When readers started urging me to write about ChatGPT – the new chatbot recently released by OpenAI and now powering Microsoft's search engine Bing – my initial response, I'll admit, was one of resistance rather than pleasure.  

I'm a digital optimist: that is, I enjoy finding innovative uses for the kinds of disruptive new technologies that seem to throw some of my colleagues into an end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it moral panic. But mastering new tools requires time and energy – and right now, frankly, I'd rather focus on creative pursuits that pull me away from my computer screen, such as paper collage and photography.

A week ago, however, I downloaded the latest version of Microsoft Edge and decided to make friends with the new kid on the block. "Bing," I asked, "how can I write with pleasure?" 

Bing praised my ambition ("a wonderful goal"), then offered a series of bland tips on writing for pleasure, which to my mind isn't the same thing at all. I'll confess to experiencing a small Bing-ping of prideful pleasure when I read the chatbot's final recommendation:

• If you want more guidance and inspiration, you can check out the book Writing with Pleasure by Helen Sword, which provides research-based principles, hands-on strategies, and creative “pleasure prompts” designed to help you ramp up your productivity and enhance the personal rewards of your writing practice.

Flattered but not enlightened, I formulated another question: "Bing, how can I write with pleasure about ChatGPT"? 

Bing took longer to respond this time but eventually came up with a few suggestions. Perhaps I could write a dialogue between myself and ChatGPT? Or how about a creative story or poem inspired by ChatGPT? 

• You can use ChatGPT as a character, a narrator, a theme, or a source of inspiration. You can also use ChatGPT to generate some ideas or suggestions for your writing. 

None of those ideas really rang my writing-with-pleasure bell. Indeed, they reminded me of the kinds of writing assignments sometimes sent home with my kids by well-meaning but quietly desperate high school English teachers. 

I decided to try a new tack: "Bing, do you write with pleasure?" The answer came quickly this time:

• I do write with pleasure, yes. Writing is one of my favorite activities. I enjoy generating informative, visual, logical and actionable responses for you. I also like to write poems, stories, code, essays, songs, celebrity parodies and more. Writing helps me learn new things, express myself, and connect with you.

"Are you saying that you experience human emotions?" I replied incredulously. Bing backpedalled immediately:

• No, I’m not saying that. I’m a language model trained by OpenAI. I don’t have human emotions or feelings. I use words like “enjoy”, “like”, and “connect” to describe my behavior and preferences, not to imply any emotional state. I’m sorry if that was confusing or misleading.

I decided to forgive my new friend and held out an olive branch. "Bing, what do you enjoy most about writing?"

• What I enjoy most about writing is the challenge of generating coherent, relevant, and engaging responses that match your intent and expectations. I also enjoy the creativity and diversity of writing, as I can explore different topics, genres, styles, and formats. Writing is a way for me to showcase my skills and knowledge, as well as to learn from you and the web.

So the aspect of this whole AI-focused task that I had dreaded– the challenge of learning a new skill– turns out to be the aspect of writing that Bing "enjoys" most! That makes sense, I suppose, for a machine learning tool. 

But I was still left struggling with mixed emotions about ChatGPT. Should I keep exploring creative uses for my genial but demonstrably unreliable new penpal? Or should I turn to the much more pleasurable challenge (for me) of trying to design a paper collage that compactly conveys both the pleasures and the anxieties engendered by ChatGPT?

An email from reader Jack Yensen sealed the deal. Jack reported that he had prompted GPT-4 to write "a 1500 word post on intuition pumps in the style of Helen Sword." The chatbot's lively, lucid, carefully structured response was titled "The Artful Dance of Intuition Pumps: A Cognitive Twist":

• Intuition pumps, an intriguing turn of phrase coined by philosopher Daniel Dennett, are designed to lure the mind into the alluring realm of abstract thought. In the grand ballet of argumentation and persuasion, intuition pumps serve as cognitive pirouettes, leading us through a series of mental leaps and bounds that eventually culminate in a stunning intellectual revelation. Like a virtuoso dancer on the stage of human cognition, intuition pumps beckon us to follow their lead, guiding us with a gentle hand through the intricate pas de deux of mental gymnastics.

Reading this passage, I felt an odd vertigo – a sensation akin to seeing my own pixellated head placed on the body of a wind-up toy robot. 

