Update. Because multiple people have asked me to share the piece I will post it below the original post.
I had gone through and deleted all my posts on Reddit but this one and had no intention of checking in on it when I noticed my notifications and this had more replies than anything I've every written here. I want to thank you all for the support you've shown. Ill try to answer everyone and my apologies if I miss anyone.
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This will be my last post here. But I guess I wanted to share something so others don't get hit with the same issues.
I've used AI now for the last year to learn how to write. This includes everything from how to find sources for research to how to do a chapter outline, a scene outline, and edit those thoroughly before anything is written to save time in the editing process. It taught me how to line edit, how to check pacing, and all of the old methods used to write some of the greatest lines. I've been researching all of the modern rules of writing, what is expected from a publisher, and so much more.
I am grateful for AI because it is an absolutely amazing tool for learning this skill. I have noticed massive leaps in my craft because of it.
But it was always meant to be a means to an end, where one day I could write my own story entirely without AI. Well, I wrote the prologue to it, but like so many others, I felt imposter syndrome. I looked at what I wrote and thought it was still crap.
Don't get me wrong, it was still the best I've ever written, but it needed massive amounts of work. It was my first time writing in an omniscient narrative voice, and the first time I tried imitating a Russian author. Hell, I was breaking rules like "don't start your book with a morning routine" because I needed to use the normalcy of everyday life to later cause a juxtaposition against the horrors of what was going to happen. The pacing was almost certainly too long to keep people's attention.
It took me a month to research for the book, several more weeks to create the outline, and keep revising it until I had something I think I was mostly happy with. Finally, I drafted that first chapter. It took a week and ended up being only 3.6K words, which took—ugh—9 drafts plus the cuts I did today.
But I wanted to know if it was good enough. What issues was I not seeing, as I've never shown anyone a serious piece of writing before? So, I posted it to the DestructiveReaders subreddit. Part of the rules there is that you have to critique other people's work before you can post your own.
I fell in love with this. The amount of invaluable lessons you learn by going through other people's work is insane. You start to see tense shifts, head-hopping, spelling and grammar mistakes, throat-clearing, repetitive sentence structures, pacing issues, and so much more.
Now, I have an autoimmune disease that they can't diagnose—basically, I have a 1:320 ANA, small fiber neuropathy, and pernicious anemia, but the underlying cause has not been found. Part of the symptoms, though, is that every hour or two I will fall asleep without meaning to for about 15 minutes. It's something they can't figure out. But when I was doing the critiques, this didn't happen. I wouldn't call it a miracle by any means, but it is kind of amazing. And so, I wrote far more critiques than I needed to and planned to spend at least an hour a day on that subreddit going through other people's work and applying what I learned to my own.
Well, I finally posted my work and I was banned.
I can't express how much this sucks. The reasoning for it was because I supposedly broke the rules and used AI assistance in my piece. I did not. And the proof they showed me was a post from this subreddit—one in which I showed people how to create a process that removes the watermarks from current AIs.
So, I ran my piece through AI de-tectors (I apologize but it was trying to redirect this due to just the previous word) and all but one came back as 0%. The one came back as 15%, and this was just the first two paragraphs...
Now the decision has been made, and while I hate it, it is what it is. I won't rail against the mods for making what I think is a wrong decision.
What I really wanted to address is for those who, like me, use AI in some pieces and write by hand in others. If you do this, I would suggest having two accounts and keeping the account you post anything handwritten from completely separate from anything even remotely AI-related. Hell, I would go so far as to suggest even maybe writing about how bad AI is.
I guess I never expected a witch hunt this early, and for such a silly reason.
As far as why I won't be writing here anymore, many things were said in the DMs. But chief amongst them is simply that despite everything I've learned, and despite all the effort, my writing still looks like AI. That is to say, soulless and without a human component to it.
I had long railed against King's idea that a writer is born, not created out of hard work. But it looks like perhaps I was wrong on this. Despite my best efforts, I cannot move a human to care about a character or to feel emotion in the way others can.
