Fairies are just Glorified Pigeons

Because it was trained on pirated work—including freely accessible online writing (like fanfic, academic texts)—ChatGPT picked up patterns and quirks native to human writing.

Including (sigh) the em dash.

There are other victims here (RIP tapestry and delve 🫠), but the appropriation of the em dash—a punctuation mark beloved by writers everywhere—feels especially personal.

A kind of low-grade panic is ensuing. Writers who once memed their own em dash overuse—the greatest punctuation mark ever to grace the control-freak’s lexicon, frankly—are suddenly backing away to avoid accusations.

No. More. We have centuries of dash-abusing writers behind us. We will not sit quietly while AI repurposes our beloved stilted aside—or the just-one-more clarification the sentence demands—or the dramatic pause your comma could never—etc.

You don’t write like AI—AI writes like you.

Defend the em dash.

(Feel free to download/share/stick it where it matters!)

✦ killing everyone is lazy. corpses are boring. the real cruelty is survival—but the kind of survival where the character will never sleep right again. give them trauma, paranoia, scars that don’t heal. it’s way worse than a clean death.

✦ horror endings should feel unfinished. neat bows are for romance novels. if your reader closes the book thinking “oh good, it’s over,” you’ve failed. the best endings itch. they should feel like there’s still something lurking just off the page.

✦ leave something unresolved. don’t describe the monster’s body—describe the mug it left behind. the voicemail still playing. the dog still waiting at the door. absence is scarier than closure.

✦ the last line is everything. it should feel like a splinter under the skin. short, sharp, unforgettable.

examples:

“she turned off the light. something else turned it back on.”

“the baby monitor crackled: don’t forget to feed me.”

“his reflection waved first.”

“she tucked herself into bed. then felt the blanket tuck tighter from the other side.”

(this came out of a conversation in the comments on a previous post about an author threatening to stop updating a fic because of lack of engagement)

So there’s this idea that fic writers should write for themselves and not care too much about stats or engagement,

and i totally get the sentiment behind that. if writing becomes entirely about stats and external validation, something important does get lost - creative freedom and joy, conviction in your own writing

but i also think:

“i write for myself, but i post for others.”

because posting fic is not only self-expression. it’s social. ao3 is called an archive, but emotionally it often functions as a community space.

people post for connection, for participation, for others to bear witness to their pain and trauma and grief,

and i don’t think most people are asking to be admired so much as acknowledged. there’s something deeply human about wanting another person to encounter something that mattered to you and go:

“ok, yeah, I see what you were trying to say. I see you.”

especially because fanfic is often people processing very real feelings through fictional characters at a safe distance, one step removed,

and then uploading that deeply personal thing into a shared archive and hoping somebody else might connect with it.

And i think that’s why it hurts so much when you summon up the courage and post a fic into the void and you get nothing back,

and then it’s like,

It’s particularly frustrating when you find something nice someone wrote about your fic on a completely different place and that same user name just put a kudo and didn’t write that same nice thing in the comment box on the fic. You found that nice thing entirely by accident.

Or when a popular author you used to admire tells you oh yes, they know your work. In fact they discussed it on a private discord with other authors in your fandom that you used to admire. Yeah, they all thought it was great! Except none of them could be bothered to tell you that, you had no idea they knew you wrote, never mind read your stuff!

Oh and the person telling you this only left a guest kudo, they could not possibly leave one with their actual name on it. That person told you this while also talking about all the cool art, podfic and even a bookbind they got from readers, so they know how awesome that feels but they can’t even tell you they liked your fic. They can’t even just click a button with their own name attached to it.

Those are things that happened to me.

I really wish that person had kept their “oh I’m one of your guest kudos” to themselves, because that absolutely destroyed my desire to write for months.