Arranging tables – and the importance of making readers work

Well, golly gosh, I thought last week’s Feedback Friday was interesting – and brave for the good souls who took part.

We asked people to post an excerpt from their manuscript – plus the same scene, as delivered by an AI tool. (You can see the full results here, and I do urge you to take a look. If the link gives you a “whoops” message, that’s because you’re not a member, or not logged in. So either log in, or join us completely free. You get load of good stuff if you do.)

Just for fun, here’s part of the scene that I posted. Fiona (a police officer, but working undercover) is meeting a senior member of a criminal gang she is seeking to penetrate. They meet in a wine bar:

My version of the scene

Vic emerges from behind a raw oak pillar. My face must change somehow, because the waiter swings round, sees Vic. Some look is exchanged, and the waiter waves me over to where Vic has a table waiting.

‘You made it,’ he says.

He clucks around me, a fussy uncle. He wants me to remove my coat, but I keep it on. Take off my hat, but keep it close.

He wants me to choose a drink. Pushes a long wine list at me, tells me to order anything. I ask for water. He tells me again to order anything, meaning that water doesn’t count, so I say orange juice, a small one.

He orders another glass of red wine for him, a bowl of olives, toasted ciabatta slices and olive oil, a selection of antipasti, and my orange juice.

I sit there with my bag on my lap. The bag is wired for sound. So is my coat.

‘Filthy day, isn’t it? I don’t mind it cold, but this is vile.’

I don’t say anything. Maybe shrug. Look sideways.

‘Listen, love, you’re frightened, aren’t you? And that’s my fault. I think I frightened you yesterday. Let’s just get to know each other a bit maybe.’

AI version of scene

The soft clink of wine glasses blended with murmured conversations around me. I’d chosen my outfit carefully – a worn blazer and faded jeans that screamed low-wage worker, a direct contrast to the polished mahogany and crystal elegance of the wine bar. Vic sat across from me, his pinstripe suit a silent declaration of power.

“You’ve got a reputation for being… resourceful,” he said, swirling a glass of Cabernet. His steel-gray eyes never left my face, measuring and calculating. I could feel the weight of his assessment.

I kept my posture slightly hunched, the defeated stance of someone desperate for work. “I go where I’m needed,” I replied, my voice low and neutral. “Cleaning’s not glamorous, but it pays the bills.”

A thin smile crossed his lips – predatory, knowing.

Comments on this

For me, the AI scene is desperately crude. Conversations (inevitably) are murmured. Wine glasses (inevitably) clink softly. The bar is (for sure) polished mahogany, even though that wood feels like a somewhat Victorian choice; it certainly isn’t high style today. And of course the eyes are steel-grey and calculating.

The trouble here is that there’s no sub-text. The reader isn’t being asked to do any work at all. “Hmm, I wonder how we should think about Vic Henderson? Well, he’s predatory and calculating so he’s probably Bad News, right?”

That’s so crude.

My version of the same man is almost the opposite. He clucks around Fiona like a fussy uncle. He nudges her into ordering something. And he accepts blame for her feelings: ‘Listen, love, you’re frightened, aren’t you? And that’s my fault. I think I frightened you yesterday. Let’s just get to know each other a bit maybe.’

But the reader knows this isn’t the whole Henderson. Not only do we know for a fact that he’s the face of a criminal enterprise, but we see him rejecting her request for water. There’s compulsion here and it’s the compulsion that we feel.

Some of the comments on this pair of scenes was:

• “the AI writing here isn’t good. I don’t think it has the capacity to be indirect. It overexplains with tired language. And it has that generic voice.”
• “There is always a lot of telling description that gives AI away. ‘Low and neutral’ ‘ thin smile’ ‘predatory’ ‘hands trembled’. The revised version has a lot of flowery descriptions. However, with your excerpt, we are picking up things as readers and not being told what to think.”

I think those comments are just right.

And just to finish, here’s a chunk (edited for length) from Sally Roone’s Intermezzo. The monologue comes from Ivan, a gifted chess player. He’s watching an arts centre get set up for a 10 vs 1 chess tournament, where Ivan is the 1. He then meets Margaret, the attractive arts centre organiser.