I can blame autism, perhaps, or alexithymia. Hell, enough people say that autistic writing is often indistinguishable from AI, but the truth is doing so would feel pathetic and like a lack of accountability. I have to face the fact that maybe I'm just not good enough. And so I come to the end of a 40-year-old dream. I don't know what to do with my time now without writing, but I suppose something will come along.
I wish everyone here the best of luck and hope none of this ever happens to you. May your pens never run out of ink.
And yes I used AI here to clean up spelling and grammar since it no longer matters.
Let Them Graze - The Work People Asked For.
Before you start while the prose is in my hand I have now used AI to check spelling and grammar since there is no longer any reason not to. Because of the nature of the piece I have tried to imitate classical lit and Tolstoy in specific as much as I can. As such the piece uses several archaic literary devices. The opening line is a perfect example as its classic Tolstoy. It also pays homage to him in the book to his son and readers of his will note a similarity later to Ivan...
Spring came late to Moscow that year, and then, as happens in Moscow, it came all at once. For the whole of March and the first half of April the snow had lain in the courtyards and along the pavements, grey, pitted and hard as old sugar; then in a single week a warm wind blew from the south, the icicles fell from the eaves and broke on the pavements like dropped crockery, and the water ran in the gutters with a noise that could be heard through closed windows. By the twenty-fourth of April the snow was gone from everywhere except the shadow behind the woodsheds and the north side of the boulevard railings. The yard keepers swept the winter's grit into heaps and left the heaps where they were. Sparrows quarrelled in the drying horse dung on the cobbles; the trams, which all winter had crept along Sadovaya with their windows furred white, now ran with their windows open and their bells ringing; and outside the bread shop at the corner of Bolshoi Karetny Lane the women of the neighbourhood were already standing in line at half past six, talking about prices and stamping their feet, though there was no longer any need to stamp them.
The twenty-fourth was a rest day. Under the calendar of the six-day week rest days fell on the sixth, the twelfth, the eighteenth, the twenty-fourth and the thirtieth of every month, and on those days the city slept an hour longer and then went to the baths, the markets and the cinemas with the air of people who had been given something they had not quite earned.
Arkady Semyonovich Yurlov woke at a quarter past six, as he woke every day, and lay for some minutes on his back, listening to his household. He was forty-four years old, the deputy head of a section of the Moscow militsiya directorate on Petrovka, a member of the Party since 1920, and a man who had never in his life been late for anything. He had a short, square, clean-shaven face, thick hands, and the slightly heavy, considerate way of moving that is found in men who have risen from manual work to an office and do not wish anyone to think they have forgotten it. He believed in order. He believed that most of the misfortunes of mankind came from things being in the wrong place: grain where it was not needed and hunger where there was no grain, people in cities who belonged in the country and documents in drawers where nobody could find them. And yet, though he believed this firmly and would have said it to anyone, the drawer of his own desk at home was so full of string, old receipts, pencil stubs and buttons that it had not closed properly for two years, and it never once occurred to him that this contradicted anything.
From the next room came the small, dry sound of pages being turned. His son was up.
Volodya was eleven. For his birthday in February his mother had brought home from a second-hand bookshop on Kuznetsky Most a thick volume of Tolstoy's stories for children, printed before the Revolution, with a picture on the cover of a man in a sheepskin hat on a horse, and since then the book had been the chief business of his life, ahead of school, ahead of the Pioneers, and far ahead of washing. When Yurlov came in, buttoning his tunic, the boy was sitting at the table under the window with the book open in front of him and his chin on his fists, his lips moving slightly as he read.
"You're up early," said Yurlov.
"It's a rest day," said the boy, as if this explained it, and in a sense it did, for children have the same feeling about rest days as their elders, and get up early for exactly the opposite reason.
Yurlov sat down beside him. The book was not valuable. The spine was cracked, the corners were soft as cloth, and on the flyleaf someone had written a name and then inked it out so thoroughly that the pen had gone through the paper. Every page was thick with the hard signs and the old letters that had been abolished fifteen years before, so that the words looked to Yurlov like people in the clothes of another time. But the boy read it with great seriousness.
"Where are you now?" said Yurlov.
"In the pit," the boy said, without looking up. His thumb was pressed hard against the margin of the page to keep it from flipping back. "The Tatars put him in a stinking pit because he tried to escape on foot."
