How to Write Fiction like an LLM

This is a guide for how to write like an LLM. You may be asking yourself, “why would I want to do that?” and this is a perfectly valid question, beyond the scope of this post.

Always Use Your First Idea

If you’re given a prompt for a story about someone experimenting with their sexuality, what’s your setting? If you said “a college or university” then you are thinking like an LLM. It’s obvious, it fits the patterns, and it requires no additional thinking. But of course, discovering your sexuality might be too interesting an idea. Instead, go with something like a person returning to their home town for a high school reunion, two siblings going to scatter the ashes of a parent they had a complicated relationship with. If you can think of several examples of this being done, you’re on the right track. How about a meet-cute at a coffee shop?

Now, you might object that just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean that you can’t write a good story, but to truly write like an LLM, you have to apply this principle to every level of the story. The characters must be the first ones that pop into your mind, the conflicts must be the obvious ones you see right away, the ending needs to be where your mind intuitively lands before you start thinking.

Now, as a human, this still isn’t enough, because your brain is a unique thing with its own intuitions. One of the many competitive advantages that LLMs have is that they are created with the idea of minimizing entropy, and they are also trained on essentially the entire corpus of human text. The LLM is capable of selecting the most obvious option. The LLM would guess the top category on Price is Right far more often than a human ever would.

So you will always be at a disadvantage, as your obvious ideas will be less obvious than the LLMs. But to write like an LLM, this is the practice to emulate: no comparison of alternatives and no generation of new ideas.

Use Stock Phrases

The LLMs love stock ways of expressing information. This is smart, because everyone has heard these stock phrases before, and there will be no ambiguity or surprise in the text. When a reader encounters the expression “a chill ran down his spine” or “a lump formed in his throat”, there will be no mistaking what you mean, and the reader won’t have to consider the imagery.

This is especially helpful because these stock phrases are non-specific. You don’t have to think about how a specific character might view the world or their unique voice, though of course if you’ve followed the steps above, they won’t have a unique voice.

Be Redundant

One mistake that human writers are prone to making is that they include information only once. When they do this, a reader can easily miss a vital detail of the characters, an important character beat, or the point of a scene.

Instead, to write like an LLM, you should restate constantly. Tell us a character’s eyes are blue three times in close succession, so the reader can’t miss it. Have the characters talk back and forth for three or four beats longer than a human would write it. Restate basic facts about the characters, their motivations, and the plot.

When doing this, it’s also best to make sure that the reader is never sure whether a sentence will contain new information or not. This may encourage them to skim, but worry not, we’re already including redundant information for them.

Write Purple Prose

If you’ve followed all of the above advice, you should have a piece of writing that can very effectively be read by skimming through the text. The reader will be familiar with the characters and the plot even before having read the first word, so they’ll know exactly where it’s going. And you might now be thinking to yourself, “then what’s the purpose of reading it?”

The answer, of course, is the quality of LLM prose.

Write the prose in such a way that it’s ethereal, detached from the reality of the scene, descriptions by way of word association. Make sure the metaphors don’t quite work, or imply things that go counter to their initial reading. The more circuitous you make the prose, the better it is, and again, you should already be expecting the reader to skimming liberally, which means that you’re free to go long: they’ll compensate.

Conclusion

If you follow all these steps, congratulations, you’ll have a story that could have been generated in three seconds for $0.002.