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The Novelitist Magazine

Hey there, traveler!

You’ve stumbled upon The Novelitist Magazine, the blog of Novelitist—the #1 book-writing app on the planet*.

Take note that this book-blog crossbreed has been written and published using Novelitist exclusively (in a kind of perverse self-referential recursion), which is something you can absolutely do for yourself, should you opt to use our services.

Here you’ll find all sorts of articles (“posts,” if you will) that don’t really belong in our comprehensive User Guide, but deemed to be worthy of your attention regardless. Either that, or someone just needed to get something off their chest and dumped it here. It’s not much now, but it will grow with time.

The format is that of a book, rather than a “proper” blog marred by bells and whistles that get in the way. It’s simple and, to some, ugly or not fancy-looking enough. Who cares? Not us. Do you?

We hope you’ll find some of it useful or entertaining. Snoop around in no particular order, with a light heart and a playful mind, take what you like and forsake the rest.

Wherever you may go next, be blessed!


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Ah, the purity of what the web should have been.

Download the The Novelitist Magazine as exported by the Novelitist app itself.

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A maximalist writing environment

Some writers prefer minimalism when working. From the perspective of people in the trade of building writer tools, that’s more than fine: as long as minimalism is a choice, not a limitation.

In that spirit, we’re now offering the choice of maximalism, so get ready to enjoy your best writing experience yet, thanks to another unique Novelitist feature: the writing ambient.

Write in the forest 🌳, in space 🌌, or under water 🌊, from your desk!

Set up your writing ambient, get stimulated, get inspired!
What’s stopping you from writing like this?

When we say Novelitist is the book writer's premier word processor, we mean it!

You already know you can:

Now, with the editor ambient, you can also:

Combined with the global visual themes, you're in for the most engaging and stimulating writing experience you won't find anywhere else!

https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/novelitist.appspot.com/o/dpLfAY1wDvSrk1K3cres91KBs5T2%2F
Writing a desert fantasy scene? Get inspired.

This truly redefines what it means to "write from anywhere," doesn’t it?

Of course, this is entirely optional, and you can always revert to a minimalist setup with a simple white page that challenges your imagination like a blank canvas waiting to be filled.

The editor ambient feature is available to all Novelitist writers, Dilettantes and Wordsmiths alike.

Like everything we do here at Novelitist, this feature has the same declared purpose: make you write more and better. Go do it! 🚀

Should I write a book?

AI-generated desk with typewriter
Is this your desk?

I’m good with computers, always have been. Knowing this, my friends and acquaintances keep asking me the question every computer-savvy person is all too familiar with: Which one should I buy?

When I was younger and a narcissist, I used to steer them towards the computer I would buy, which was always the performance beast of the day, an idealized monster I couldn’t afford myself, ready to chew and spit out anything you throw at it (the latest AAA games, mainly) like it was nothing, at least for the next two years, before it too became obsolete.

This advice resulted inevitably in frustration at the outrageous cost and scarce availability, in friends going elsewhere for computer advice, and even in people foregoing or postponing such purchase altogether.

As I matured and realized the error of my ways, and seeing how people still ask me which computer to get (mostly laptops, nowadays), I’m at a point now where I immediately counter their inquiry with my own: What do you need it for?

This ensures that someone who only watches cat videos on social media and writes emails gets the computer that does that without breaking the bank, while a beginner gamer can play the latest titles with minimal frustration, for a reasonable amount of money.

The advanced gamer needs no purchasing advice. He’ll just go all-in anyway. So will the software developer with more money than sense.

This little introduction leads neatly to the basic question: What are you writing a book for?

Let’s preempt (and destroy) the most common answers.

I want to be the next J.K. Rowling, aka rich

(Or George R.R. Martin, or Stephen King.)

In that case, the question you should really ask yourself is, “Should I play the lottery?”