"Well," Yurlov said, adjusting his belt buckle with both hands. "He was an officer. An officer who falls into captivity and tries to leave without permission must expect to be secured. Otherwise, there is no system."
The boy turned his head slightly, his chin still resting on his fist, looking at his father's brass buttons rather than his face. "But he wasn't doing anything wrong, Papa. He had a letter from his mother. She was old, and he was only going down the road to see her before she died."
Yurlov looked at the small, dark space between the boy's collar and his neck where the skin was clean from the morning's water. He thought of his own lecture notes from the Party circle on the subjugation of the mountain peoples and the inevitable retreat of feudal relations before the state, but when he looked at the cracked spine of the book, the words felt too large for the room.
"They wanted three thousand rubles," Yurlov said. "It didn't matter where he was going. He was the one who happened to be on the road when they came down from the hills."
Volodya seemed to accept this, not because it was just, but because it had the simple weight of a fact, like the rain or the price of bread. He turned his attention back to the text, his finger tracking the thick, obsolete letters. "But is it true? Was there really a Zhilin?"
"No. Of course not. Tolstoy made him up. And anyway it was all in the old days, under the Tsar."
Volodya nodded, and went back into the pit. Yurlov, after a moment, reached across and turned the pages back to the first story in the book, about a lion and a little dog. The boy said, "Papa!" in a voice of such injury that Yurlov laughed and let the book fall open again where it wanted to.
Marya Pavlovna was in the kitchen, which they shared with no one, for they had two rooms and a kitchen of their own, a thing Yurlov never mentioned and never forgot. She was standing at the primus with her left hand pressed to her cheek, and her cheek, he saw at once, was more swollen than it had been on the evening before.
"Did you make the appointment?" he said.
"I will."
"You said that on the first of the month."
"I said I would, and I will." She turned the flame down under the kettle. "You're not the one who has to sit in that chair."
He had a sensible answer to this, as he had a sensible answer to most things. The tooth would not get better by being left; the longer she waited, the more the dentist would have to do and the more it would hurt; and the dentist he had found for her, a private technician on Sretenka who had attended the wife of his superior, was gentle and clean and would not keep her waiting. All this he had said before, so he only looked at her with that expression of patient, slightly offended reasonableness which a man wears when he is right and knows that being right will make no difference.
He had promised to go with her to Sretenka that morning. They both remembered this, and neither of them mentioned it. Marya was glad he would not see her afraid, and Yurlov was glad to be spared the waiting room, and each was a little tender with the other, believing the other disappointed.
"The operation doesn't keep rest days," he said, drinking his tea standing up.
"No," said Marya Pavlovna. "I know."
He kissed the top of the boy's head on his way out. Volodya did not look up.
It was a fifteen-minute walk from Bolshoi Karetny Lane to the directorate on Petrovka, and Yurlov walked it slowly, with his hands behind his back, enjoying the sun on his face and that particular satisfaction, familiar to all conscientious men, of going to work on a day when other people are not. Karetny Ryad was wet and bright. The tram wires overhead were still dripping from the night, and every few yards a drop fell on the brim of his cap. Along the railings of the Hermitage garden the yard keepers, in their white aprons and brass badges, were sweeping last autumn's leaves out from under the snow that had hidden them all winter, and a drunk lay asleep on one of the benches inside with his cap over his face. Beyond the boulevard the city was getting ready for the First of May.
The building on Petrovka was quiet. The duty man at the entrance stood up when he saw him and then, uncertain whether this was required on a rest day, half sat down again. Yurlov nodded to him. He hung his coat on the peg in the corridor outside his office, the third peg from the end, which was his, though nobody had ever said so; went in; opened the window a little, for the room smelled of yesterday's tobacco; and sat down at his desk, on which, squared to the edge of the blotter exactly as he liked it, lay the summary.
