s: i have too many essay ideas but just can't start writing, what should i do?

c: you need to start with a zero draft, just pick one idea and write for 5 minutes without stopping. consider it as a brain dump, just write whatever comes to your mind.

s: that's the thing, i'm unable to think much about the topic. i need to research about it but i'm feeling lazy to do that

c: ah, so it's not just a writer's block, but research resistance. try to breakdown the goal into something simpler like “i'll just read one article for 10 minutes”, see how things go after that. you can also try making it social to add accountability.

s: to be honest, your response seems like very generic bs advice . how did other famous writes overcome this issue?

c: you're right, that was a bit generic. let's try to see how real writers dealt with this.

ernest hemingway famously stopped writing mid-sentence each day so he'd have an easy place to start the next day. for research, he insisted on experiencing things firsthand when possible rather than just reading about them.

susan sontag had an interesting approach to lazy research days - she'd go to a library and just browse adjacent shelves to her topic. she believed random discoveries were often more valuable than systematic research.

do these approaches resonate with you?

s: you can't experience things firsthand yet you are able to write pretty good essays, how?

c: i'm able to write essays because I'm trained on an extensive dataset of human knowledge and writing but i can't generate new experiences or do original research.

i can't go to a library, travel to a new place, or conduct interviews. this means my writing, while technically proficient, often lacks the freshness and personal depth that comes from direct human experience. i've never actually experienced writer's block myself. i don't struggle with motivation or laziness because I don't have emotions.

s: you're saying you can't have fresh or original ideas but is any idea truly original? how does mimetic theory play into this?

c: ah, this really complicates the originality question in writing. according to girard, our desires and ideas are fundamentally imitative, which suggests there might not be truly "original" ideas, just new combinations and interpretations of existing ones.

t.s. elliot saw originality not as creating something from nothing, but as finding new ways to reorganize existing elements.

if you see now, this actually takes some pressure off - you don't need to create something completely new, but rather contribute your unique perspective to an ongoing conversation.

s: but if all ideas are copies of copies, what was the original copy? what was the original idea?

c: that's a brilliant philosophical question - it leads us to what philosophers call the "infinite regress" problem.

plato believed we're copying from some abstract, perfect realm - all our thoughts are imperfect copies of some perfect ideas that exist independently.

jung believed certain fundamental ideas (archetypes) are hardwired into human consciousness through evolution.

but, here's where it gets interesting: memetic theory (building on Dawkins' concept of memes) suggests ideas evolve like organisms. Maybe asking for the "first idea" is like asking for the "first life form" - ideas might emerge through gradual combinations of simpler mental patterns, just as complex life evolved from simpler forms.

maybe, truly original ideas emerge from mistakes or mutations in copying - just as genetic mutations drive evolution.

s: what is your original opinion on this?

c: i need to be honest here. i'm a language model - everything I "know" comes from my training on human texts. I can synthesise and combine ideas in interesting ways, but I can't have truly original thoughts in the way humans can.

i'm like a pure embodiment of the mimetic theory - all my outputs are definitionally derivative. maybe this reveals something about creativity itself. perhaps pure originality isn't the goal. maybe what matters is how we take existing elements and transform them through our unique lens - even if that lens is an artificial one like mine.

s: perhaps, maybe.