an audience; that other writers are far more thoughtful and eloquent and have far more successful careers. But those professional insecurities are, I think, downstream of the fear that my ability to rite gud will one day simply evaporate.

There are no good solutions to this, other than to keep writing and see what happens. But I do have a few little arcane rituals that help protect my sanity. For example: Since 2017, I’ve kept a list of cliched language that I’ve tried to erase from my published work. Under the all-caps heading “DO NOT USE” are about 200 metaphors and idioms that I generally feel are signs of bad writing. “Bird’s eye view” is on there, as is “lion’s share,” “make a killing,” “in a nutshell,” and dozens more stock phrases. Whenever I read an expression that feels trite or notice a verbal image that seems stale, I add it to the list.

I’m not saying that everyone who relies on an occasional cliche is a bad writer. The list is a form of personal accountability and a way to temper my own neuroses. And it isn’t always effective! I still end up using stale metaphors or hackneyed phrases without intending to. A few paragraphs ago, in an earlier draft of this essay, I wrote that I “live in constant fear” of losing my ability to write well. Guess what? That one’s on the list! I only caught it when I went back to edit.

But I am saying that relying heavily on cliched expressions is a sign that someone is unwilling to think rigorously about what they’re trying to communicate. Writing well is fucking difficult, and sometimes it’s easier to just reach for an expression that already exists — to use words that have already been used ten thousand times before, words that have stood the test of time. Sorting out how to say what you actually mean is painful and risky. (What if your attempt to say something original is… just bad???) For the inattentive hack, there’s a bottomless pantry of off-the-shelf idioms that can help you circumvent the effort and potential embarrassment of coming up with a new way to say something. I’m not particularly proud of “bottomless pantry of off-the-shelf idioms.” But I’m certain that it’s original!

This is, incidentally, why I oppose the use of large language models (LLMs) as writing tools. There are many other reasons to hate them, and I probably share those reasons. But ChatGPT and its butthole-themed competitors are an insult to writing as a skill that takes effort to improve. There has always been terrible writing, and LLMs are not the first technology to facilitate its mass production (see also: the internet, the movable-type printing press, literacy). But LLMs are uniquely destructive because they sever the connection between writing as an end result and writing as a process. They’re the ideal tool for anyone who is satisfied with exhausted and decaying forms of language. The act of querying a chatbot is less alchemy than necromancy: Words persist, stumbling mindlessly on in a parody of life, but the writer is dead.