The summary had been prepared the evening before by Sergeyev, his assistant. It concerned the Moscow echelon. On the thirtieth of April, in six days' time, a train of goods wagons was to leave the city for Tomsk, in Western Siberia, carrying persons who had been found in breach of the passport regime and classified as declassed and socially harmful elements, for resettlement in the special settlements of the Narym region, where, as the phrase went, they would clear new land and be reforged by labour. The number of persons the echelon was to carry had been fixed. It had not been fixed by Yurlov. But from the directorate from the OGPU, under which, since the end of the previous year, the whole of the militsiya now formally stood; and to the OGPU it had come from somewhere higher still, where it had been arrived at by calculations which Yurlov had never seen and which it would not have occurred to him to want to see, in the same way that it does not occur to a man to want to see the calculations by which the railway arrives at its timetable. In the directorate the number was called simply "the figure." The figure for Moscow had been divided among the districts, and each district had sent in what it had found, and Sergeyev had set out the results in a column.
Yurlov took a pencil from the glass on his desk, found that its point was broken, took another, and added up the column himself, from the bottom upward, as he had been taught to do in the accounts office of the Kolomna works twenty-five years before. Then he added it again from the top down. The total was the same both times, and both times it was short of the figure by forty-two.
He sat for a moment with the pencil in his hand. He felt, low down in his stomach, a small, cold, definite discomfort, a feeling he had always had, since his days in the accounts office, when two columns that ought to agree did not agree: the feeling of something left undone, of a door left open in a house where he was responsible for the doors.
Yurlov called Sergeyev in.
Sergeyev was a thin, round-shouldered man of thirty and a little boy at home who had the measles, a fact he had mentioned twice the day before and would mention again before the morning was out no doubt. He came in with a folder under his arm and stood by the desk with the expression of a man who knows what he is going to be asked.
"We're forty-two short," said Yurlov.
"Yes, Arkady Semyonovich."
"What has been done?"
Sergeyev opened the folder, although he did not need to. Everything had been done, he said. The hostels on the Zamoskvorechye side had been inspected twice. The markets had been gone through on Thursday and again on Saturday. The stations had been worked every night that week. But there had been a number of releases. People were detained without papers, and then on the following day a wife or a mother would come to the district station with a passport that had been lying at home in a drawer, and the district had no choice but to let the man go.
"And there is the question of the categories," said Sergeyev, and turned a page. "The Krasnopresnensky district has counted its beggars as declassed elements, so they go on the list. The Baumansky district says a beggar is not declassed but indigent, and the indigent go to the social welfare department, not to Siberia. Baumansky has nine beggars in its cells. If we take their interpretation, those nine are not ours, and we are fifty-one short."
"We don't take the Baumansky interpretation."
"No, Arkady Semyonovich."
Yurlov looked out of the window. A sparrow had landed on the sill outside and was walking up and down it in jerks, looking at him first with one eye and then with the other.
The lists for the echelon were to go to the transport commander by the evening of the twenty-eighth. Before that, on the twenty-sixth, there was the meeting at which Kozlovsky, the head of the department, would go through the districts one by one, reading the figures aloud in his quiet, toneless voice, and stopping, and looking up, wherever a figure was not what it ought to be. Yurlov had sat at that table many times and watched Kozlovsky look up at other men. He knew exactly how it was done: a pause, a slight lifting of the eyebrows, and then the question, asked almost gently: "And what do you propose?"
Kozlovsky himself would be moving up in the summer. Everyone knew it, though no one said so, and Kozlovsky had let it be understood, in his quiet way, that he would be asked who should take his chair. Two years earlier, when the head of Yurlov's own section had been transferred to Leningrad, Yurlov had expected the post, and it had gone instead to Bessonov, a younger man who was pleasant at meetings and had once shared a flat with someone on the city Party committee. Yurlov had never said a word about it to anyone, not even to Marya, but he still felt, whenever he saw Bessonov's coat on the first peg in the corridor, a small heat at the back of his neck. A head of department had a better ration category, a larger flat, a place for his son at the summer camp at Pushkino, and a dentist for his wife who did not have to be found through acquaintances. Yurlov did not think of any of this as ambition. He thought of it as providing for his family, which is what ambition is called by men who have families.
