Nocturnal Drafts | First Draft
Join me in admiring the mess
Hello, hello Night Owls. I’m your Narrator, Nikki. However you got here, welcome. I’m not one to waste a word (I prefer to waste many words), so I’ll get right to it—I’ve noticed a lot of posts and Notes about AI on Substack.
Some writers share prompts to help write entire fucking blog posts—others share in my…frustrations.
This discussion with
and sent me on a spiral/crash-out that lasted…an embarrassing about of time.I mean we all see what’s happening. Same voice, same rhythm, same recycled metaphors, copy-pasted from post to post—even the goddamn Notes, dude. I’m receiving replies to my notes that are entirely generated by AI. This, my friends, is very, very icky behavior.
The result of this, for me, has felt akin to a weird little hollow space in my soul.
I kept circling back to one question: What do we do now? Not even “develop your own voice” works anymore. What do I, a fiction author, do when someone can take a post, copy-paste it into ChatGPT, and mimic a voice or character?
I won’t pretend to have a solution—
—what I can do is share the worst, messiest pieces of my process. Call it proof of life.
Annnnnd that’s about where we’re at on that.
Where Are We, Exactly?
Good question—rhetorical in the Void, but good.
Nocturnal Drafts is where I’ll dump bits of my writing process—from the notes and scraps, to the scenes that never made it past a brain dump. This isn’t meant for the general public (though I know someone will still skim it). It’s for those of us who miss the human element—mistakes, false starts, someone leaving her place holders in and hitting publish, errors.
There’s no schedule for this. I have no plan for how often these will appear. Sometime this week I’ll upload my docs from chapter 3 of Olivia. Probably.
I’m one-million percent sure that I’m not the first to do it, and probably won’t be the last. So, if you’re a writer and want to participate, consider this an open invitation to join me in shameless oversharing. See you then.
Until the next draft,
—The Narrator
P.S. We’re already 17% of the way to our Ko-Fi goal for May! How cool!
I can’t thank you all enough.
If you’d like to contribute, you can do so with the button below.
GINA LINETTI MEME!!! (I somehow love you and your publication even more now because having a Brooklyn 99 meme in your post is proof of fabulous taste)
But all of that aside, I LOVE this idea! It's a little rebellion against AI and I am ALL FOR IT. Not to mention that getting a glimpse into your writing process is like discovering a treasure chest all in itself. Can't wait!!
The thing that gives me hope about AI is that it will eventually destroy itself. It’s not going away but for AI to work it will require restraint in order to reach equilibrium. Otherwise it’ll just cannibalistically feed on itself until the internet is filled with gobbledygook. The good news is it has revealed the value of curation which will effectively bring back some form of magazine culture again. We’ve all left print media behind because gatekeepers and environmental waste but we’re finding out that the curation was the real value added. Substack is the first step on that process.