“Writing is a core human activity.”
How writing in 2026 is more private than public. (Issue #450)
Last week, we discussed the findings in Medium’s 2026 State of Writing Report, including the rise of AI tools that writers have been using as part of their process. This week, we wanted to dig deeper into the why.
We grabbed some time with Medium’s Scott Lamb, about the impetus behind the report, its findings, and where writing might go from here.
Writing is an act of compression, while my thoughts naturally expand outward through association.
— Varyanne Sika, The Anatomy of a Rabbit Hole: How Reading Oscar Wilde Changed the Way I Think About Thinking
A tumultuous time for writing
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Medium Newsletter: Why did you commission a State of Writing Report? Why at Medium was it important to do this pulse check?
Medium VP of Content Scott Lamb: It’s just an unbelievably tumultuous time for writing right now. The Internet is changing so quickly with the advent of AI-powered tools. It’s changing the way that Medium works. It’s changing the way that people find stories and the way that people create stories. We wanted to go deeper than what we’ve been reading in coverage from other places and get firsthand data — not just in the Medium community, but beyond. We wanted to get a representation of writers at large, wherever they may be doing their work.
Given The Harris Polls’ reputation and their long standing authority in the space, they just seemed like a great fit. They were super excited to help us put it together.
MNL: We discussed this in last week’s newsletter, but one of the most interesting findings is that 71% of writers use AI tools in some part of the process. These tools are everywhere — for example, we’re using a transcription service to record this interview. Was that finding surprising to you?
Lamb: I was surprised. I feel like I shouldn’t have, given the conversation around AI is sort of omnipresent.
MNL: And yet the survey found we’re seeing more writing overall. In the report, you called it a “private writing revival” because so much of this writing is actually happening privately now, versus people publishing publicly. Why do you think that is? Or do you think it was always this way?
Lamb: I think it’s probably safe to say that private writing has always been a relatively big part of how people write. Journaling, keeping a diary, writing drafts that never see the light of day — we know from just looking at Medium’s data that there’s a huge number of unpublished drafts on the site.
But the other thing that we are seeing — and this has been a trend pre-AI — is that there has been a retreat from the public internet. People are taking writing to WhatsApp groups, text threads, or other shared safe spaces. And I think that AI is just fueling that already existing dynamic where people don’t want to be putting out thoughts that in two or three years time will come back to haunt them.
The private writing revival
MNL: Was this trend of writing entering more private spaces instead of writing in public the impetus behind TK?
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Lamb: Definitely, but I think also a big part of TK was that we just wanted to make writing easier for people in some way. We wanted to find a space where we could just lower the bar for entry.
MNL: Do you think some of this blurring of the lines between writing and being a capital-W Writer is part of why we’re seeing this revival?
Lamb: I believe everyone is a writer. I was at a public event a couple of months ago and just asked for a show of hands: “How many people in the audience consider themselves writers?” And two or three people raised their hands. Then I said: “Well, how many of you have written something in the last day or so, from an email to a text? How many of you have done the act of writing a notebook?” Obviously, everyone’s hands go up.
One of the primary ways that we understand the world is through reading. And one of our primary ways of expressing our ideas is through writing. That’s a very core human activity.
The best thing you can do, to improve your writing, is to read it aloud while you’re working on it.
— Susan Orlean in The Medium Handbook, The Simplest Way to Improve as a Writer
The future of writing
MNL: Do you have any predictions about what you’ll find in the 2027 State of Writing Report?
Lamb: I assume that AI as a tool people are using in a lot of the writing and reading is going to continue. I hope that the thing that we’re talking about in 2027 is more clarity and disclosure about how and when those tools have been used. You know, “Here’s my statement of how I use AI and how AI shows up in my work.”
I hate the idea that people are going to start writing to AI. I mean changing their voice to avoid AI detection or to avoid sounding like AI. That was something that showed up in this report already. It was a real bummer to see that some folks that we spoke with have lost confidence in their writing and that their voice has changed based on AI.
The other thing I’ll be really curious about: Where are we seeing more positive use cases? We have a lot of really AI-skeptical writers on Medium who are, for good reason, mad about how their writing has been stolen by these companies and used for training. But we’ve had some examples on TK, which has some AI components in it, where some folks in the Medium community who’ve been pretty outspoken about AI in general use TK and have a moment of, “Oh, maybe I have this project that I want to work on, and I have 50 essays on Medium that speak to it. I want to understand some of the through lines.”
And I’m really hopeful that a year from now, there are going to be a lot more of those types of use cases and a lot less focus on people just using AI to generate writing whole cloth. That seems like the most boring and least valuable possible use.
Why bother doing that? There’s a lot more interesting work to be done in the world.
A final thought
On the topic of losing confidence in your writing, we wanted to share this recent piece by Jahde Vaccani. She argues in Writelicious that writer’s block isn’t actually real, but instead a signal that maybe what we’re writing isn’t in the right direction, or has been complicated by our feelings. She writes:
Your writing isn’t great yet. Tell me — how many years did you study to get where you are? From school to graduation, post-graduation, and the years of work experience? How do you go from being an intern to a senior? Yes, it takes time. And this time changes from person to person. Never compare yourself. We’ll always take the time needed for things to be just right, in their place, and as great as they can be. There’s absolutely no shortcut.
Interested in more thinking on writing? Check out the Writing topic to read fellow Medium writers on this “core human” craft.
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Edited and produced by brandon echter and Carly Rose Gillis.
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