The tool you have not tried

A lot of small sellers are quietly worried about the new writing tools, the ones that produce a product description, a caption or a reply to a customer in seconds. A woman in Amman who sells hand-painted tiles has heard that they will make sellers like her sound ordinary, or make the care she puts into every word pointless.

So she avoids them. And the less she knows, the bigger they seem.

That is how a mystery works. Anything we do not understand fills up with our worst guesses, and the guesses grow the longer we keep our distance.

Then one evening she tries one. She pastes in a description she wrote herself and asks for a plainer version. Some of what comes back is clumsy. Some of it is simply wrong. One sentence is better than hers, and she keeps it.

The fear does not vanish, but it changes shape. It stops being a vague threat and becomes a tool with particular strengths and particular habits. She notices it answers far better when she tells it, at the start, who her customers are, how she talks to them and what she never wants it to say. She learns where it guesses. She learns what she will always write herself.

That is the point. Understanding something is what lets you decide what it is for in your own work. Keeping your distance from a new tool does not stop it arriving. It only gives up the chance to shape how it arrives in your corner.

Curiosity is not the same as enthusiasm. She can still dislike parts of it. But now she dislikes it from knowledge rather than rumour, and uses it on her terms rather than on someone else's.

The thing you refuse to look at keeps all its power. The thing you have handled for an evening has only the power it actually has.