AN UNINVITED GUEST

How are you getting on with AI?

Every time I open up a blank page on the computer, Microsoft’s Copilot bounces up, tail wagging, tongue hanging out, asking if I would like to draft with it. No ta. Every time I write an email it asks if I would like Copilot to rewrite it. No ta. I tried to uninstall Copilot because it was getting on my nerves. Computer said no. I am really not keen on uninvited guests.

I would imagine most writers these days use AI for purely practical purposes. I spell-check. I word-count. I don’t use any writing software tools (Scrivener etc) because, to be honest, I prefer to keep my tech simple, rather like my brain when it actually encounters tech. I save, I meticulously file, I back-up. To several places. I print out, because I can’t edit on the screen, and in any case I see editing as an intimate and sometimes very irritable relationship between me and the current version. It needs to be physical.

I’m an editor on a community writing website. It’s free to join and people can post anything they want, as long as it doesn’t break our terms and conditions, which basically involve guaranteeing it’s all your own work and not being an arsehole. The only reward writers get is being flagged-up if an editor feels the piece is particularly worthy, or being selected as a pick of the day, week or month if it’s worthier still. The idea of the site is to enable and encourage anyone who feels the urge to get their writing out there and maybe get a bit of feedback. We have prose writers, poets, published writers, unpublished writers, people writing in any and every genre. It’s great.

We’re increasingly having to run things through an AI checker. Which is a bit of AI which will tell you how much of the piece in question is likely to be AI generated. We have a strict ‘no AI’ policy when it comes to the actual writing.

It's a bit of a mystery to me why people use AI to create creative writing. Surely the whole point of the thing is to put yourself out there, for whatever reason – artistic glory, competitive instinct, or the much-maligned motive of making enough money to pay your bills. I can see why anxious or lazy students use it for essays – I thoroughly disapprove, but at least, if you get away with it, you’ve got a certificate in your sticky mitts, and every time you look at it you can feel the warm glow of knowing that you obtained it under false pretences. I get that it could be useful for job applications. In that respect, is it any worse than the friend who used me to write resumés and job applications, in our youth, because I was ‘better at words’ than they were? 

But why the hell would you do it on a website where the sole purpose is to develop your own creativity?

Is it that ‘winning’ is everything, even if ‘winning’ is no more than a nod from an editor? 

Is it that people are frightened of being not good enough, even when there’s no actual definition, on our site, of what is good enough? You do your best. You contribute. You offer encouragement to others. We hope you enjoy. Your AI tool will not enjoy.

I’m not inherently anti-AI. There’s no point in being so, apart from anything else. It’s here, you can’t uninvent it, we have to learn to live alongside it. Members of my family greatly enjoyed ABBA Voyage, with the avatars. Someone (not one of my family) asked me why I was so against people using AI in creative writing when I was so pleased my family had enjoyed themselves listening to recordings of ABBA songs while watching gussied-up videos of ABBA. It’s questions like that which make me wonder whether the machines have taken over already. 

The real point of writing, the absolute essence of it, is that it’s a thing you feel you have to do. It’s a part of you. It’s not always the happiest of parts, but you can’t ignore it. We shouldn’t let AI take that away from us. 

What I’m reading:

The Time Traveller’s Guide To Medieval England by Ian Mortimer (Vintage). The Guardian called this ‘…the most entertaining book ever written about the Middle Ages’. I don’t know about that, I’m not an expert on books about medieval England, but it’s enormous fun. I thought it would help with research I’m doing for a story about a medieval ghost, and it’s the most enjoyable bit of research I’ve ever done. When AI finally does crack time travel for us, this book will give you all the information you need for your weekend in the 1300s.

In The Shadow Of Gods by Rachel Deering (Black Bough Poetry). Declaration of interest: Rachel is a fellow editor on ABCTales.com. She is also a much-published poet whose work on nature, mythology and folklore creates its own magic. Even if poetry isn’t usually your thing, if you like being enveloped in a world of blurred boundaries, glimpses of beauty and cruelty, and explorations of all nature, including the human kind – you’ll love this.

WRITING THE LIFE

I’ve never been too keen on doing much Life Writing. I do Daily Pages, when I get up early enough to fit it into the morning. If you’re not familiar with Daily Pages (there are many and varied names for this), the idea is that you sit down and let words come out, spontaneously, for however long works for you, but not too long, because then you start self-editing, and that ruins the whole point of the exercise. 

I find Daily Pages particularly helpful when I’m stuck, either with writing or life in general. If I can’t force anything coherent out, I play games. I do mirror writing, or drag words diagonally down the page, or in a circle. At least I’ve got squiggles on paper, and it’s reassuring and freeing to be completely childlike for a bit. 

