Between the Lines: The Novel Has Entered the Chat

Published every Friday, Between the Lines is a weekly column by Namrata. This week, she explores if AI can write a novel, who gets to have the bad first draft?

I have been working on a novel for the last eight years, which is a strange thing to admit in a world that has become increasingly impatient with anything that takes too long. Eight years is enough time for friendships to change, cities to change, children to grow up, for books that once seemed contemporary to acquire the faint patina of nostalgia, and yet my novel remains somewhere between being written and being imagined, neither entirely a manuscript nor merely an idea anymore, but a thing that has lived with me long enough to acquire its own history.

It is nowhere near ready to be shared with the world in any form. I could call this a lack of confidence, and there would be some truth in that. I could call it fear, because there is something particularly vulnerable about allowing other people into a world that has existed privately for so long, to have them meet characters I have lived with for years and encounter the sentences I have worried over, changed, removed and restored. There is also the possibility that I am simply one of those writers who believes, with a stubbornness that is not always useful, that a book should be allowed to leave only when it has become the best version of itself that its writer is capable of making. I know this is an impossible standard. There is always another sentence to improve, another chapter that could be rearranged, another character whose motivations could be made more complicated, another ending that might be more satisfying if I were willing to disturb it.