TechTakes

so I clicked through to the barely veiled advertisement on NaNoWriMo’s blog:

Rephrase by ProWritingAid is a brand-new feature meant for writers like you. You can highlight any sentence, click Rephrase, and generate a new sentence. Shorten or lengthen a sentence, change the tone to formal or informal, or add sensory detail.

Here’s a boring sentence I wrote: “Quinn entered the dark and cold forest.”

And here’s a sentence Rephrase gave me: “Quinn shivered as he stepped into the cold, dark forest, the air thick with the scent of damp earth.”

I can build off that! Now I’m more excited to write this scene that was feeling bland.

like fuck me that’s somehow even more bland, but it’s longer so you’re closer to that 50,000 words you need to write ~~so you can nut~~

I’m not a particularly good writer, but here’s some advice my human brain hallucinated without burning down a rainforest:

• nobody fucking “steps into” a forest, what the fuck is that? if it’s an important place, describe it geographically. describe how the atmosphere and scenery change as Quinn approaches the forest. and since this is NaNoWriMo and you’re in a hurry, you can go with a placeholder like // TODO: sober up and do some basic research on what forests and their surrounding areas are usually like for authenticity, lorem ipsum Deloris shrdlu
• this fucker started shivering? is he naked? is the forest frozen in a way the surrounding area isn’t? if so maybe write that cause it sounds more interesting than this bland shit.
• maybe I live in a particularly dry place, but my brain isn’t rendering “the scent of damp earth” or why it’d sit thick in the air. I don’t think that’s what the forests I’ve been in smell like though — they smell like trees looking to fuck. but is Quinn the type of character who’d even give a fuck about any of this? maybe he lives in the forest and none of these smells are new. maybe he’s currently half a foot tall so the smell of the damp earth’s very relevant to him. the LLM doesn’t know so it filled in the blandest shit possible instead!