To which I reply to you that yes, by all means, play the lottery and you’ll be better off. You get much better chances with far less effort. After all, several people win big every year, far more than there are hyper-successful multi-millionaire authors.

If your goal writing a book is to become rich off of your work, better turn around now, and start a business in the real world. Sell bread or booze. Play the lottery on weekends.

I want to be famous

The chances that your book makes you famous are correlated with those that it will make you rich. The two probabilities intertwine at the level of about zero chance.

If fame’s your goal, then lottery offers a better shot. You’ll get your fifteen minutes of fame in the tabloids, half when you win big, and the other 7.5 minutes when they follow-up about how easy money ruined you.

Art is a high-risk, high-return investment. In other words, you risk investing a lot and getting nothing in return (most people), while you also “risk” getting filthy rich and bafflingly famous (Damien Hirst).

I want respect from intellectuals

So you’re willing to forego fortune and fame, as long as you impress at least some people more prominent than yourself in matters of the intellect. Fair enough.

With the right approach, mainly by choosing the right field or niche, plus the heavy exercise of politics, this may be within reach.

Of course, it all depends on what you mean by “intelectuals,” and how low you’re willing to stoop on the political side of things.

I want to make a living

The web is chock-full of advice on how to make money as a writer. This advice is especially useful if you pay for it, although probably not to you.

Large recruiting companies (the likes of Glassdoor, Talent, or ZipRecruiter) purport that a professional writer’s remuneration, at the time of this writing (July 2023), rests somewhere between $50K-70K per annum.

It’s a living wage, for sure. If you’re happy with that, and you’re able to find the people who’ll pay for your words, this plan is feasible.

Just mind the caveat emptor here: You’ll likely not write as you imagine you would, your imagination unconstrained, creating miraculous worlds of fiction or tackling big ideas in new ways. The reality is you’ll have to write on demand, on topics you don’t really get to chose, in a style you don’t get to dispute.

Even so, this will be good schooling for your writing life, and you get to make a living off of it. Many now famous authors have started just like this, writing on demand for newspapers and magazines, honing their craft in the process.

In today’s culture of “content,” the need for writers (of “copy”) has exploded, so this may be the best time to contemplate such a career. With the advent of superior AI, it’s also the worst. Take that into consideration before you rule out a carpentry career.

I just want to express myself

This is probably the best reason to write anything, including the coherent whole that is a book, and not only because writing is by definition a form of expression.

Whether you just want to hear yourself “talking” as a form of self-therapy, or you simply enjoy creating through words, this is a win-win (or at least a no-loss) endeavor.

By all means, go ahead. At the very least, writing makes you a better thinker, and that translates to everything else. From that alone may spring opportunities otherwise inaccessible to you.

Only make sure that this is your genuine drive, not just a smokescreen behind which lurk the mercantile reasons above.

Should you write a book, then?

All things considered, yes, you should. You should write more than one, from a humble and hopeful position. Through the process itself you’ll find the better and larger you. You’ll expand and explode.

And who knows, maybe despite these stats, some dismaying, some encouraging, and discarding everything I said so far, you might just grab the muse’s ankle and soar with it to fame and riches, or maybe just towards a greater and stabler state of self-fulfillment and peace of mind, which is no small thing. Some would trade fame and riches for it, in an instant. Many do.

Perhaps you can go around the entire “money and fame” circus and win your peace with your own words, oblivious to worldly benchmarks.

Wouldn’t that be nice? Pursue it and find out for yourself.

Friction writing

Frictionless academic pigeons

I haven’t misspelled “fiction.” You can read the title as “friction while writing.”

It’s tempting to go directly for the physics concept, i.e., the actual force of friction, which certainly plays a role in writing— yet I don’t mean that either.

I also don’t mean what Steven Pressfield calls “resistance,” although this “friction” may certainly be a part of what stands between you and fulfilling your mission (aka the Pressfieldian “resistance”).

