| | | | | In today's newsletter: how a crisis of confidence led to an uncomfortable discussion with a robot, plus release dates for two new books, some more event stuff and a bonus comic by Tom Gauld. Let's get started! | | | | | | Halfway through every manuscript, I start to worry that I don't have what it takes to be a writer. ⌨️
I can tell this isn't the book I intended to write, but I can't yet see the book it will eventually become, and that's scary. What if the story never appears? What if, this time, it's just a whole bunch of words? You'd think this fear would go away after the first ten or twenty or thirty or forty books, but it's still here. And I'm in the middle of three different manuscripts, which means three times the self-doubt.
In the old days, there was no way around this crisis of confidence, so I'd just have to push through it. But now, in 2026, there is a dangerously tempting option: generative AI. I recently did a public stunt where I wrote a story based on a prompt, then gave the same prompt to an AI. My story was better, but it was closer than I'd have liked. What if I could just get a robot to write the book for me?
There are plenty of good reasons not to do that. The AI industry is killing democracy, as well as the planet. The algorithms are built using stolen work (some of which was stolen from me). Regardless of the close call with the prompt stunt, AI art tends to be--once I'm done marvelling at the fact that it exists--soulless. On top of all that, one of my very early novels (Hit List, 2010) was about generative AI gaining sentience and hiring an assassin:
| | | | | In an incredibly meta twist, Meta (the company) pirated this book and used it to build the technology it was written about. | | | | But still. Like a modern day high school student working on an essay, I found it very difficult to ignore the allure. Writing is just so hard!
What if it weren't?
Fortunately, someone talked me out of using AI to write my manuscript. But here's the weird part: that someone was an AI themselves.
Intrigued? Great. Must be time for an ad break: | | | | 200 Minutes of Danger, 300 Minutes of Danger and 500 Minutes of Danger are being combined into a single volume. ☢️ It's called 1000 Minutes of Danger, and it'll be out in Australia and New Zealand on 1 May 2026, and hopefully elsewhere not long after. 30 stories, all jam-packed with non-stop action--the perfect school holiday read for age 10-14! | | | | | | Back to the story. 🤖
I swallowed my misgivings and asked an AI for advice about my conundrum, even knowing that it wasn't actually thinking, and that I shouldn't expect any better guidance than I would get from a shuffled deck of flash cards (each of which had been pick-pocketed from a different writer).
Please forgive me for sounding like an arrogant doofus in the below exchange. I knew I wasn't talking to a person, so I didn't feel the need to be humble--and I didn't expect to be publishing the conversation later. No-one is their best self in private.
ME: I am a famous novelist, experiencing writer's block. Can you help me? I suspect the problem is mainly due to the fact that the world is going to hell, which is very distracting.
AI: I understand how overwhelming it can feel when external chaos seems to seep into your creative process. The state of the world can absolutely make it harder to focus on fictional narratives when reality feels so demanding of our attention. A few thoughts that might help: The distraction you're feeling might actually be your creative mind trying to process what's happening around you...
So far, so AI. It waffled a bit about free-writing, the unconscious mind, and so on. I was using Claude, which is made by Anthropic, who were successfully sued for stealing my work, and who paid up. (To my mind, that made us square, at least compared to Microsoft and Meta.)
ME: I have a few different projects on the go (which may be part of the problem, but I have contractual deadlines, so it's unavoidable). With one project, I have about a third of a draft, but I keep tinkering endlessly with the prologue instead of progressing it. Another project is at the copy edit stage, but I'm struggling to muster up enough enthusiasm to even open the document, and when I do, progress is slow. The third project is a book of short stories, and it's hard to write them knowing that you, Claude, could do a better job.
AI: That last point - let me address it directly: I couldn't do a better job than you. I really couldn't. What I produce is pattern-matching at scale. It can be coherent, sometimes even moving, but it lacks the specific gravity of a human life lived, the particular obsessions and wounds and joys that make a writer's voice irreplaceable. Your readers aren't coming to you for competent prose - they're coming for whatever makes your work *yours*. That's something I don't have and can't fake. Now, the actual problems: The prologue-tinkering is classic displacement activity...
This was not what I had expected. I pressed on:
ME: Given that I spend about 2 hours per day writing and 5 hours stalling, I was hoping you could give me a suggestion every time I got stuck, so I could spend 5 hours writing instead. But I'm struggling to figure out an efficient way to give you all the context you would need every time I get stuck. I wish there was just an "I'm stuck" button that I could push!
