I just started drafting—like very shitty first drafting—a narrative essay about a kink dynamic I’ve been anxious to write about for some time. Writing sex is hard, and writing complex kink and BDSM feels even harder. I love how Garth Greenwell does it, so I thought hey, why not ask ChatGPT to help me “steal” his form. Like Meg, here’s what I got:

Nope.

Tried again:

FINE, PrudeGPT. One more time:

A bit generic, but okay. It essentially told me to play with sentence structure, subtext + tension, vulnerability + trust, etc. Broadstrokes. I wonder if it might help me break down and copy the rhetorical structure of his sentences if I fed it some text, the way I saw Eula Biss do in her version of Didion’s “Goodbye To All That”. Perhaps something to try for my next exercise. 

I then asked ChatGPT to help me write compelling narrative creative nonfiction, and interestingly, it duplicated a few of the same tips it provided for copying Greenwell’s work.

Finally, I took a snippet of my (again very very very rough) draft of a scene of “narrative nonfiction” and asked ChatGPT to make it more compelling.

My Draft:

ChatGPT’s take:

Truthfully, there are a few words here and there I might snag, but wow. Is this what the internet thinks of us narrative nonfiction writers?

I’m curious to see if the paid version is any better at this sort of thing, since I’ve heard it’s better at subtle shifts in language.