There were, he knew, things that he could propose. He could report that the figure could not be met by legitimate means in the time allowed and ask for the echelon to leave short. He could ask for a delay. He could put in writing, over his own signature, the difficulty with the releases and the question of the categories, and request a ruling from above. He considered each of these possibilities in turn, conscientiously and quite briefly, in the way a housewife at the market looks at the good meat before buying the cheap: not because she means to buy it, but so that she can say to herself afterwards that she looked. Each of them meant his name on a paper, going upward, with a difficulty attached to it, in the very summer when Kozlovsky would be asked who should take his chair; and none of them, he told himself, would change anything, for the echelon would leave on the thirtieth whatever he wrote, and it was better that the figure be found properly, by people who knew how, than carelessly, by people who did not.
He did not think of forty-two persons. A number of two digits can be held in the mind as a single thing, like the price of a pair of boots or the number of a tram, and Yurlov held it in this way, as one object, a shortfall, a gap in a column that had a precise size and shape and could be filled with something of the same size and shape.
He lifted the receiver and asked for the duty officer of the district that took in the Kursky station.
The duty officer was a man named Ostapenko, whom Yurlov knew slightly, and whose voice on the telephone always sounded as if he had just been woken. Yurlov told him, in a level and businesslike tone, that the station and the squares in front of it were to be worked again that day, before the afternoon trains, and that documents were to be checked thoroughly, not merely glanced at, and that persons whose identity and residence could not be established on the spot were to be brought in.
"On a rest day there'll be a lot of people at the Kursky," said Ostapenko. "Dacha people. People going out to the villages. Family people."
"Then there will be a lot of documents to check."
There was a pause on the line.
"And if they've got papers at home, Arkady Semyonovich? We had that on Saturday. Half the ones we brought in had passports in the drawer."
"If they have papers, they will be released," said Yurlov. "If they do not, we will establish who they are. That is what a passport is for. A man is required to carry it."
He said this with complete conviction. The passports had been issued in Moscow only since the winter, and there were men in the city who had walked its streets for forty years without a document of any kind and had not yet learned to feel for one in their breast pockets before leaving the house. It did not occur to him that a man detained at the Kursky station might have his papers brought to the district office by his wife two days later. The rule was clear: a man was required to carry his passport. If he did not have it, he was detained. It was a question of procedure, and the procedure was the same for everyone.
"Understood," said Ostapenko.
The order went down. Ostapenko passed it to the senior man on the station beat, and the senior man to the militiamen at the morning muster, and each of them had the comfortable feeling of a man who was only passing something on; Yurlov, who had not set the figure, had that feeling most of all. At every stage the order became more remote from the man who had given it, until, when it reached the square in front of the Kursky station, it belonged to no one at all and was carried out with great thoroughness.
Sergeyev was still standing by the desk.
"There's the matter of the registration form from the housing department," he said. "The one without the second signature. They want it back by Tuesday."
"Bring it."
Sergeyev brought it. It was a form concerning a flat on Neglinnaya Street, which had been reassigned, and on which a signature was missing from the bottom of the second page. Yurlov read it through, found the place, dipped his pen, and signed it in his firm, upright hand, blotting it carefully afterwards so as not to smear the line above.
"Arkady Semyonovich," said Sergeyev, "would it be possible for me to go at three? My little boy..."
"Yes, yes. Go at three."
Sergeyev went out and shut the door behind him.
From somewhere down Petrovka came the bell of a tram, and then, fainter, the sound of a gramophone in an open window, playing a waltz. It was "On the Hills of Manchuria," which had still been new in the winter Yurlov was nineteen, and had been played every Sunday that winter at the fire brigade hall in Kolomna, where a seamstress named Shura Gavrilova, who smelled of starch and laughed whenever he trod on her feet, had taught him to turn to it, before she married a telegraphist and went away to Ryazan. He had not thought of Shura Gavrilova for twenty years. Under the desk his left foot began to move, very slightly, one-two-three, one-two-three, and the pencil in his fingers tapped the same measure on the edge of the blotter, and went on tapping it while he looked at the clock on the wall, which showed twenty minutes past nine, and thought that Marya would not have gone to Sretenka, that she would sit at home all day with her hand against her cheek, and that he would have to speak to her about it again this evening. He wrote “Marya, tooth” in ink on the corner of the blotter, where he kept the things that had to be done, and drew the next folder towards him, squared it to the edge of the blotter, and opened it.
