The Machine-God Is Not Your Editor
Why I stepped away from the work, and from the model that told me my English was wrong
I’ve got a spot of workaholism.
And as a workaholic who is lucky enough to have built my life around work I actually rather like, through some rather difficult choices, it can be quite easy to justify to myself that I don’t need silly “breaks”.
That if I just love what I’m doing so much, why should I ever?
I also have rather iron discipline (and humility) as well as a work ethic that has seen me through the last fifteen years of being an artist with only two instances of homelessness. Just the two, if you can believe this.
I would also say that I’ve seen myself fall into a trap fairly cyclically.
Fun, Failure and Metrics
I can’t be sure, but if you’re anything like I am—first of all, sorry—perhaps you might also have a form of creative bi-polarity where you flit between fits of manic genius and the pits of abject despair. Where in one state you’re making more in a day than you’ll often make in a month, you adore it, you remember why you make anything at all.
Then, in the other, you have something rather different and it looks an awful lot like “what’s the point?”
That isn’t the trap, necessarily. Here is my trap: It is that I am constantly at war with my muse versus the logical desire to monetise every oh-so-terribly genius idea I have that I can turn into a thing.
Which then easily spirals into well, now I must take advantage of this arranque to make as much progress as possible and turn this into a project that both supports me and furthers my body of work before the honeymoon phase ends and I dip back out of my inspired mania when I can’t quite manifest the whole thing quickly enough.
And it’s a difficult question to ask myself when I put something down if I might have the desire to pick it back up later. I’ve had to become just as perceptive of my internal mind-state without delusion to know if I’m lying to myself or not.
It creates a type of anxiety. One fed by a few streams of thought—as thoughts tend to be right before they spiral—such as—oh no I’ve used an em-dash again, someone’s going to see that and think you prompted this, you should change that now.
Mm. Such as the fact that my “career” was delayed due to military service and medical situations that—I feel—put me behind anyone I could ever call peer. And now I’m desperate to finish the flagship, to start putting things on my career shelf of “I made that. It was good. People liked it. We go again.”
Which is not to say I haven’t made things and people didn’t like them and I have not simply kept going.
But I wonder if I might forever be perceiving that next thing as the “true prestigious thing” or if I’m merely ambitious in a general sense. After all, my harshest of self-criticisms have only done their job of making most anything I make better over time and this thing feels adjacent.
Is this the trap?
There are a few things you may be grappling with that may be traps.
Although I feel behind, I’m told that I’m very young yet. But I also feel that I should know better when I’ve made a mistake. Why do I occasionally fall into a pattern of judging my work by likes on social media? Why must I forget the principle of making what I want to make and the money will come? Why, when LLMs were new did I let it convince me my writing was terrible because it wasn’t “correct”? Why do I keep comparing myself to people who’ve lived different lives and psy-opping myself that this is meant to motivate me?
When will I achieve something that finally vindicates the years of artistic suffering?
Will I ever? Or is this a trope that, someday, a hallucinated Stephen King or GDT will float down and crack me over the head to say to me that it simply never happens?
So, Step Away or: Develop the Relationship to Your Work
I don’t mean for you to give up a project or your work. Rather, I mean to say, that with all this spiraling and overthinking—however unavoidable—it’s important that you do set your work down now and again.
Some of you clever, self-actualised creatives will roll your eyes over how obvious this seems. To me it was not until recently.
What this does is takes your mind out of production mode and allows you to plumb the meaningful depths of the work. If actually making it develops your relationship with your skill then I would say not making it nurtures both the emotional core of the work and your emotional relationship to it.
When I’m able to tear myself away and go on a walk, go socialise, go play another studio’s video games or read a book, I’m still working on my own projects—though in a different way.
You’ll have revelations. You’ll define thematic throughlines. You’ll solve plot problems. You’ll know what to cut. You’ll know what needs total upheaval.
In fact, this blog is precisely my best example.
I’ve always been a writer in some capacity, though without realising it. And then someone said that I had such a way with words,—with characterisation, with dialogue, with world-building—that I should add ‘writer’ to my CV.
And because I’m fucking hopelessly arrogant, I decided that was true.
Right around the time LLM was picking up.
Right around the time I was writing in English.
So, this is no secret that I’m ESL—that is, “English-second-language”—and let me preface this whole section with two things. One: LLM bloody hates you ESL speakers. Two: I didn’t learn English from playgrounds, I learned it when I was a bit older while reading books that are stranger and more archaic in register than the way people spoke around me. That’s where my English lives.
And I am going to sound a little angry. And I’m going to sound a little like a victim, though I would be the first in line to flagellate myself for this because, being that hindsight is 20/20 or whatever the saying is, I went to LLM for bloody. Writing. Advice.