I only abuse the fact that “fiction” and “friction” are paronyms, and attempt to exploit the inherent possibilities for metaphor in order to prove a point.

I’m talking (writing, rather) about the friction you encounter during the concrete process of expressing your thoughts as written words.

When you’re an illiterate toddler, this friction is so great, that it prevents any transfer of your thoughts into writing, because the friction happens inside your very head: You’re simply not physically and mentally equipped to write anything. The process isn’t only supremely difficult. Indeed, there’s no process at all.

Then you get to preschool age, and you can scribble simple sentences with a pencil: “I love mom.” It still takes much effort. The friction while transcribing your luminous, childish thoughts into a written declaration is still significant, and you’re underdevelopment is still its primary cause.

Time goes by and you’re now a graduate, and have not only mastered handwriting, but using a keyboard and touchscreen as well. There’s still that barrier between your thoughts and how they translate on paper. Some of it is that nagging filter between thinking and expression, which you now realize may get thinner, but won’t ever go away completely, and you have to make peace with that. However, equally nagging is the feeling that there’s more to it.

This brings me to my point: The remaining friction, now due to your environment, your tools, your mindset.

You can write, maybe you’re even good at it. Yet you don’t, not as much as you’d like, anyway. As for your digital tools, you’ve long suffered from “tool fatigue,” having tried almost all writing tools under the Internet sun, without much change in the quantity and quality of your output.

So much so that you’ve perhaps returned to pen and paper at some point. You then had to transcribe that work into an editor, and save a file for the specific purpose of forgetting all about it, as it will forever gather digital dust.

Ideally, you’d just think your thoughts of fictional universes, and some marvelous instrument would commit them to paper automagically. A sublime device like that doesn’t exist, and likely never will. You’re stuck to writing and typing, and maybe dictating, if you’re brave enough, or really wanted to write “rest in peas.”

In reality, there’s a rather long and steep road that ideas endeavor to travel between their breeding ground inside your head, and their final resting place as text. They make this treacherous journey on a high-friction roadway, and instead of a smooth glide, you get a jerky progression with halts and backtracks at every step.

For instance, assume a jolt of inspiration has just hit, and your thoughts string together haphazardly into a semblance of words and sentences, racing to get out into the world. They demand to be expressed outwardly and saved as textual information. What are your options?

Use pen and paper

Grab the pen and paper you presumably have about you at all times, and quickly jot down the stream of words flowing from your consciousness, before it decides to recede or evaporate.

That’s a rather frictionless process—assuming you do carry pen & paper. Now, your idea has been transformed into intelligible words, but that’s not yet a book.

You must transcribe that into the digital domain, and merge it with your other structured work. Hello again, friction.

Even if you write your entire book by hand, at some point it needs to be dumped inside a computer. You either hire a typist, or you end up in front of a screen, hands on the keyboard, wondering how it has come to this and whether it’s all worth it anyway.

Use a typewriter

Don’t.

Use generic software

Uh-oh, here comes the friction.

Like most, you’ll reach for something like Microsoft Word™ or Google Docs™ and crack on.

As you’ve already discovered (or soon will), Word and relatives have been created for documents in general, not books in particular. They are perfect for writing a generic document, but are significantly lacking when it comes to book writing.

The document is monolithic, and you can’t put inside it stuff that belongs to your book, but not in your book, stuff not meant to be published, but meant to be kept at hand while writing. There is no concept of story elements, and there aren’t any serious organizing and planning tools. When you’re done, you either print it, or find another tool to convert it into a publishable e-book. Friction.

Use dedicated book-writing software

Choose to write your book within a veritable virtual writer’s studio that you have with you everywhere you go; your own personal writing sanctuary which you can enter anytime, through any device, like going through a portal. A place where you write like a writer of books, not mere documents, within your own universe designed to keep you writing. Then, when you’re done, just click a button, bake your fresh e-book, and smell the e-ink. Frictionless.

