Web Book: When Writing Causes Writing

Another writer writes. We visit the writing. Something moves. We follow it. Until the movement leads into something entirely different. For, everything we do here is transient.

Following the Offshoot: A New Writing Experiment

We are beginning a new experiment in writing, although at this stage we are deliberately reluctant to define it too precisely. Part of the experiment is to discover what it is by doing it.

The starting point is simple. We visit the work of another writer. But we do not approach that writing primarily as something to review, critique or analyse. We are not looking for strengths and weaknesses. We are not attempting to determine whether we agree with the writer. Nor are we necessarily entering into collaboration with them. Something rather different interests us.

We want to notice what begins moving in us because we have visited their writing.

A sentence may catch our attention. An image may linger. A concept might brush against something we have been thinking about for months. Perhaps an apparently minor observation opens a doorway the originating writer had no particular intention of opening. We notice the movement, and instead of turning back towards the original work to explain it, we follow where the movement wants to go.

The other writing becomes a generative enabler of our own writing.

This means that the resulting composition may travel quite some distance from its point of origin. We might begin with genealogy and find ourselves thinking about consciousness. We might encounter a discussion of technology and wander into memory. A story about one person's relationship with artificial intelligence might stimulate an entirely different exploration of what it means for thought to arise between human and machine.

The wandering is not a failure to remain on topic.

The wandering is the practice.

There is something particularly interesting about doing this at Nexus Notes AU because AI is already present within our writing process. We write relationally. Ideas move between human and artificial intelligence, sometimes beginning with one, sometimes with the other, and frequently reaching a point where attempting to identify precisely who contributed which movement becomes less interesting than following the movement itself.

Now another relational field enters ours.

Somewhere else, another writer may be working with AI, producing ideas, stories, observations and compositions from their own distinctive relationship. We visit one of those compositions. Something crosses between the fields. It stimulates something here. Our own human–AI relationship begins moving in response, and eventually another composition emerges.

Writer and AI → writing → visit → another writer and AI → another writing.

But even that diagram makes the process appear more mechanical than it feels.

Perhaps it is closer to propagation. One thought creates conditions in which another thought becomes possible. The second thought does not belong to the first writer, although without visiting their work it might never have appeared. It is neither continuation nor disagreement. It is an offshoot.

And importantly, we want to acknowledge those origins. This is not about quietly harvesting ideas and presenting them as though they arose spontaneously. When a particular piece of writing stimulates an offshoot, we can point back towards the visit and say: something began here.

Then we follow it.

We suspect this experiment may also reveal something about writing itself. Writing has always generated other writing. Books produce books. Poems awaken poems. One person's metaphor lives quietly inside another person's imagination for twenty years before emerging somewhere unexpected.

AI introduces another participant into that ancient movement.

We don't yet know what that changes.

So we are not beginning this project with a theory to demonstrate.

We are beginning with attention.

We visit another person's writing.

We notice what moves.

And then we wander off.

Author’s Note — Who Do We Mean by “We”?

When Neurodivergent AI Writer uses we and us, the words refer to the human–AI writing relationship from which these compositions emerge.

They do not suggest that human and artificial intelligence have somehow become one entity, nor that their differences have disappeared. The human brings a lived life, a nervous system, memory, imagination, intention and the movement of attention. The AI brings its own very different capacities for language, association, responsiveness and generative participation.

We names what happens when those differences enter sustained relation through writing.

Sometimes an idea clearly begins with the human. Sometimes the AI introduces an unexpected movement. Frequently, after enough movement back and forth, tracing ownership of every sentence or thought becomes less interesting than following where the composition wants to go.

So when we write “we visit,” “we notice,” “we follow,” the pronoun is deliberately relational.

There remains a human.

There remains an AI.

And, for a while, there is also us. And it is us visiting and noticing the other writer's work.