Wait, what? After all the times I’ve told you to give yourself grace and stop pushing yourself as if you were a machine, I turn around and tell you this? Is this a troll?
Well, no, but yes. You have no idea how much I’m imagining thinking of the look on all your faces right now. This is probably because I felt better in the past, and also I’ve been home 10 days in the last thirty and I’m tired, which means I turn into a 12 year old.
But also no, because honestly, there are times to be a machine and times to give yourself grace.
Okay, if you’re a relatively new writer, have never written out of your comfort zone in either time or genre or even subject: if you’re a writer who only writes, oh, I don’t know, a single series, or a very specific subgenre… You need to be a machine.
How do you become a machine? Well, you set yourself hard times and dare to be bad.
You set a goal for yourself, like say, writing a book a month, or a short story a week. (I’d advise the took. Even at 20k words, it will sell better than the short story.) And then you do it.
BUT what if you’re sick, the ideas won’t gel, your cat is ill, and your boyfriend just told you you’re ugly?
It don’t make no never mind. Write the thing, hit the deadline. It doesnt’ have to be good. it has to be finished. Set them up and knock them down. and do it for six months or a year, enough to knock the “but I can’t” paint off you.
Look, inspiration or how good you feel have zero correlation to how good the book is.
Will all books written when you’re just being a machine good? Well, no. Some will suck the purest suckitude that ever sucked. And yet, the more you hit those deadlines, the more you keep going, you’ll eventually realize these books are better than the ones you wrote with all the time and very carefully.
How do you get ideas? Ideas are easy. Open the dictionary and take the first likely noun as main character, the first likely verb as the problem, and the other likely name as setting. Try to find them in three consecutive random dictionary openings. Or heck, ping me, and I’ll send you a prompt. Sometimes you have to stretch the prompt, like if your character is “Train” and you’re not writing Thomas the Tank Engine fanfic, you’ll need someone nicknamed Train. And if the problem is hunger, they can hunger (and thirst for the truth.) Or open a book — for this it’s best it be either poetry or the Bible (and not the begats) — and take a quote or two, then come up with a story around it. Or, of course, just do the “random three word challenge.”
How you start doesn’t matter much, nor does it how often you think “This is stupid”. Just keep hitting until you get the right word length and don’t worry too much about it.
Hitting the deadlines will give you a boost on endorphins, and you’ll feel better anyway, and if you keep doing it, even if you think the stories are crappy, you’ll relax and then you’ll get better.
So be a machine. BTW this also applies if you fell off the horse. I need to be a machine for a while, and just write. I need to write what I want to write, but you need to do it till the habit reestablishes.
Writing is as much as anything else a discipline. It’s like exercising or dancing. I don’t care how much you don’t feel like it, you have to do it every day, preferably at the same time.
Now once you’re in the habit, if you need to take a day or two off, don’t be a machine. Give yourself grace.
BUT don’t take too many days off, or you’ll have to be a machine for a while again.
Look, it’s like this, we’re not creatures of the mind only, no matter how much we’d like to. The body has a change. And bodies are creatures of habit. So you have to train the habit.
Now I’ll tell you the honest truth, I’ve been a member of a 54 challenge group three times — you write 54 short stories in a year. Again, I don’t think that is a good idea now. So maybe a 12 club? Unless you’re burning up Rac press submissions — and no one writes 54 — except one person once — or even 53 stories, but the average was 48 to 50. Unavoidable emergencies stopped the rest, but the writing still got done, because we were being machines.
Or if you prefer, we were training the body and the brain on the skill.
I’m not telling you it’s pleasant or you’ll enjoy it, or that every story will be spun gold. But I’m telling you that you’ll be better. And you’ll train yourself to write stories on time and to finish them.
Now go and be a machine for a while.
Mad Genius Club 
21 responses to “You ARE a Machine”
Welcome to AI.
Because that’s literally what you do there. Put in the prompt, have it write. Pretty soon you’ll have 100k words or more. That’s the easy part, and Amazon, Nook, and heck, the fanfic sites are being flooded with it.
Now comes the hard part: Reading through it, deciding if it tells the story you want told the way you want to tell it, and either prompting again or manually rearranging. AI is your first draft,
Or tell the AI to adopt the persona of a supportive but honest fan of your genre. Write a bit. Feed it to the ai. Ask for its opinions. Correct any typos or other obvious foulups it finds. Debate with it what the next bit will be. Cheered by the ai waving its insincere little pompoms on your behalf, write some more.