That’s where Novelitist storms in, slams the door behind it, points an accusatory finger at your pathetic writer “tools,” and utters in soothing, yet unequivocal, tone, “Come, your plight ends here. Enter these plains of plenty, and finally be who you were meant. I’ll hold your books, and keep them safe and tidy. I’ll fend off distraction. I’ll spoil you with the colors you like. I’ll keep a log for you, so that you always know where you stand. I’ll be there wherever you may go. You just write, I’ll do the counting. You just write, I’ll be your printing press. There is no friction here. Just write, at last.”

The walls around you disappear, the breaks are lifted, friction subsides, and you finally, finally write that novel.

Writing is a game of numbers

A Novelitist chart showing a writer's progress
Your novel ain’t gonna write itself.

Much can be said about writing a book. Much has. Even more can be written about writing a book, while not writing said book.

Divine inspiration keeps popping up as the key ingredient of success, but waiting for it is, in fact, the key facilitator of divine procrastination. Rely on inspiration if you plan to never finish anything, yet continue to enjoy the cheap thrill of thinking yourself an author.

Established writers know this. They know they have to show up every day and spend a certain number of hours in front of a slow-filling page, resulting in a certain minimum daily word count. They’ve long shed the misconception about writing as this wonderfully bohemian activity guided by a capricious muse’s whims, and know it’s more often than not a total tedium.

Established writers know, and harness, the magic of accrual.

I used to tell interviewers that I wrote every day except for Christmas, the Fourth of July, and my birthday. That was a lie. I told them that because if you agree to an interview you have to say something, and it plays better if it’s something at least half-clever. Also, I didn’t want to sound like a workaholic dweeb (just a workaholic, I guess). The truth is that when I’m writing, I write every day, workaholic dweeb or not. That includes Christmas, the Fourth, and my birthday (at my age you try to ignore your goddamn birthday anyway).

— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Spend an hour writing a thousand words every day. Even if you skip weekends, that’ll give you about 20,000 words a month. Give it four months, and you have an 80,000-word first draft to show for it.

The old timers had to count words in their mind, or simply rely on the habit. Us moderns can’t be bothered with either. Too often we label ourselves “writers,” perform all the relevant personal and social rituals, and whine about not having finished that mythical novel that would surely rank us among our illustrious predecessors, once published.

We don’t even have to perform mental word counts any more, computers do it for us. Our part, it seems, is to just ignore all that, and keep entertaining our delusions of authorship. When you’re not tracking your writing habits, it’s easy to enjoy the fine sentiment of having done your part, while you’re doing nothing of significance towards finishing that book. Simply continue to marinate in the sauce of modern digital stimulation, without a way out, without any alarms sounding off when you’re lost.

If you’re serious about writing your book, then get serious about writing it. How’s that for a koan? It’s time to admit that as esoteric a form of art writing may be, it’s also a game of numbers. It sounds silly: If you don’t write, you’re not writing. Yet here we are.

To finish your book before you die of old age (if you’re lucky to survive that long), you must:

Set a deadline for your book

How can you finish anything, when you don’t plan to finish it?

In that case, “finishing” is synonymous with “abandoning.” You’ll never finish your work, you’ll just abandon it surreptitiously, and pretend it’s the normal thing to do, like people throwing newborn kittens over the neighbor's fence.

A deadline means you’re planning to finish. Missing it means failure, not the sort of neutral “success” that’s supposed to be some sort of stepping stone for the greater things you’ll surely achieve in some reassuringly distant future.

Set a deadline and strive for it. Without a deadline, it’s probably best not to start at all.

Try another, open-ended hobby.

Set a target word count

How can you finish anything, when you don’t know what “finished” means?

Here’s an acceptable definition: A book is finished when you've got nothing more to add to it. Take that one step further, and let’s say that a book is finished when it’s perfect. That’s a fine definition of “finished.” It’s also an excellent cop-out.