Daily Pages are for my eyes only, though. Even when they’re just games, they’re a part of me that is just for me. It’s like the Diary I kept from when I was about nine or ten until my late teens. I’m not sure why I stopped keeping it. Maybe I just got too caught up in living life to want to spend time recording it. 

A few years ago I ‘downsized’ from the semi I’d lived in for twenty-three years, and chucked the various notebooks containing the Diary into a skip. Life had been stressful for a number of years, and I wanted a complete reset. Also, I didn’t fancy my kids reading the inner workings of my teenage mind, should I shuffle off the mortal coil at short notice. 

I also threw out old love letters. We had handwritten love letters in my youth. Some came with photos of the boyfriend of the time, but dick pics were there none. It was a different age. Or maybe it was just that none of my boyfriends had a Polaroid camera and taking the film into Boots would have got them arrested.

The only thing I actually miss about the Diary, or the letters, are their fact-checking facilities. It’s not that I don’t remember the past, it’s - do I remember it right? 

I’m an only child so I haven’t got siblings to compare notes with. I spent most of my childhood abroad, because of my Dad’s job, and I’m not in contact with anyone I knew then. It all changed after my teens – I’m still in touch with a few people from Uni days and having lived in the same city for nearly fifty years now, I’m not short of people to reminisce with. 

I’m fascinated by the process of memory, how we remember, and why we choose to remember some things and allow others to float away. It’s a recurring theme in my writing. It doesn’t take a therapist to point out that this fascination is probably because I feel unmoored from parts of my own past. It’s as though the only existence those parts have is in the images of them I hold, or possibly create. 

That could have advantages, of course. I could make up all sorts of bollocks, and no-one would ever know. I was the most popular girl everywhere I went! Blokes fell at my feet! I was bravely outspoken on matters of social conscience from the time I could form words! I had amazing taste in clothes and boy, could I rock a green lurex halter-neck maxi with towering black platform shoes!

Actually, I didn’t look too bad in the green lurex. I fell off the platform shoes and slipped a disc. 

I do have the letters my parents sent me when they were abroad and I was in the UK, doing my A Levels and then going to Uni. They kept all my letters as well, so I now have both sets. This gives a timeline but obviously, my letters were heavily censored versions of my life. ‘I had a great time at Mary’s birthday party last Saturday!’ I got shit-faced and didn’t wake up in my own bed. In all probability.

Who the hell was Mary? 

So Life Writing has always scared me a bit. How can I do it? I can’t give a reliable account of the first twenty years of my own life. Also, who’s interested in some old woman burbling on about her dodgy neo-colonialist childhood? 

It took me far longer than it should to realise that Life Writing is present in every story we concoct. Our memories are writing aids. Unless we’re actually writing a fact-based autobiography, it doesn’t really matter if we remember precisely how we felt at a particular time. The feelings we have now about a place, person, or experience from the past are the truth about the effect those things had on our lives. If that effect was overwhelmingly negative, it might help us to re-examine what facts we have and reshape our own narratives. But there’s a reason we remember things the way we do. We have to discover why that particular story has always felt like the right one.

And because we’re writers and we plunder everyone’s experiences, including our own, for material, the question of why we choose to frame our own narratives in a certain way helps us give our characters substance. We lend them bits of our lives that fit. 

If we can get them to play along, of course. Characters are stroppy buggers. If they don’t like the bits of our lives we’re offering, they soon let us know. 

Thanks for reading. See you soon! 

Jane x

What I’m reading: 

Butter, by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton (Published by 4th Estate). The English version of this was published last year and got great reviews. I’ve only just started it so can’t really say what I think of it yet, but the first seventeen pages are very promising indeed! 

The Kraken Wakes, by John Wyndham (Penguin). Another of my nostalgia reads. This was the first John Wyndham I read – I must have been twelve or thirteen. My Mum was a big Wyndham fan and I’m pretty sure she bought it for me. Wyndham is a very underrated writer, in my humble opinion. He’s often been denigrated for his ‘cosy catastrophes’ but there’s a lot more to him than that. People have been scathing about his conventional female characters but there’s a lot more to them as well, and if you want a searing comment on the exploitation of women through advertising and propaganda, read his short story Consider Her Ways. It was written in 1956, so it’s not cutting edge now, but it was then. I read it in my teens and all that pretty much passed me by. I read it again in my thirties and I was gobsmacked. 

THE GAME OF THE NAME

It may come as a shock to you (or you may not give a stuff), but Jane Ayrie isn’t my given name. Well, the Jane part is, but the surname is completely made up. 

My original surname is perfectly unobjectionable, but it’s also very common. In 1954 a lot of its owners apparently had a revelation and decided calling their daughters ‘Jane’ was the best idea ever. Far too many of these daughters, if you ask me, became academics or writers. There’s bloody millions of them out there. I am vain enough to have Googled my name on a few occasions and it’s like looking at one of those big shoals of herring you see on ‘The Blue Planet’. They’re all little individuals with their hopes, dreams and ambitions, but no big fish is going to bother distinguishing one from the other.

