For as long as I can remember, all I wanted to do was write. I was the kid sitting in class writing stories and doodling pictures of dragons. I had notebooks filled with attempted novels. I’m sure my teachers didn’t know what to do with me: I didn’t know what to do with me either. Being a writer didn’t feel like a real thing you were allowed to do; and even if it did, I had no idea how to get there.
Fighting Words would have known what to do with me. The fact that this supplement exists, that it is full to the brim of amazing writing, is nothing short of amazing. But it represents only a fraction of the work that Fighting Words does for young writers. Fighting Words gives writers confidence, support and a community that shares their passion. The writers bring everything else. Most importantly, they bring the stories.
Stories are places where imagination meets empathy. That is no small thing. When you tell a story, you are stepping into the shoes of a character. Not only that, you are declaring that they matter, that the world they inhabit is worthy of attention and that their concerns are worth listening to. You are saying that what happens to them is important and if the reader pays close attention, they might just feel something too.
Stories are precious and storytellers are magical. And they have never been more important. We are all fighting for our own attention spans. We know that social media is bad for us, that short-form video content is addictive and that blue light keeps us awake before bed. Knowing that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with.
READ MORE
I often find my attention wandering away from me, my hand moving to pick my phone up before I realise what it is doing. Every second we spend thinking is precious. And writing is an act of thinking. It claws back something essential, something that is only for us.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is a threat to writers. It is been trained off our work, scraping it from social media and pirated libraries without paying us. This supplement will probably find its way into its great jaws some time in the near future. AI chatbots cannot exist without this fundamental theft. But, more than that, generative AI robs us of our chances to think.
Here’s the thing: writing isn’t always fun. Sometimes, it’s infuriating. Sometimes, you put your heart and soul into a piece and it doesn’t come out the way you want it to. You can’t let that stop you. You pick up the pen, you try again. It is work, but it is a labour of love. Every single writer published here has put in hours of work that you cannot see.
‘The stories that you will read in this supplement are alive. They breathe. They are human. The sheer creative power contained in a single one could never be replicated by AI’
Without work, without thought, without empathy and imagination, there is no story. There are only words. The writing that is produced by a generative AI chatbot is a dead thing, something that is less than the sum of it’s parts. The stories that you will read in this supplement are alive. They breathe. They are human. The sheer creative power contained in a single one could never be replicated by AI.
Writers do not write to be published, they write because they have something to say. They have a story or a poem that lives inside them, and it has to come out. But it is important that they are published so we get the chance to hear them. And there’s nothing quite like seeing your name in print.
So, open these pages up and prepare to be transported to another world. And I mean, really: prepare. A story is not complete until it is read. Come to them with an adventuring mind, ready for wherever they bring you.
[ Friend From Foe: A story by Líle-Grace Mullan, age 15, DublinOpens in new window ]
You will read stories that play with genre: blending it, subverting it, refusing the label altogether. You will move from pieces that span space and time to stories that take place on a phone screen. Some give weight to the everyday, and others that treat the end of the world like it’s just another day at the office. There are experiments in form and in content, and the writers are not afraid to mix the funny with the dark. They are not afraid of big philosophical questions either.
When we write, we transform the three dimensional world around us into lines of text. It’s transfiguration, alchemy, a magic trick. Good writers know how to play with the minds of their readers. Great writers let willing readers do the work for them. Because reading is also about imagination and empathy. We want to feel, to learn, to laugh, to cry. To not take our lives for granted, to be given a new lens to view the world.
When we read and when we write, the big problems become solvable. Not by ourselves, but together – with imagination and empathy.
This essay was published in The Irish Times Fighting Words magazine, a collection of stories, poems and essays by young and international writers