You’ll always have more to add, and your book will never be perfect, so it won’t ever be finished. You can still call yourself a writer, in the meanwhile—you are, technically, writing with no end in sight. Come to think about it, why bother finishing that blasted book at all, since it’ll never be done, and you still bear the title of “writer” regardless.

Let’s get back to Earth, shall we, and define a “finished” book as having a certain size, measured in words—its word count.

You set out to write a novel? Good. Start writing and don’t stop until you’ve hit 90,000 words. Now go back and start trimming the fat. This will still probably get you above 70,000 words, which is the somewhat arbitrary size of a standard-form novel.

Congratulations, thanks to defining “finished” based on a measurable parameter (the word count), you now recognize what finished is, and therefore you’ll know it when you see it.

Supercharge your process

Having set a deadline and a target word count for your next masterpiece, you’re faced with two options: the familiar one, which is to pat yourself on the back for this achievement, fold it, and walk away; or to start working.

Now the latter is the bit you may not necessarily enjoy, but there are ways to ease yourself into it, by surrounding yourself with the tools and processes designed to facilitate that.

Ideally, you’d have everything set up:

On top of that, you would set goals. Smaller, manageable goals, to support the overarching goal of writing 90,000 words. We all need small victories and that periodical reassurance of “task completion” to keep us going.

So set daily, monthly, yearly, and even hourly goals for:

Don’t just set these, follow-up on them, otherwise you just wasted time with the busywork of organizing the writing that you don’t do. Check to see if you’re actually achieving these goals, and how you fare on the bigger picture—the writing of your master oeuvre.

There’s no greater thrill than seeing how your work takes shape, measurably. It’s a self-reinforcing loop: the more you write, the more goals you’ll attain, and the more you’ll be energized to keep writing.

And then?

And then, having followed this recipe, you’d have finally written your book, for better or worse.

The only remaining question is how easy or difficult this whole goal tracking business will be for you.

Novelitist was purpose-built from the ground up to take care of the above (and much more), thus unburdening you from it, freeing you to actually do your job: write, and write more. Be a clever writer of your time, and take full advantage of modernity.

Alternatively, use other means to track your writing progress: other apps, pen and paper, anything, but make sure you do it.

Because, as prosaic (sic!) and unglamorous it may sound, writing a book is a game of numbers: no numbers, no book.

Why movies can never replace books, or, why watching will never replace reading

You’ve probably read Frank Herbert’s Dune. If you haven’t, you should.

Until then, know that Paul Atreides is one of the main characters of this sprawling, haunting, beautiful work of literature that transcends the science-fiction genre.

If you haven’t read Dune, just think of a main character from one of the books near and dear to you.

Dune has been ported to the screen at least three times. Historically, three different actors played Paul.

I’ve watched these adaptations several times. Every time, I ask myself the same question:

Who ordered this Paul?

https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/novelitist.appspot.com/o/dpLfAY1wDvSrk1K3cres91KBs5T2%2F
Is this the Paul Atreides you had in mind?

They’re all terrific actors, the three of them. They all did a “great job,” but none quite did it for me, and I bet that’s the case for any rabid Dune fan.

It’s not their fault, and it’s not the casting director’s fault. They can’t possibly select the Paul I had in mind, in fact, the Pauls millions of readers have conjured up in theirs.

Even myself, given the final word on casting, and an unlimited supply of candidates, wouldn’t be able to choose the right Paul—the one I had in mind after reading the book.

“Red car!”

Having read the headline above, close your eyes now. What do you see?

https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/novelitist.appspot.com/o/dpLfAY1wDvSrk1K3cres91KBs5T2%2F
I bet you saw none of the above.

Your mind manifested some red car; a red car; the red car for you.

It may have some commonalities with the objects above, but it’s at the same time nothing like those, to you.

The words “red car” evoke a certain picture in your mind, entirely particular to you, to the way you’ve learned to perceive the world based on your comprehensive life experience, stored in your memories, crossed by associations you’ve made, common or weird, constantly changing with the context you’re in.

