Is ChatGPT your summer intern?
Can we use AI ethically to boost author creativity? Let's make those robots "werk" for us, I say!
Hello and Happy Wednesday. This is the weekly paid edition of Before and After the Book Deal. I have a special anniversary sale still going on for one more week if you would like to upgrade to paid and join us on our journey to make writing and publishing more empowering and fun.
Because I work as both a writer and a corporate namer naming brands and products, I’ve been privy to a LOT of hand wringing over AI and specifically, ChatGPT. I recognize that people are worried about it. I recognize that “worried” is an understatement. But as a woman in America, my plate of things to worry about is so full, I do not have the emotional capacity to get overwrought about AI. In fact, I decided that I would stay blissfully ignorant on the topic. I have not read the articles. I have not clicked the links. I haven’t visited whatever portal will take me to the place where all of this GPT Chat goes down.
Well, that changed last week. A month ago I handed in a draft of what I hoped would be a new novel to my agent. For a year now, I’ve been hard at work at what I think of as a “summer book.” A book that I’m hoping will match the pacing and readability of my first two novels, I AM HAVING SO MUCH FUN HERE and TOUCH. In other words, a book that actually sell copies in a bonkers market.1
You should know before I share this that I have a specific way of approaching revisions with my agent. Or rather I should say that she has had to develop a specific way of working on revisions with me, because I have a wonky approach to novel-writing. Basically, I have to write the same book over and over (and over once more) to find the book I want to write. When we first started working together in 2011, my agent and I worked on developmental edits in a hands-on, line-by-line way. This worked out really well for us because I’d already been working and reworking that book for ten years. But when we started book number two together, I exposed my agent to my unwieldy side, which initially saw her devoting editorial talent to drafts that I must have known—in my heart of hearts—were just placeholders for the real manuscript to come.
Today, 12 years after our first novel together, my agent is on to my Groundhog Day-approach to novel writing and she doesn’t get in the weeds with my initial drafts until—somewhere around draft 7—I land on the right book. It’s then, and only then, that we do the full developmental edit process that my agent excels at. Until then? She gives me big picture takeaways on whatever demented thing I’ve handed in, helping me little by little to find my way toward the book I need to write.
These big picture takeaways can range from a mood we need to carry over, to a value or agenda, or a character we love, who might not even exist yet. With my second novel, TOUCH we agreed that my main character had an unusual job, and that I should build the whole book around that job, which I eventually did. With the novel I’m currently working on, which would be my fourth novel, my agent picked out one exciting sentence that we should build the book around.
Some of you might be breaking into hives reading this admission. One sentence out of 70K words of sentences? I know. It sounds horrific. But shit: this is my process. I write the book to find the book—I know no other way. And lest you think that me writing a book over and over is a sloppy or rushed process, let me disabuse you of that assumption: I outline all my novel drafts according to a three-act structure. I make character portrayals for my main characters with meticulous notes about my characters’ wants, needs, goals, and psychological trauma(s) before I get to work. But even with this deliberate preliminary labor, I still need to write the book with different characters and tonalities and plot lines nearly seven times before I get the damn thing right.
While it was daunting to realize I needed to go back to square one, I didn’t break down after hearing from my agent. The 70K words I’d written, tinkered with so carefully, the characters and all of the layered backstories I dreamt up? Off to cupboard with them: it’s fine. The real problem was that when I returned to my desk to build the book around my one exciting sentence: I had no imagination left. I don’t want to scare you by admitting how many main characters I auditioned for the role of narrator, how many different tonalities and perspectives I have tried this book out in.2 Suffice it to say that I had no more ideas for wants/needs/psychological trauma and plot points because I’d tried them all.
While I was plum out of ideas and inspiration, I still had the desire to right the novel—no small thing!3 I had the determination and the skills and ego to make the dang thing work. But I had no more juice. I was, in the immortal words of Air Supply, all out of love.
I didn’t feel like I could ask my agent for plot points and motivations because this woman has seen this damn novel shapeshift so many times, I fear she worries for my sanity. And I couldn’t ask my friends because I don’t share my work with anyone. So, reader? I asked ChatGPT. Do you know what happened next?