by Gregg Winkler.
I started playing Wordle around the same time everyone else did. The world was still in the era of Covid, which had racked up millions of deaths. The American Capitol Building in Washington DC had been attacked by its own citizens. And we were all still reeling from the glass-bridge episode of Squid Games. These were difficult times. It is not surprising that the world needed something to bring it together. What was surprising, was that that thing would come in the guise of a guess-the-secret-word game.
For the few out there living under a rock, Wordle is a game where a player has six attempts to guess the day’s secret five-letter word. After each guess, the game tells you how close you are. If you guess a correct letter in the right location – the letter turns green. If you guess a correct letter but in the wrong location – that letter turns yellow.
I played every day. My wife and children played, too. We’d ask each other about our Wordles. It was common in our house to hear someone say something like, “Oh nice! COAST is a great word!” Or “Why would you guess FUGUE?!” It was nice imagining conversations like this happening in homes and businesses everywhere. It was a simple pleasure. There were no ugly politics involved, no threats of illness, no need to worry – it was a lovely, simple ritual to start the day.
Until, like something out of a 1980s James Cameron movie, it came along. Inhuman. Unfeeling. Wordlebot.
In 2023, I downloaded the New York Times games app to my cell phone. The games app comes with a half-dozen games; Wordle was one of them. The app also included the new Wordlebot feature. Wordlebot is a computer program that will analyze your Wordle guesses and assign them a score from 0-99 based on skillfulness, luck, and information obtained from the guess. As the Wordlebot does this, it also plays the game letting you know what it would’ve done in the same situation. When I first saw Wordlebot, I was fascinated. I loved the idea of this thing giving me feedback on whether LEMON or MELON was a better word. But it didn’t take long for me to learn an important fact about Wordlebot: Wordlebot is a prick. When analyzing my game, Wordlebot attributed my best attempts as lucky, not skillful, openly impugning my talent at guessing five-letter words. Other times, the ‘bot would say things like, “SWEAT wasn’t my favorite choice” – as though its choice of BETEL sent shivers down my spine. Then, invariably, if it took me five attempts to guess the day’s word, Worldbot got it in four. If it took me four guesses, Wordlebot took three – you get the idea. All I wanted was a cup of coffee and a fun ten minutes of gameplay – all Wordlebot wanted was to make me feel stupid and unworthy of dignity and respect.
While saner people were happy to just ignore the ‘bot, I ranted about it daily. My new mission was to beat it. I began compiling data from each day’s Wordle. First, since Wordlebot started each day with the word, CRANE, I began to use CRANE too. This was just to even the playing field. I knew that the secret to beating the ‘bot came with playing the perfect second word. Unfortunately, there are 243 potential outcomes for the first word, which means there are potentially 243 different “best” second words. Eventually, my notes began to pile up. Each day, I played CRANE, then based on the outcome of green and yellow letters, I’d comb through my pages until I found the best second word. I kept track of both my own second word guesses and the ‘bot’s. Wordlebot always picked a word ranking 99 in skillfulness. Day after day, game by game, the ‘bot and I began to tie. Rarely, would Wordlebot beat me – which makes sense, since we were mostly playing the same words. At first the ties were satisfying. But I rarely won. After months of joylessly checking and rechecking a handwritten spreadsheet of words, it dawned on me that I had become the very thing I hated: I had become a slower, balding, fleshy version of Wordlebot. Worse, the game was no longer fun. I had dissected the golden goose and wound up killing it.
But this wasn’t the first time I’d done this…
I first started writing when I was a young child. Distractions like the Internet didn’t exist yet, and we were too poor for video games, so I used to rewrite the movies that I loved. I wrote a version of Back to the Future which took place in the army. I rewrote Tim Burton’s Batman with a superhero I called the Night Knight. Writing, for me, was a sanctuary from school bullies, my parents’ constant fighting, and your typical pubescent insecurities. I cranked out story after story. I would write a single draft and immediately put it a drawer never to be read or revised. I couldn’t be bothered. All I wanted to do was get the stories out of my head and onto a page.