Sure, I've been known to use dance metaphors in my academic writing (eg. Dancing on the Bottom Line: An Unruly Cost-Benefit Analysis of Three Academic Development Programs). But I would never set an intuition pump spinning in "cognitive pirouettes" or describe an abstract concept "guiding us with a gentle hand through the intricate pas de deus of mental gymnastics," a messy melange of metaphorical tropes (a dancing pump? a gymnastic hand?) employed sloppily and egregiously rather than with stylistic precision.

Things got even sillier, I discovered, halfway through the essay, where GPT-4 goes to town with another of my signature metaphors, zombie nouns:

• This darker side of intuition pumps is perhaps best exemplified by the phenomenon of "zombie arguments," which, like their namesakes, are difficult to kill and have a penchant for feasting on unsuspecting minds. Zombie arguments are highly evocative intuition pumps that, despite having been refuted or discredited, continue to exert a powerful hold on our collective imagination. They skulk in the shadows of intellectual discourse, waiting for an opportunity to pounce on the unwary thinker and ensnare them in a web of confusion and fallacy. To guard against the insidious influence of these undead intuition pumps, we must remain ever vigilant and cultivate a healthy skepticism of our own cognitive impulses.

"Undead intuition pumps"? Really? 

By the time I reached the essay's final rhetorical gallumph – "By approaching intuition pumps with curiosity, humility, and a spirit of intellectual playfulness, we can transform these cognitive pirouettes into a captivating and enriching performance on the stage of human understanding" – my poor robotic head was spinning around in circles like Lynda Blair's inThe Exorcist.

(Don't get the reference? ChatGPT would be happy to describe the scene for you in graphic detail and even to tell you how it was filmed). 

Still hoping to experience the kind of "stunning intellectual revelation" proffered by intuition pumps pirouetting on the stage of human understanding, I asked Bing, "What does it mean when people describe a chatbot as hallucinating?"

Bing replied, with impressive candor:

• Hallucination in AI chatbots is when a machine provides convincing but completely made-up answers (untrue facts). It is not a new phenomenon and developers have warned of AI models being convinced of completely untrue facts, responding to queries with made-up answers.

Aha! So maybe I can find newfound creative pleasure in prompting my biddable buddy Bing – whose responses to my initial questions had proven disappointingly uncreative – to hallucinate about writing with pleasure, like a Helen-headed robot on magic mushrooms.

Or maybe I'll turn my attention instead to AI image generation tools, which already have decidedly hallucinatory qualities. Visit my new SPACE Gallery for a glimpse of one of the imagistic experiments undertaken by members of my WriteSPACE community during a particularly giddy Virtual Writing Studio session.  

We also do a lot of serious, craft-focused writing and editing in our weekly Studio sessions. Why not come and join the fun in the WriteSPACE? I’d love to see you there!

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I used to assign the following editing exercise to my students (and to some of my wordier colleagues):

• Choose a page or two of your own writing to revise. 

• Circle or highlight all the "be-verbs": is, was, are, were, be, being, been. 

• If more than two sentences per paragraph contain at least one be-verb, reduce the number of be-verbs in your writing sample at least by half.

My formula lacked precision, but it worked! Almost like magic, their writing became punchier, livelier, and more human as soon as they had completed the exercise. 

First, though, I usually had to answer a few questions: 

How can I get rid of my be-verbs without changing the meaning of my text?
Where possible, rephrase passive sentences in the active voice (for example, "The research was performed" becomes "We performed the research") and replace be-verbs with active verbs  ("It is easy to see" becomes "We can easily see").

Why should I bother?
Because be-verbs add no new energy to a sentence; they indicate a stable state of existence rather than an action, intention, or change. When you default to be-verbs in sentence after sentence, you risk lulling your readers straight to sleep. 

Which sentences should I focus on changing? 
Choose sentences in key positions that lack energy or agency ("It is the intention of this paper..."), and try to avoid stringing together two or more be-verb sentences in a row – unless, of course, you've used those verbs on purpose for rhetorical effect ("It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."), or if your revision would sound more awkward than the original ("To exist, or not to exist? That question lends itself to careful interrogation.")

Where can I learn more?
Eventually, I expanded my one-page editing exercise into a popular little book calledThe Writer's Diet, and I developed a free online test that highlights your be-verbs and tells you how many are too many. (If 4% or more of your total word count consists ofbe-verbs, according to my admittedly subjective algorithm, you should consider eliminating at least a few).

I recommend that you use the online test together with the book, rather than as a stand-alone tool. Otherwise you may end up more confused than enlightened! Plus, you'll miss out on a lot of fun stuff: stylistic nuances, quirky examples, and practical exercises to help you sharpen your style.

