Unfortunately the step of shoving an elephant into a shoebox is where you figure out what you actually wanted to say. Without that, you're just left with the absolutely worst version possible of the shittiest tier hack writer ever.

And you can't really edit that into something good, because the AI doesn't really understand what you're trying to do. If you want a heist, the AI doesn't understand what you like about heists or how this one fits into the larger genre, it just repeats the whole plot of "Ocean's 11” or whatever.

All it can do is fill in the blanks with other people's work, and even that is something it does by rote. So you're not editing your own thoughts, which are formed by other fiction but also nonfiction and your own experiences and your thoughts on how to connect it all, just a lot of word vomit.

Come up with a neat concept -> feed a synopsis or whatever to an AI -> get a draft you can refine into something good. Except it doesn't work that way. If you ask gen AI what's 2+2, it doesn't do math. It finds that statistically speaking most people adding 2+2 get 4 as a result.

Once I've refined it enough, I post it to avoid getting stuck on an eternal loop of rearranging commas. As I said, that's my own personal process, but I'm pretty sure a whole lot of writers find the translation stage maddening, too. So it's really tempting to want to outsource that stage.

Eventually I can start moving into the refining stage. Other people will write a whole draft first but I can't do that. This is where things get fun again. I go over the stuff I wrote and try to find ways to say it better. Often this is where I figure out what I wanted to say all along.

while harming the elephant as little as possible. Of course the elephant resists it most of the time. Often I'll find out some of my concepts don't fit together. Whole plot points and characters are thrown out and added. At some point I just want to set everything on fire.

general idea of the plot and characters, I sit down and write. This is the hardest and most frustrating part by far. I'm gonna call it the translation stage, because I have to translate my fun ideas into writing. It feels like having to cram a whole elephant into an indestructible shoebox

So my creative process has three stages. First is the daydreaming stage, where I come up with an idea and think about it. It's like Agatha Christie getting ideas when washing the dishes. Doing something with your body fires up the creativity! To me this is the fun part. Then, when I have a

If this isn't the stupidest career-fouling way to try to make a couple hundred bucks or so, it's definitely in the top five. Deeply embarrassing. It got me thinking of gen AI and the creative process though. This is about my own process because that's what I know. 🧵