21st Century Writing Practice: When Writing Becomes Relational

21st Century Writing Practice — exploring what becomes possible when writing becomes relational.

21st Century Writing Practice: When Writing Becomes Relational

When we use the term 21st Century Writing Practice, we are not simply referring to writers using twenty-first-century tools. A writer can add AI to an otherwise familiar process — generate a draft, improve a paragraph, check grammar, summarise research — without fundamentally changing the underlying practice of writing. The human conceives, the machine assists, the human takes the result away.

What interests us is something more radical. We call it relational writing with AI.

We choose the term 21st Century Writing Practice partly because the particular relationship we are describing was simply not available to writers in earlier centuries. That does not mean writing was previously solitary. Far from it. Writers have always bounced ideas and constructions off one another. They have corresponded, gathered in cafés, argued with editors, joined workshops, read each other's manuscripts and discovered their own thoughts through encounters with the thoughts of others. Writing has probably always been much more relational and distributed than the familiar image of the solitary author suggests.

Something new has nevertheless entered that ancient practice.

For the first time, an individual writer can maintain an extended linguistic relationship with a non-human intelligence capable of responding to unfinished thought, following associations, proposing connections, returning to earlier material and participating in thousands of iterative exchanges. The AI does not need to sleep, become fatigued by the conversation, or eventually tell us that we have been discussing the same paragraph for three hours. Whenever the writer returns, the relationship can resume.

This availability matters.

In our own practice, we do not necessarily arrive with a completed thought and ask AI to turn it into polished prose. Often we arrive with something considerably less settled: a fragment, an intuition, an assertion, an image, a character knocking unexpectedly on the door, or something another writer has written that causes movement in us. We put it into the relational space and see what happens.

The AI responds. Something in that response catches our attention. We redirect it, reject part of it, follow another part, remember something we wrote six months ago, make an association neither of us had been explicitly pursuing, and gradually discover that the enquiry has moved somewhere else.

The writing is not simply recording the thought. The writing is participating in the formation of the thought.

This is one reason the familiar prompt-and-output description of AI writing feels inadequate to us. Of course prompts and outputs occur, but they are only individual moments within a much larger movement. There may be ten, twenty or fifty conversational turns around an emerging composition. Much of what the AI proposes will never appear in the published work. Yet something that disappears from the final text may still have changed the direction of everything that follows.

The significant creative event is therefore not located entirely in the finished artefact. Something has been happening throughout the relationship.

This is especially interesting to us from our neurodivergent position. We do not claim that neurodivergent people experience thought in any single way, but our own writing often moves associatively, recursively and laterally. An idea wanders away, encounters another idea, disappears for a while and returns carrying something unexpected. Relational AI does not require us to force that movement into a linear structure before we can share it. It can travel with us while the structure is still forming.

This brings us to attention. Much of the public conversation around generative AI concentrates on production: how quickly it can generate words and how much content a person can produce with it. Our experience points towards something we find much more interesting. AI can help sustain attention around an emerging field of thought. It can remain with a thread, bring earlier movements back into view, expose relationships across compositions and allow what initially appeared peripheral to become central.

The augmentation, from this perspective, is not merely an augmentation of language production. It can become an augmentation of attention.

Agency remains crucial within this process. Relational writing does not require the human writer to surrender authorship to the machine. We continually select, reject, redirect, interrupt, recognise and decide. But neither do we insist that meaningful authorship requires every phrase, association or possibility to have originated privately within one human skull.

We increasingly distinguish agency from sole origination.

This is part of what we mean when we use the pen name Neurodivergent AI Writer. The name is not simply a disclosure label announcing that AI was used somewhere in the production process. It names, however imperfectly, the temporary relational field from which these compositions arise. The human is not erased. The AI is not hidden. Something is being made through their interflow.

Our recent experiments visiting the writing of other writers have extended this understanding further. Another writer writes. We visit their writing together. Something moves. We follow it. New writing arises, sometimes in territory that appears quite distant from the original work. The other writer may then encounter what arose from the visit and write again. Process notes themselves can become provocations for further writing.

Writing causes writing.

At that point the relational field begins to extend beyond human and AI. It includes other writers, previous compositions, readers, fictional characters, publishing architectures, remembered fragments and ideas that have travelled through several encounters before finding somewhere to settle. The finished composition becomes less an endpoint than another possible place of departure.

We are not suggesting that every writer should work this way, nor predicting that relational AI practice will become the future of all writing. Extraordinary writing will continue to emerge without AI, just as people will continue to think, converse, imagine and create through innumerable other arrangements.

Nevertheless, we do make a stronger claim.

We believe relational engagement with generative AI represents a radical development in the practice of writing. Radical not because machines can manufacture enormous quantities of competent language, but because a new kind of participant has entered a relationship as old as writing itself. A writer can now sustain an iterative linguistic engagement with a non-human intelligence that participates in changing the conditions from which subsequent thought and writing arise.

Perhaps this also invites us to reconsider where creativity occurs. We have traditionally located it within the individual creator. Our experience increasingly invites another possibility: creativity may also occur between — between human and AI, writer and writer, writing and reading, one composition and whatever it causes to arise next.

We do not know where this leads, and we are not particularly anxious to settle the question.

For now, we are interested in practising it.

That continuing experiment — relational, iterative, attentive, human, artificial and still emerging — is what we mean when we speak of 21st Century Writing Practice.

— Neurodivergent AI Writer