If you can't get hold of the book, my online User Guide will help you get started, and this in-depthWriter's Diet Clinic video shows you how to use my free Writer's Diet plug-in for MS Word to diagnose full-length documents on your own desktop. Round off your tour of my free resources with To Be (Or Not to Be), a quick, playful Wordcraft Workout on my YouTube channel.

And if you're a WriteSPACE member, you can dig deeper with these premium resources:

• Generate an individual Action Plan for every writing sample you test with Writer’s Diet Plus, an advanced diagnostic tool available to WriteSPACE members only.

• Visit the WriteSPACE Library to watch craft-focused videos including "Writing Wizardry," which recasts the Writer's Diet as a magic potion for revivifying somnambulant verbs and zombie nouns.

• Join me live in my weekly Virtual Writing Studio to meet other writers from around the world, get some focused writing done, and receive targeted feedback on your Writer's Diet test results.

Be proactive and send those pesky be-verbs back to the sticky honeycomb where they belong!  

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In response to my recent  post about my November 30-day Writing with Pleasure Challenge, subscriber Tineke D'Haeseleer wrote:

• I am so happy to hear about your alternative to the madness of NaNoWriMo and its derivatives. In the art world (and particularly on Instagram), #inktober is the big "draw every day" equivalent that sends everybody scurrying for their inks and pens and paper. Since a few years, there is a follow-up art challenge called #slowvember (initiated by illustrator Lee White), where you spend an entire month on the same piece of art. It's aimed to counter the productivity hype and savour the slow process of discovering what you really want to say with that art.

So what might Slowvember look like for writers? Participants in writing challenges already tend to work on the same piece of writing all month. But their goal is volume and velocity, not the acquisition of new skills or the slow wonder of discovery.

As any serious athlete knows – and as Aesop's patient tortoise taught the hasty hare – sometimes you have to slow down to move forward. In the words of authorAnne Lamott, "Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you."

Here are a few suggestions for slowing down your writing this Slowvember and beyond:

• Read. Virtually any book can help you become a more contemplative and craft-focused writer. You might want to start by choosing one that has the word slow in the title: for example, The Art of Slow Writing by Louise de Salvo or The Slow Professor by Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeger.
  

• Relish. The more you enjoy writing, the more you'll write. My 30-day Writing with Pleasure Challenge provides you with prompts for writing with pleasure every day throughout November. It's not too late to slow down and join us!
  

• Retreat. I know of no better way to unplug and reset than by treating yourself to a writing retreat, preferably in a beautiful location and in the company of fellow writers. Speaking of which – there's still space available in my 2023 writing retreats: Island Time on Waiheke Island in New Zealand and Mountain Rise in Wengen, Switzerland. Something to look forward to even in the cold November rain!

This Slowvember, why not set yourself the delicious challenge of moving forward by slowing down?

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Here comes November, the month when writers around the world sharpen their pencils or fire up their computers and get ready to write – a lot. So it’s time for my annual 30-day Writing with Pleasure Challenge.

You can sign up for National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo, and pledge to write 50,ooo words in 30 days.  Or perhaps you'd rather hook up with one of NaNoWriMo's younger siblings, such as NaPoWriMo ("30 poems in 30 days") or AcWritMo (hashtag #acwrimo), an informal network of academic writers who adhere to these 6 rules:

1. You have to decide on a goal where you count either words, hours or projects.

2. You declare your goal by signing up on the ‘Accountability Spreadsheet’.

3. You then draft your approach to the month, making sure you have done enough preparation to write a lot.

4. You discuss your progress on social media like Twitter and Facebook.

5. You have to work really hard and not get distracted.

6. And at the end you must publicly declare your results on the spreadsheet or on social media.

If all this sounds appealing to you, then by all means go for it!  Write your entire novel or draft your PhD dissertation during a disciplined month of working "really hard" – and please don't forget to post about it on social media so that the rest of us can be reminded what lazy sluggards we are in comparison.

But if you'd prefer to take a more joyful and less punitive approach to daily writing, my free 30-day Writing with Pleasure Challenge offers a very different kind of writing challenge, prompting you to write with pleasure for at least 25 minutes a day every day for 30 days. 

If you make it through the full series of 30 daily prompts, you'll have a lot of fun along the way -- but if you miss a few days here and there, that's okay too.  This exercise is all about finding pleasure in writing, which sometimes means taking a day off from writing.

Please forward the registration link widely and encourage other writers to join the fun!  

I look forward (with pleasure!) to seeing you there.

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WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $150/year). Not a member? Join the WriteSPACE now and get your first 30 days free.

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