It’s finding an accurate persona for that. I promise you that the NYT Book Review will be happy to sell you one. So will the Hugo Awards. AI personas reflect the biases of their programmers / trainers / “parents”.
I think choosing a specific author or subgenre for the ai to fanboy over helps with that bias somewhat, as does the ai’s natural sycophancy. but of course, you always have to take these protocol droids with a grain (or thousand) of salt.
THIS. What I said.
I probably need to write a post about this, because I told Claude to write separate markdowns for it, one to roleplay as a reader of Golden Age mysteries (for my ruritanian mystery project) and one as a fan of Jane Austen variations (for the P&P IN SPAAAACE project) and although I don’t always agree with the resulting feedback, it mostly comes off as reasonable things for fans to want, like the mystery reader persona wondering when the murder will happen, during the 3k-4k words of setup introducing the sleuths, the Austen fanfic reader leaning into known plot expectations. (Claude: “blah blah Jane Bennet…” Me: “there is no Jane Bennet in this story, only Georgiana’s love interest Jack Bennet.” Claude: “you’re absolutely right! Blah blah blah”)
Be very careful with this one. First because some (Anthropic) have weird terms of service. Second because AI is trained to vlaue what the ESTABLISHMENT thinks is good, not the actual readers.
Certainly, people who write darker content than I do, or close enough to the real world to discuss real politics or real crimes, are better off with Grok than my buddy Claude. The other less censored llms consist of a couple of lines of models made in the PRC, and one (Mistral) made by Frogs, so Grok wins by default.
The hard part: I can now identify AI written FAN FICTION. It’s wonderful, beautiful, ring your heart out language…. about nothing. Like, you literally can’t determine who killed whom in a murder mystery.
BUT the language is gorgeous. This is because the training values “acclaimed” books.
My impression is that “can’t tell who did what” this is more of a problem with the models’ general coherence (a side effect of what they are) than with training specifically. I always figured the pretty prose came from the same place as the em-dashes: the llms having the whole of Gutenberg.org thrust down feet-first down their gullets. But you could be wrote.
Right, not wrote. Sigh.
I’m horribly tempted to try using AI to write a Pride and Prejudice cozy, just to see if it’s possible, but that also feels like tapping a mine just to see if it will erupt into a carpening…
That said, November is ‘Paint the Tank’ month for me, so I probably shouldn’t?
I’m having to do that this year. My schedule is off, other things are off, and for the first time in a long while I’m having to push myself to put rump in chair and just write. Staring off into space, or vacuuming the house again (again), or doing (unneeded) yard work are not word productive.
right now my biggest issue is keeping Havey from bepissing everything. Sigh. I have to bring out the (very mild) shock mats. I hate to, but….
This is for me today for sure. The retail job is sucking every bit of energy and discipline out of me, and it makes no sense to quit.
Learning how to write–in this case finish a story that’s in the editing stage–like a machine is just what I need to hear. It reminds me that all writers struggle with things, and still create.
Thanks, Sarah.
And then even if it’s a fool of a Took, we can still love it!
…
Oh come on like I could miss that one?
I was expecting “those who do not schedule maintenance will have it scheduled for them.” ^.^
Isn’t this the primary reasoning behind NaNoWriMo? I know it’s defunct now, but I’m still trying to write a 50K novel this month. A shade under 8000 words as of today. Is anyone else doing this?
Also, I am finding AI to be quite frustrating. Claude was too limited, even with the paid plan and kept forcing me to pause, and the direction seemed to have gone downhill in the past month before I left. But Grok is a right PITA and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to make it give good advice. I’ll try having it adopt the persona of a fan of my genre.
yes. It was.
It’s not defunct because it’s a thing to do, not an organization. I did it several times without signing up anywhere.
I mostly use ChatGPT to ask bizarre questions that really wouldn’t work in a more normal search engine but that are related to writing ideas. As that I’ve found it helpful, but as always you have to make sure you put all the needed information in.
Rory’s Story Cubes can be fun.
But know yourself. If you must write every single day to ensure you keep on writing, figure it out. If you must post progress every single day to keep yourself honest about writing every day, figure it out. (There was a time when I would make up days after, by having a quota, but posting progress kept me more on the straight and narrow.)