Hard Mode? Or Cheat Codes?

A dish I love requires freshly grated coconut. Most women of my generation don’t cook much, and if they do, they probably buy frozen grated coconut. Growing up, the concept was heresy. We swore we could tell when corners were cut. The coconut had to be so fresh it didn’t even carry a smell yet. And it had to be grated right before it was used, or the texture would be dry. It wasn’t until I started working professionally that I realized the inequity baked into such claims – forcing women to stay at home, cooking for hours.

I still grate my own coconuts. Here’s what I use:

Friends have told me that they look like torture devices. Crack open skulls and grate out the brain. My friends have wild imaginations. I prefer to cook this way because the goal is to recreate not just the taste of the dish as it was made by my mother, and her mother, and her mother before her, but the experience in the body. Cooking is the fabric of our lives. We spend days in the kitchen, talking to each other, cooking together, tasting, eating, anticipating and relishing. Both process and output matter.

The writer Ana Sun, who blurbed Algorithms of Betrayal, says she likes to do things “in hard mode.” Her short stories are a tightrope act, doing things like switching between five points of view in 1500 words. By contrast, I’m always writing in easy mode, sprawling and taking up space. Novel too long at 150,000 words? I’ll just make it longer and split it into two! Can’t tell the fantasy story I want in a trilogy? Eh, I’ll just write as many books as it takes.

Recently, someone asked me whether I would use AI to write my books. Once I was past the “Heresy!” reaction, I did some soul-searching. Why do I think it’s acceptable to use a grinder, rather than a mortar and pestle, but not to use frozen coconut? Why do I think it’s acceptable to use AI as an editor, but not to write? The answer comes down to two things: some things are cheat codes that democratize access, lowering barriers and saving time; some things are necessary constraints without which the work becomes meaningless. Which is which?

1. Cheat Codes

A computer is already a cheat code. We don’t use typewriters or hand-written manuscripts anymore. Spellcheck is a cheat code. And I might cook in hard mode, but I have a house cleaner. When delegating, either to technology or to another person, I ask myself three questions:

• Is this something only I can do?

• Is this a worthwhile use of my time?

• Is this something I like doing?

If the answer to all these questions is No, it’s prime for a cheat code. If the answer to all these question is yes, hard mode it is.

Here are some recent writing-related cheat codes I’ve discovered:

• Novelpad – software that is much more promising and intuitive than Scrivener, and the engineers building it are really nice. There are some advanced features I need in it before I can use it myself, but I’ve shared that with the team and most are coming in Novelpad 2.0.

• Ctrl+F for line edits – when you’ve been reading your prose over and over, you grow blind to it. Instead of trying to edit sequentially, I’ve found it easier to edit by searching for problematic words and editing the lines where they show up, e.g.

I have a whole list of words to search for, building on what I’ve learned about self-editing from The 10% Solution. I managed to cut 5,000 words this way. If this is interesting to you, drop a comment and I’ll share more.

2. Necessary Constraints

An MIT study found that use of ChatGPT significantly decreases brain activity. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. When I was young, we had to compute trigonometry and logarithms in our heads. Now that we no longer have to, I bet those neural pathways have been hollowed out to make room for Netflix. And OpenAI has hired a forensic psychiatrist because its users keep sliding into mental health crises.

To stay healthy, your brain actually needs to work. Just because there’s an elevator in the building doesn’t mean you no longer need exercise. In a previous post, I mentioned that the real threat of AI is the abdication of agency, of trusting technology with the wrong work. When I attempt to use Gemini as an editor, it hallucinates, telling me things that simply aren’t true. And I would never use it to write fiction, since the point is to write – to express my thoughts and my voice (something only I can do), to exercise my communication skills (a worthwhile use of my time) and it’s something I love doing.

Other constraints I used to hate, but have come to appreciate – genre, structure and narrative point of view. One of the reasons cited for the movie Mickey 17 being a box office failure was its enormous budget – at $118 million, many decisions that would have happened to manage pacing and market fit became unnecessary. Star power doesn’t make up for poor story.

I kinda love the idea that a thriller has to be “unputdownable,” because it forces show over tell, and requires us to cut anything that doesn’t serve the story. Even if what I write isn’t always in the thriller genre, the constraints of any genre force you to think about your story not just as a narcissistic dump of how your brain sees the world, but as a means of communicating with people whose brains are wired a certain way that’s different than yours. Reaching across that divide is why I write after all.

Things I will continue to do “in hard mode” are:

• Write

• Read

• Grate coconuts

Definitely waiting for self-driving cars though. That’s not even a question.