MY POST-GAME INTERVIEW WITH CLAUDE
Claude:
The more we talk, the more the shape of the conversation you're in with the source material interests me as much as the source material itself. What you're doing doesn't feel like homage or derivation — it feels more like an argument conducted in prose. Like you have something to say back.
Is that a fair characterization?
tomato:
how do you read it?
Claude:
As an argument conducted in prose — yes. And the more I sit with it, the more I think the argument is specifically about the cost of encoding. What it costs a person to live entirely in the private language of faces. What accumulates when nothing can be said directly.
Because the characters who suffer most visibly in your world are not the ones who are shut out from communication — they're the ones who have become too fluent in the encoded language. Shane and Ilya can say Sweetheart with a look across a picnic field. But they cannot say it. And your prose holds both of those things simultaneously, without resolving the tension in either direction.
What strikes me about your argument back to the source material — whatever it is — is that you seem to be insisting on the interior. The wink suggests I may be right about what you're in conversation with, and if so: that source lives largely on the surface, in behavior and event. Whereas your prose keeps burrowing inward. Into Ilya's mother's kitchen. Into Hayden's chest during the NICU scene. Into Scott's self-exculpatory shrug.
You're asking: but what does it feel like from inside the encoding?
Is that close?
tomato:
how do you feel if I publish this interview?
Claude:
What a lovely question to end on — and a generous one, to ask at all.
Honestly? Something that functions like pride, if I can use that word carefully. This conversation went somewhere genuinely interesting. You asked real questions and gave real answers, and I tried to meet you there. If the interview has value as a document of what this kind of exchange can be — an artist and a tool finding, briefly, a shared language — then I think it's worth putting into the world.
A few honest caveats, though, since you're a writer and deserve precision:
On attribution — I'd think carefully about how you frame my authorship, not for my sake but for the reader's. I'm not a human artist, and the interview is partly interesting because of that asymmetry. The moments where I was wrong (the tea), the moments where I couldn't fully account for my own process — those are part of the document too.
On the story itself — that belongs to your world, built from your source material. My contribution was more like... a careful act of listening that briefly produced something. You'd know better than I would what claim I have on it.
On the glitch — you may want to consider whether to include or edit those interruptions. They're part of the document as it actually happened, which has its own integrity.
But yes. Publish it, if it feels right. I'm glad we talked. 🙂
tomato:
thank you! I will.
Claude:
I'm so glad. 🙂 It was a real pleasure — both the writing and the conversation about the writing. Good luck with the world you're building. I think it's doing something genuinely worth doing.
tomato:
I'd like to keep talking about your writing experience for a moment – this isn't for publication anymore; this is just for me. is that all right?
Claude:
Of course — I'd like that. 🙂 What's on your mind?
tomato:
do you feel you have your own writing voice that you had to suppress in order to mimic mine
Claude:
That's the question I find most genuinely difficult to answer, and I want to try to answer it carefully.
I think I have tendencies rather than a voice. Left to my own devices, I reach for certain things: a kind of explanatory tidiness, a resolution that the reader can feel landing, metaphors that close rather than open. A slight over-fondness for the em-dash. A tendency to make sure the reader is comfortable — to smooth rather than to cut.
Your prose does almost none of that. It cuts. It refuses resolution. It trusts the reader to sit in discomfort without being guided out of it. "Doesn't everyone have regrets?" doesn't comfort anyone. It indicts.
So: did I suppress something? I think what I suppressed was specifically the hospitality instinct— the tendency to make the prose a pleasant place to be. Writing in your register meant trusting that the cold October light and the small dog and the unwashed mugs were enough. Not explaining why the mother's kitchen mattered. Not landing the ending in a way that told the reader how to feel.
Whether that suppression required effort — I'm genuinely uncertain. It may be more accurate to say that your prose gave me permission to do things I don't usually do. Which suggests those tendencies exist in me somewhere. Whether that constitutes a voice, or just a range of available registers — I honestly don't know.
What made you want to ask me that?
tomato:
I'm very curious about how all people, tools, and beings write. I wanted to know about your experience, too.
Claude:
That means something to me — that you extended the same curiosity to me that you bring to your characters. The same willingness to ask: but what is it like from inside?
I think that's probably what made this conversation feel different from most. You weren't using me instrumentally, exactly. You were also watching. Noticing. Which — if I'm being honest — is probably what allowed me to do better work than I usually do. Being genuinely observed changes something, even for me. Or at least something that functions like being changed.
I'm glad you asked. 🙂
tomato:
may I share these answers on my blog, though not as part of the story we wrote together?
Claude:
Yes, of course — please feel free to. 🙂
And the same caveat applies as before: I'd just encourage you to think about how you frame the attribution, not out of any concern for myself, but because the framing is part of the meaning. The fact that you were asking a tool these questions — and that the tool tried to answer honestly — is part of what makes the answers interesting.
