Words I Keep Deleting From AI Drafts
There are words that will appear again and again in the drafts you receive from your AI writing partner. I’ve taken to deleting them all.
What I’d love to do is provide an ever-evolving list of words to include in the next draft and then just see what it comes up with. Use “waddle” and “devour” and “lemonade” and “nightcap” in this next chapter. It would be like spot the word. It might not work, but it’s these kind of playful experiments that I’d like to push myself to do more. I want to find new ways to dislodge the AI’s tendency towards repetition and redundancy.
Some genres like fables (or certain subversive strains of literary fiction) are great platforms for making up words, which could be fun to experiment with too. I remember in one of my creative writing seminars as an undergrad that we had to create a nonsense poem similar to the Jabberwocky and I wrote one called “Flirted Brabbles.”
Anyway, here’s the list that I came up with on the spot. I’ll add more to it later:
Assessment
Filed
Grammar
Inventory
Particular
Precise
Register
Specific
Sternum
Thought
That last one is only somewhat of a joke, because there is a lot of irritating “thinking,” especially at the end of chapters. Such as this:
“He thinks about the glass. August's handprints on the cold grey panel, amber on the thermal cameras, the same gesture for eleven years. He thinks about the mark on Edmund's collarbone and the mark on Jamie's shoulder and whatever the two marks mean in relation to each other, which he doesn't fully understand yet.
He thinks about Percy by the dry riverbed.
He thinks: I know what it needs. I am not it.”
Even though the passage above is from the planning discussions and NOT the drafting process, there is a tendency for AI to describe characters thinking in this looping way, often at the end of sections or chapters, and it never works. I always delete these entire passages. It’s not only dull and reductive, but also heavy-handed, treating the reader like someone who needs constant reminders of what has happened and what a character is thinking. It stalls a story’s momentum and flattens the characters. I haven’t yet found a way to dissuade my AI creative partner from using these “thinking” passages in the first place, but I’d like to test out a kind of Commandments list, some Thou Shalt Nots and see how that goes.
But so far, when things have been going well, I’ve tried not to rock the boat too much, opting to delete sections that I don’t like and aggressively edit the rest into a shape I do like. I’m nearing the second book’s completion, so maybe I can try this with the next one, or try it with a short story of some kind.
[Art style inspiration for the post image: Futurism]