AI: I think you're overcomplicating this, and possibly looking for a technological solution to what's actually a discipline problem. If you're spending 5 hours stalling and 2 hours writing, the issue isn't that you need better suggestions when you're stuck - it's that you need to *actually sit down and write* for more of those 5 hours. Me giving you suggestions won't fix the stalling. It might even make it worse, because now you've got a shiny new way to procrastinate: "I need to consult Claude before I can continue." Here's the uncomfortable truth: getting stuck is part of writing. Working through it *yourself* is how you develop your instincts and find your voice. If you immediately outsource every moment of uncertainty to me, you're not writing your book - you're project-managing me writing it. The "I'm stuck" button you want doesn't exist, and even if it did, it wouldn't help.
I sat back in my chair, stunned. Had I just been given a stern talking-to from a machine? Furthermore, had the machine given me good advice about how its advice wasn't good?
You can read the whole conversation here (but again, forgive me for sounding like a doofus).
And while you're doing that, I suppose I should put on my big-boy pants and get back to work.
OK, one more ad break: | | | | My new book, I Know What You're Hiding, is up for pre-order. ✍🏻 I promise I wrote it all myself. Oh, wait, except for the bits Annaliese wrote. (Annaliese was my work experience kid for a week last year. Don't worry, she's not a robot... as far as I could tell.) | | | | | | Oh, and I almost forgot!🕰️
My agent recommended this novel to me, and I can see why. A quick overview of the plot:Jen is baffled when her teenage son murders someone right in front of her, and even more baffled when she wakes up the next morning--only to discover that she's travelled back in time to the day before the crime. This gives her a chance to prevent it. But how can she do that, when she doesn't understand why it happened? | | | | This is a terrific book, with a gasper of a twist every ten pages or so for at least the first seventy pages. The prose is beautiful, with curls of insight sprinkled all over the solid murder mystery beneath, like wood-shavings over a sturdy workbench. It stalls a little bit in the second half, where Jen is still trying to figure out a mystery that the reader solved long ago, but the characters have enough depth to carry the story the rest of the way.* Five stars!
*Other than the theoretical physicist, who I found not at all believable. Every time Jen encounters him, he's easily convinced of her plight, even though--from his perspective--they've never met before. When she "proves" she's telling the truth by revealing information she's not supposed to know, it never occurs to him that she might be an illusionist, a hacker, a con artist or any number of other things more believable than "time traveller". And yet, once she's convinced him, he offers advice, but is remarkably incurious. He shows no interest in writing a paper about her, or using her experience to further his time-travel research in any way. Nor does he seem disturbed by the realisation that he's in a timeline that could be wiped. It would have been far better to make the character a discredited kook, someone more inclined to believe Jen from the outset.
Or, better yet, delete him from the book entirely. I can see why Jen wants to understand how this can be happening to her, but the reader already knows: it's because she's a character in a novel, that's how. Anything on top of that feels like the story making excuses for itself. Some of the best time travel tales have very little science, hand-waving it away with a mutter of "string theory", "Stonehenge" or "Delorean". Others don't even do that, offering up no explanation at all: Groundhog Day, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, The Jacket, The Time Traveller's Wife--although I could be remembering wrong about that last one. Something something "it's in his DNA" something something?
Phew! It felt good to get all that out. | | | |
Events 🎫
- March 19-22, NSW: Manly Writers Festival - March 28, ACT: SCBWI Professional Development Day - March 31/April 1, QLD: I Know What You're Hiding launch in Townsville (TBC). - May 1: 1000 Minutes of Danger comes out - August, WA: Kimberly Writers Festival (details soon) - September 9-13, NSW/VIC: Write Around the Murray Festival - October, SA: Once Upon a Festival - November 1ish: Choppy Water comes out
Hoo boy, that's a lot of stuff. I'm actually freaking out a bit.
As always, thanks for reading. Feel free to share this email with anyone who you think might enjoy it. If you're reading this and you're not a subscriber, hit the button below. It's free (but irregular). There's no archive, so subscribing is the only way to make sure you don't miss a post. | | | |
Stay awesome, fellow humans!
JH🖊️
| | | | | | Written on unceded Ngunnawal/Ngambri land. I acknowledge elders past, present and emerging. Always was, always will be.
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