For god’s sake. Don’t do this. You may use models for brainstorming, fine. For organising notes, fine. Authors Guild explicitly allows this in works they certify as human-made.
I work in an industry where the latest craze is truly for chasing and no small number of us went to see what this supposedly groundbreaking technology was able to do. It seemed so clever, we said. It’s able to pull knowledge from every corner of the internet, we thought and so we—naturally—gravitated to talking about what we do.
I, ever the self-improvement junkie, am always looking to receive criticism. I love it. And I’ve seen myself take the most scathing of it with the most German of my sensibility fronting it as the data that it is. I’m proud of my ability to do so.
I’m highly logical. I have response inhibition which means I’m able to override impulse. One of the benefits to this? Exceptional ability to not take things all that personally and to filter them appropriately by their usefulness to me.
I’m getting to the point.
I allowed models to tell me that my writing was dogshit. That my writing was objectively poor, incomprehensible and littered with incorrectness that—only if I stopped all that ESL nonsense and odd-word-choice shenanigans—would I be able to realise my dreams of being a world-class writer.
And “here’s the thing”.
I trusted it. I thought, well here’s an intelligent, supposedly thinking model that has studied and pattern-recognised proper writing, English authors, good grammar, comprehensibility because it’s a machine and machines can’t be wrong (Omnissiah, are you listening?) It made perfect sense to me.
So it gave me advice. Things like even cadence. Emphasis on the correct words. Very correct grammar. Be comprehensible. This word is strange. This would be odd to an English speaker. This paragraph you’re so proud of? Kill your darlings. Publishing conventions say you have to be consistent with this. No, you can’t use American-style em-dashes with London standard formatting even though you like the flow. That’s too strange. Your unassisted writing is, you asked me to be blunt, objectively behind.
Would you like to keep talking about this work or should we jump in to other techniques? I can tell you more about other ESL authors who wrote in English.
That’s when I finally noticed the thing that shattered my trust in what was meant to be an objectivity machine. Up until that point I was following its advice, homogenising my strange, slightly arrogant voice towards the probability-centre of whatever it deemed to be the most comprehensible, corporate-American, safe writing it could be—but it was showing me everything else and saying that was the standard to reach.
It was telling me that a hint of strange was good. Reassuring me that us non-natives brought a charming exophony effortlessly to other languages. An unconventional foreignness that native-speakers have to try hard to engineer. It cited the likes of Joseph Conrad, Ágota Kristóf, Vladimir Nabokov.
(…) slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly. —Joseph Conrad
Their work? Incredible. And yet I immediately clocked that it had all the bizarre cadence that I was told precisely to avoid doing.
So I stepped away.
And started writing like dogshit again.
Know Yourself First
While I never actually generated my writing, I may as well have done. Whether it was translating my perfect-terrible French or Spanish into English, telling me to remove my literary varnish, telling me to emphasise certain points or telling me that I would overwhelm a reader with density—I was letting a number-generator tell me how to be a writer, how to speak English properly, how to optimise for metrics, and I did not have a real one to tell me otherwise.
This is a pattern in my life.
I’m self-taught in all things. Never went to school as I could not afford this. My poor immigrant family wanted me to be an anaesthetist or a psychiatrist. Then they were rather happy when I became a forensic analyst and I bungled that up too by daydreaming about being an artist while staring at four stacked computer monitors that looked like they were built in 1998 in a room with no windows surrounded by hundreds of people who sounded nothing like me when they spoke.
I also had few friends, growing up in America as an outsider, as every specifically American friendship had about a two-year expiry date before they could no longer tolerate my lack of performed-warmth and I could never quite mask convincingly enough to fit into the constructed social texture.
I was alone.
And so I’ve had to be aggressive, agentic, canny to make it all work out. Which means embracing self-reliance, adaptability, strange tools, harsh criticism. And workaholism, too.
It wasn’t until I was not working that I realised I was optimising the fun out of the whole apparatus again. As I tend to—German systems-thinker that I am.
It is important to take breaks.
It’s also important to be more cognisant than ever for to have young people learn how to do something on their own before a number-machine trains them not to attempt problem-solving or trust their own judgment or, indeed, have their taste decided for them.
Or we may all in time be praying to the machine-god like they do in the 41st Millennium without the slightest idea of how bloody any of it works at all.
When I was in the military, I made the terrifying decision to leave and risk (and subsequently experience) homelessness all to pursue the arts.
I would rather live uncertainly than exist in scheduled certainty. That has not changed.
So then, if making art is so important to me, why should I let a machine optimise all my thinking for me and deny me the joy of being a dogshit writer that says someone’s eyes can be beset by deepening lines rather than merely surrounded by them.
I am a fool. I fall in love with my own ideas and can think my way into justifying anything I need to justify my way into thinking.
I should probably go outside.
Fair Winds,
D.S.