When you’re anxious, you’ll see with your mind’s eye a “red car” that may be significantly different than when you’re in a state of relaxation or excitement. Have you noticed how books give you a different overall feel depending on how you were already feeling while reading them? That’s why certain books work best at certain times in your life, and why re-reads often provide new revelations.

Words stir numerous internal representations, not only as many as there are people, but even within a single mind. Yours is free and able to craft its own.

Ready-made, one-to-one, visual images enforce a certain picture and vision that’s far less flexible—you ingest what’s in front of you as-is.

As successions of images racing at least 24 frames-per-second before your eyes, movies give you the same: a ready-made visual representation of what’s going on, which you’ll intake as given, with little room for you to contribute.

That’s not to say static images or films can’t stimulate your emotions. They certainly can. It’s just that they don’t tap into your creative abilities the way words do, forcing you to come up with your own, unique internal scenery that matches what you’ve just read.

Your brain on words

Reading activates specific brain areas, in different ways than watching a movie does. This radical difference between creating an entire film in your mind as you read, as opposed to consuming a ready-made one, is well-supported by neuroscience.

You don’t need science to tell you that reading is more laborious, compared to watching movies. That’s probably why many people don’t read.

Reading is the decoding of symbols—ultimately arbitrary glyphs, but universally agreed upon—to derive meaning from them. It’s a process of cognition, and it changes your brain.

With direct imagery, the basic meaning is served on a platter. Only higher-level meaning remains to be worked out.

The impassable chasm

When you read about a lion and a hunter, as in Italo Calvino’s mind bending t zero, they take shape inside your mind’s theater, they inhabit an ever-changing place that’s created more by yourself than the writer, where they play out their roles as you keep reading in a way that’s impossible to translate to film.

Beyond the basic differences in neural mechanics between reading and watching, reading affords abstractions that ready-made images can’t possibly convey.

To sum up: to stay in t0 I must establish an objective configuration of t0; to establish an objective configuration of t0 I must move to t1; to move into t1 I must adopt some kind of subjective viewpoint so I might as well keep my own. To sum up further: to stay still in time I must move with time, to become objective I must remain subjective.

— Italo Calvino, t zero (The Complete Cosmicomics)

Port this gem to a visual medium, I dare you. Make abstract philosophical ideas into blockbuster movies, I challenge you.

Reading is uniquely human

You can find countless videos of cats and dogs looking at their own image in the mirror (or at videos of other cats and dogs and whatnot) and reacting as if they were looking at something real, fooled by the visuals. The animal brain is all it takes to watch things. You won’t find any videos of cats reacting to reading a paragraph about a mouse.

No species reads, except humans. Although blind people can’t look at pictures or watch movies, they can still read. They can decipher meaning from symbols they acquire via a tactile approach just as well as people who see the symbols. This makes it clear that the means of obtaining that information is quite irrelevant. Reading begins after merely seeing (or feeling) the letters.

Lessons from artificial intelligence (AI)

You feed words into certain AI systems and they dream up images. Prompt DALL·E 2, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion to create images for you, and they’ll paint (sometimes hallucinate) pictures to match.

In a way, these AI models are reading. They read your prompt, then do their best to come up with the matching visuals.

Turns out the best way to describe something to a machine is still natural language, not imagery. Communicating with original images is beyond normal human capabilities anyway, unless you’re a painter or proficient photographer, but even so, the overhead of such communication is tremendous.

The theater of your mind

That’s a scene you populate by reading, with visions unique to you, of people and places and events, artifacts of your imagination, built on top of your memories and emotions.

Only the intricate, nuanced use of language can bring those plays to life, and make them brilliant with true significance. By simply watching things you miss out on all of this.

Your inner stage becomes something like a metropolitan downtown, plastered with visual adverts put there by someone else’s vision. It’s exciting and fun for a while, before it becomes dull and tiresome.

