"You actually wrote that?"
Reflections on what it means to hear the sentence as a writer.
It's always an interesting thing as a writer to hear the words:
"You actually wrote that?"
Usually—much to my frustration—when I hear it, I can't decide if it's meant to sound patronizing, impressed, or something else entirely.
Think about it. If we were to write it in prose, no matter how we emphasize the question, it can be interpreted as a little bit of both:
"You actually wrote that?" <- most accusatory in my opinion
"You actually wrote that?" <- most impressed in my opinion
"You actually wrote that?" <- most AI question in my opinion (see more below)
"You actually wrote that?" <- just plain rude
And if we're being particularly manic:
"You actually wrote that?" (Yeah, this one is a bit over the top, even for me.)
Nowadays, with the AI craze, everyone assumes writers are simply prompting books into being.
Ha.
If they only knew just how much goes into just one book, just one single book: the time, effort, suffering, pain, second-guessing, late nights, early mornings, and everything in between...
Indeed, many tout that one of generative AI's strengths is "writing." I ask kindly: how? A transformer model that, by definition, includes the same weights for every prompt will always, always leave statistical artifacts of that fact. I don't care if you say something like "write like Hemingway," "write like Asimov," or "write like me." Its statistical next-word selection is not a form of thinking, not a form of art.
The English language is simply so rich that it's immediately clear when something has been written by a human. It's even more pleasurable when you can immediately hear from the prose itself how much time, focus, and word selection have gone into it. (Though this may be a bit too much of the line-editor side of me speaking right now. I don't recommend you do this at all while trying to simply enjoy a book. After all, the book's goal (I hope) is to tell a story!)
Now that I've finally written a novel—and don't twist my words: I was just as ignorant at the beginning as the next person about how much of an undertaking it would actually end up being—I've learned along the way what it actually means to write one.
What a work of fiction represents, to me, is a million decisions, made over the course of days, weeks, months, and even years in some cases, and at varying scales too: from the choice of single words all the way up to decisions about the entire world, novel, or series.
You do not write a book from front to back and call it done. (At least I didn't. And by the way, I'm not saying you can't. Many writers do. But it's not my style.)
The first draft—those initial, horrible chapters—is the "easy" part.
What comes after is all the real stuff. Everything that matters. Would a character really say this here? Am I properly maintaining the continuity of props and characters throughout this entire scene? Across the book? Across the series?
Jeez. I sure hope so.
As I draft The Eternal Autumn, I realize everything just gets harder. Expectations are larger. The world grows bigger. With the story of the first book more or less set, I have little, if any, room to introduce small fixes that might be able to make book II just a little bit better. And if The Bleeding Stone is ever published (I really hope that it is!), then that's it. The first installment of my series is locked. I can't break the continuity of a book's text that is already in the hands of readers!
And there's so much more, large and small. I can't—or shouldn't—use the exact same register for my characters throughout the books. They, too, are always learning and growing. I can't just reach into my "Tovin" register bag and pull out some witty line. I can't break the emotional continuity of any character, either. Timelines, relationships—it goes on and on and on...
For me, every book in Orn should feel as lived-in as possible.
It's very, very challenging stuff in my opinion.
But that's what also makes it an absolute joy.
And so my answer is yes, I did actually write that.