Sally Rooney / Intermezzo

Standing on his own in the corner, Ivan thinks with no especially intense focus about the most efficient way of organising, say, a random distribution of tables and chairs into the aforementioned arrangement of a central U-shape, etc. It’s something he has thought about before, while standing in other corners, watching other people move similar furniture around similar indoor spaces: the different approaches you could use, say if you were writing a computer programme to maximise process efficiency. The accuracy of these particular men in relation to the moves recommended by such a program would be, Ivan thinks, pretty low, like actually very low…

A woman enters. She happens to be noticeably attractive, which makes her presence in the room at this juncture all the more curious. She has a nice figure and her face in profile looks very pretty … She works here, the woman named Margaret, here at the art centre: that explains her sort of artistic appearance. She’s wearing a white blouse, and a voluminous patterned skirt in different colours, and neat flat shoes of the kind ballerinas wear. He begins to experience, while she stands there in front of him, an involuntary mental image of kissing her on the mouth: not even really an image, but an idea of an image, sort of a realisation that it would be possible to visualise this at some later point, what it would be like to kiss her, a promise of enjoyment simply to picture himself doing that, which is harmless enough, just a private thought.

Do you play chess? he asks.

Nowhere does this say, “Ivan is a chess geek.” Nowhere does this say, “Ivan is certain to be awkward around women.” Nowhere does this say, “Ivan will not come across as sexually impressive.” But we know immediately that all these things are true. We also know that Ivan would slaughter us at chess and also be far more likely to remember the formula for a Gaussian probability distribution.

The point here is that the reader is being made to work. They have to bring their own knowledge of the world (geeky men / arts centre-y women) and build out their understanding of the scene from facts they’ve acquired about the world. The AI text almost assumes that we have no knowledge of the world, so if an observation isn’t in the text, it doesn’t exist.

But it does exist! It’s the most interesting part of the text. The joy of reading Sally Rooney isn’t Sally Rooney text alone. It’s ‘Sally Rooney text plus our own human wisdom.’ A robot couldn’t read Sally Rooney and form any real sense of what makes it worthwhile.

You don’t believe me? Well, I asked a robot to ‘rewrite and improve’ Rooney’s passage. The result is in the PS below. But suffice to say – I do not love it.

And nor should you.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

OK, here’s a rather different task from what I normally hand out – but still on the theme of this email and the last.

• Post a 200-250 word excerpt from your manuscript
• In [square brackets and italics] add your comments wherever you detect the kind of subtext that you would not expect a robot to pick up.

Once you’re ready, log in to Townhouse and post yours here.

I’m going to like the excerpts that have lots of italics!

***

That’s it from me.

My massive Viking longship was handed in to school and duly admired. It’s now sitting in my garage. When summer comes, I’m going to find a petite red-headed Viking and launch her off into the biggest lake or river I can find. The ship is papier-mache and is likely to dissolve, but wotthehell. The Vikings sailed to America, right? I reckon they’ll manage the Thames.

Til soon.

Harry

***

PS: Here’s the AI version of that Sally Rooney passage: which scrubs all subtext with a total lack of self-reflection. Ms Rooney has nothing to worry about just yet:

Standing in the corner, Ivan observed the chaotic rearrangement of furniture with detached analytical interest. His mind, perpetually seeking patterns, calculated the optimal sequence for transforming this random scatter of tables and chairs into the intended U-shape. It was a familiar mental exercise—one he often entertained while occupying the margins of rooms like this, watching people execute with human imprecision what could be solved with algorithmic elegance. He estimated the efficiency of these particular men at perhaps thirty percent of optimal—their movements dictated by intuition rather than calculation, by conversation rather than silent computation.

A woman entered the space, and Ivan’s algorithmic thinking stuttered. Her presence was an unexpected variable in what had been, until now, a predictable equation. She moved with confidence through the disarray, her figure drawing his attention with a force that felt almost mathematical in its inevitability. Her profile cut a precise silhouette against the institutional wall—high cheekbones, a determined chin, eyes focused on something beyond the immediate disorder.

Margaret, he recalled from the program. She worked at the art center—an explanation for both her presence and the deliberate aesthetic of her appearance. Her white blouse provided sharp contrast to the chromatic explosion of her skirt, which moved like liquid as she navigated between half-arranged furniture. Her ballet flats made no sound on the floor, adding to the impression that she floated slightly above the mundane proceedings.

Without warning, his mind produced not an explicit image but a theoretical construct—a placeholder for a potential visualization involving the pressing of his lips against hers. Not even a fantasy so much as a mathematical proof of a fantasy’s possibility: If x equals proximity and y equals mutual attention, then z could equal… He felt a curious satisfaction at the mere architecture of this thought, this harmless private equation that would never require solving.

“Do you play chess?” he asked, the question emerging from some calculation deep beneath his consciousness, a gambit whose purpose even he couldn’t fully articulate.