Get your own Paul Atreides

Read the book to be rewarded with your tailor-made, unique vision of the story, the world, the characters. Read to create that long-lasting impression that will never leave you, even after you’ve watched all the screen adaptations.

Your Dune could be Pride and Prejudice, or Anna Karenina, Slaughterhouse-Five or The Consolation of Philosophy. The principle remains: read to really take that universe in, its settings and characters, struggles, tragedies and triumphs.

This changes you in ways inaccessible when you only watch pictures, whether they’re in motion or not.

Will AI replace writers?

It depends, but it will.

Robot writing a novel ((AI-generated image)
Guess who made this image of a robot writing a book. Hint: it’s not made of flesh.*

As far as some writers are concerned, the Singularity is here

Large language models (LLMs) the likes of ChatGPT have already stirred quite the commotion in the society of computer science gurus, politicians, and other experts whose relevant qualification is having a Twitter account. Soon, as the effects of this technology become manifest, society at large will be shaken to the core.

It’s gotten crazy. Computer scientists, many of dubious fame, shout from the rooftops how Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), meaning something akin to human intelligence, not merely specialized AI (aka quasi-impotent Machine Learning (ML) efforts), is something we will never be able to produce, yet at the same time, the same people, sign the infamous petition to block further AI research. Make up your mind, then: If AGI is intangible, why bother stopping research?

We’ll never get AGI, not with this attitude.

What’s your shtick?

Are you writing dime-a-dozen smut and/or emotional pornography that you wrap in an enticing (i.e., salacious) package, usually consisting of a book cover boasting some half-naked version of Christian Grey, that you then dump on the Kindle Store?

Then the answer is yes: You will be replaced by AI. AGI not required. This needs not be tragic. Simply switch sides: get AI to do your work for you, write that schlock in your stead, then just market it as per usual. Profit at scale.

Perhaps you’re writing copy for commercial purposes, landing pages and ads. If your copy is bland, generic, purple, conformist, then the answer is also yes: You’ll be replaced by AI soon enough. Do not despair. As is the case with the smut writer, you can turn AI into your ally. Most people don’t know better anyway.

https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/novelitist.appspot.com/o/dpLfAY1wDvSrk1K3cres91KBs5T2%2F
Writers (and similar) have some of the greatest risk exposure to AI: Source article.

Polish or perish

In the coming world of AI-powered, write-by-numbers verbalism, great human writing shall rise like oil above water.

The deafening background noise of AI pseudo-creation already makes the human signal all the more salient.

This is a good thing: Mediocrity now has an infinitely scalable competitor. Rise above, or drown in that lukewarm ocean of probabilistic droplets.

Polish your craft or be surpassed by the machine.

The opportunity here lies in arming gifted human writers with unobtrusive AI tools to take over the menial tasks, provide a second set of "eyes," offer alternatives, assist and help—in short, like a tireless personal assistant or secretary, remove much of that friction that isn't promoting creativity, nor expression; unblock and facilitate, clear the path, unburden humans of everything but that which compels them to write in the first place.

What seems to some as the ender of professional writing is only the raiser of the standards.


At Novelitist, we’re not judging. Nothing wrong with writing schlock.

Here we encourage writing in general, and our business is providing the best tools to write with, to the businessman as well as the literary enlightened.

“The best” now means AI-enabled tools. They give you technical abilities inconceivable (or all but impossible to implement) just one year ago, ranging from assistance with style and research to writing and entire first draft.

That’s why AI is coming to Novelitist. It’s going to be opt-in and kept completely separated from our other facilities (meaning you can simply shun it without losing anything else we provide), but there’s no turning back.

The genie has left the building.


* Generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E model.

What’s next is more quality, timeless material littered with shameless self-promotion, like the one you’ve hopefully just read.

Typing furiously
Stay close, stay tuned, keep writing.