I’m very fond of my first name. It’s my identifier. My parents chose it with love. I’ve never really got the fuss about family surnames, though – they’re just accidents of history and if you need a name to remind you which family you belong to, maybe you should be looking for another family. I suppose if it’s something extraordinary you might feel an attachment to it, or it might be important as a signifier of your culture, but ordinary run of the mill names like mine really don’t warrant the fuss.

My kids have both parents’ surnames, which was still a bit of a novelty when they were born. I was amazed at the number of people who asked, in horrified tones, ‘But what about when they have children? Will those kids have three surnames? Or four??’ To which the obvious answers are: a) why should you care? and b) in my experience, people generally have sufficient gumption to sort out names for their kids. I might not like some of those names, but that’s not my business either. 

The names we choose for ourselves, professionally or personally, are very significant. The reasons for a pseudonym vary: John Le Carré said his position in MI6 made it essential he used a different name, and both the Brontës and Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) were pretty sure unambiguously female names would hamper their chances of publication. Some writers feel adopting another persona helps them focus when they sit down to put words on the page. I find that. For me, it’s part of ‘going to work’. The non-writer part of me is a directionless slob who, given half a chance, will sit doing crosswords all day, drinking cups of coffee (morning) or tea (afternoon) while nibbling toast (morning) or scones (afternoon). Occasionally this persona will look up to peer through the front window, conveniently placed to observe the coming and goings on the three streets that converge in front of it. Jane Ayrie is the persona who says, ‘Get up, you lazy, nosey bitch. The sodding draft won’t edit itself.’ 

Why people choose particular names, though, is often less clear. Le Carré sometimes said he chose the name because it would stand out, and sometimes said he’d seen it in an advert on the side of a bus. Gloria Jean Watkins chose the name bell hooks (deliberately not capitalised) as a tribute to her much admired great-grandmother. Whatever the reason, there is something about it that clicks with the writer and feels right. It says something about who we are, to ourselves if no-one else.

‘Ayrie’ emerged from fiddling about with my username on a writing website. No great emotional heft, no clever word play, but I knew when I looked at it that it would do the job well. 

I get a similar moment of joy when I discover the right name for a character. I say discover, because I don’t choose characters’ names. I have to wait until they introduce themselves properly. Sometimes they piss me about, trying to fool me with false monikers, but I know when they’re lying. I can see it in their eyes. I know that if I just wait, they will eventually tire of the game and tell me the truth. And then we’re good to go with their story. We don’t get anywhere until they tell me their name.

I find the processes of naming, whether real children, characters, or ourselves, endlessly fascinating. I’d be delighted to hear what you think about it all.

Thanks for reading! 

Jane

What I’m reading: 

Dhalgren, by Samuel R Delany (I have a 50 year old copy published by Bantam, so I don’t know who publishes it now). This was first published in 1975, so I’m giving it an anniversary re-read. It’s been compared to Ulysses, but don’t let that put you off. I was gripped from the first word, which is not something I can say about Ulysses. There is a story, about a drifter, the kid, or Kidd, who fetches up in a place called Bellona, with no memory. From there on reality is fluid, narrative is circular, narrators are unreliable (or are they?). Language is beautiful and at times incoherent. I’ve read it many times and I hope this time to work out what it’s actually about. Nah, who am I kidding?

Samuel R Delany is one of my favourite writers, and this is my favourite of his books. It’s both revered and excoriated, and Delany does tend to be a Marmite author. If you don’t know his stuff, it’s probably best to start with his magnificent short stories, and there’s a lovely collection titled Aye, and Gomorrah published by Vintage. For my money, Delany is one of the most brilliant speculative fiction writers we have, but I’ll shut up now, because I could go on about him for ever.

Elidor by Alan Garner (originally published by Collins, but still out there somewhere). Another anniversary re-read! Elidor came out in 1965, and I got it for Christmas when I was eleven. I have re-read it every couple of years since. A group of kids in Manchester slip through a portal into another world and return as guardians of ‘treasures’ that must be protected to ensure the realm of Elidor can be saved from the powers of darkness. But darkness keeps seeping into 1960s Manchester…

This was my first introduction to what I suppose would now be called Urban Fantasy. I was gripped, scared out of my wits, and filled with the desire to write stories like that. These days, the fact that a group of kids, at least two of whom are pre-teen, can wander about Manchester day and night with no means of contacting their parents or anyone else, while no-one raises an eyebrow, seems as fantastical as the interdimensional baddies chasing them. Alan Garner is one of our greatest story-tellers, and this is one of his best. If you had the misfortune to see the bloody awful BBC TV adaptation in 1995, don’t let it put you off. It bore no resemblance whatsoever to the book.