It must be the future, because Im taking writing advice from a computer.
But her latest creationwrites beginning sentences of novels, and its a genius:
I am, or was.
At the mid-day meal the sun began to set and the quiet dragged on.
I am Eilie, and I am here to kill the world.
The black stone was aching from the rain.
The moon stood on its own two feet.
It opens so many questions: who is the I?
Why write, if they live next door?
I want to know everything.
And yet, the sentence itself is straightforward, declarative.
You are right there, moving along, ready to see how those questions get answered.
Surely the writer who can set up such a scenario is going to masterfully explore and resolve it.
And yet, there is no rest of the novel.
The writer does not, technically, even exist.
The other sentences have a similar tension between matter-of-fact-ness and suspense.
Even the sentences that dont make sense, they dont make sense in an artful way.
The sea of stars was filled with the serenity of a million little birds.
The great blue field was all white, swept away by the blue-gold breeze that blew from the south.
Verbs are very important, writes Goldberg.
They are the action and energy of the sentence.
Be aware of how you use them.
She then instructs us to list ten nouns, any ten.
Then choose an occupation, and write down fifteen verbs having to do with that occupation.
(For a cook, she suggests saute, chop, mince, etc.)
The AI doesnt know what words mean, so sometimes it uses the wrong one.
In doing so, sometimes it chooses the wrong metaphor or action entirely.
But if youre not writing strict facts, the wrong word can be, poetically, the right one.