Those early days taught me a lot about writing, but it was when I was 16 years-old that I started making an effort to get my work published. This meant researching, revising, editing, and proofreading. Submitting my work became a part of the process, and at first, everything was rejected. After my eighteenth birthday, though, I published my first article in my local newspaper. Through college, I had some luck with journalism and academic writing. In my twenties, I started publishing nonfiction, fiction, and poetry on a regular basis. I was getting better at crafting what people wanted to read and finding markets for my work. Despite this, I didn’t want to just write publishable stories and articles, I wanted to be a truly great writer.
After grad school, I began devouring great books on the craft of storytelling. For years, I read them all, studying their wisdom. Dwight Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer, Robert McKee’s Story, and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird to name just a few. These books broke down the craft of storytelling and laid bare the nuts and bolts of spinning yarns. I could see how the moving parts worked in the stories, novels, and movies I loved – but as my knowledge grew, my own writing deteriorated.
I began having a harder and harder time writing fiction. I was plagued by self-doubt through the entire drafting process. I just couldn’t live up to the experts’ expectations. If I sat down to write, all I could think was: “Does my protagonist have enough motivation? Am I incorporating poignant symbolism? Are my words capturing the emotional weight of the scene?” I would write a few thousand words, then abruptly give up, knowing that what I was writing wasn’t perfect, and I was wasting everyone’s time, including my own. Sometimes, I would embark on meticulously planning and outlining a work. I did this with three novels. I’d spend more than a year planning, tweaking, free associating, and trying everything to find the perfect balance of characterization, plot, pacing, theme – so that by the time I felt ready to sit down and actually begin writing the piece – the entire story was dead to me. The words just laid there lifeless on the page like a cadaver. I would quit writing out of pure boredom. Years passed, and it became obvious to me – no matter how much I wanted to write – I had killed whatever was inside me that made it possible.
And I had done the same thing with Wordle. I had taken a thing – a small joy in a world increasingly more and more tumultuous and uncertain – and in an attempt to perfect it, I had killed all the pleasure in it. I had a habit of disregarded Voltaire’s warning that “The best is the enemy of the good.” Was I doomed to take the things I loved and turn them into passionless automatic processes in which the outcomes were dry and predictable?
Perhaps… but! They say naming a problem is the first step in overcoming it. In the decade that I struggled to write decent fiction, I also wrote a lot of essays – very similar to the way I dashed off stories as a teenager. I’d write a couple thousand words about everything from observations regarding the news to my ideas about the challenges behind losing weight. Even as I wrote them, I never intended them to be seen again. Not even by me. But with having had some success with writing articles in the past, and with the amount of fulfillment I’m currently feeling writing these new essays, I thought I might try my hand at writing nonfiction for publication. My initial knee-jerk reaction, of course, was to read a couple of books about essay writing – but I stopped myself before I started. I read nonfiction for the sheer enjoyment of it. I know what I like. I know what I don’t. With my tendencies, I do not need some random freelancer telling me what I need to do to write the perfect essay. Instead, I’m willfully walking into the world of nonfiction naively, but with eyes wide open, eager to learn. I’m sure I’m making mistakes, but I will learn from those mistakes. Sitting and writing six pages (or eight… or ten…) hasn’t been a chore lately. Instead, it’s exciting. I feel like a kid again.
I’ve also given up on beating Wordlebot. In fact, I don’t look to see how my day’s guesses compare with the computer program anymore. I no longer use CRANE as my starting word. Now I choose some random five letter word, usually one that I can see from where I’m sitting (TABLE, SHIRT, RADIO – all good starting words). My goal isn’t to guess the right word in as few guesses as possible, but to solve the puzzle in six or fewer tries from any random five letter word. I no longer care how skillful or lucky my guesses are. And the game has become more joyful for me.
In fact, my new daily routine is really working for me. These days, I start my day with a cup of coffee, the day’s Wordle, and then I begin tinkering with whatever essay or article is tickling my fancy. Today, as you can see, I worked on an article about my animosity toward the Wordlebot. Tomorrow, I have an idea about the government shutdown’s effect on federal employees (I’m one of them). I also have an idea about Tom Petty I’d like to write. I’ve got a lot of ideas in my head. And right now, I’m happy just to see them on the page – whether they’re written perfectly or not.