Does Artificial Intelligence Get Writer’s Block?

Musings on serialized fiction, AI, and facing the blank page

This week, I was beset with a mild case of writer’s block. It happens from time to time, and I’ve learned not to panic. I remember when writing Depth Charge, I’d sit and stare at my screen’s blank page for hours and it terrified me. How will I ever finish this book? With Sweetwater, my more methodical planning and a new sense of writing discipline really helped. Every day, I knew my goal, and I treated each chapter like a freelance article, since they tended to be about the same number of words. I was done with my first draft in just a few months. 

When mulling an idea for this week’s missive, I was reminded of an idea I was kicking around for a while: “serialized fiction,” using Substack to publish a full length thriller novel one chapter at a time over weeks and months. There are pros and cons to doing this, obviously. On the one hand, readers might enjoy weekly installments moving the plot forward, not unlike a TV series (pre-binge watching days) where you tune in to see how the hero gets out of last week’s predicament (remember the show, 24?). Thrillers are well suited for this style of story development, where each chapter ends in a sort of cliffhanger to entice the reader to turn the page. From a crass business perspective, I could also see how writing a serialized novel might drive some traffic (and subscriptions) to my publication.