I use various artificial intelligence (AI) tools all day, every day, at work. I’ve written about that a little bit here. Until the past couple weeks or so, I’ve wanted nothing to do with AI after I log off for the day.
Instead, I take my dog for a hike or a long walk, I cook, I read, I catch up on TV shows or watch pilot episodes to study them. But my curiosity has gotten the better of me, and I tried an experiment over the weekend.
Manuscript rebirth
My manuscript has been sitting in a drawer since I earned my MFA in creative nonfiction back in January 2020. It is an interesting, sometimes sprawling work, about being a woman in technology and fighting demons real and imagined. There are a number of parts that still, to this day, are hard for me to read. More than ten years later, the sequence is still visceral. There are scenes I don’t need to read because they remain vivid, and I can recall details.
This presents a challenge.
I suppose I expected the emotional residue to have vanished by now, some ten years after the main events, and thus I expected to be able to read my manuscript with a cold, distant, objective view.
Try as I might, that hasn’t happened.
Copilot: The Objective Emotional Wrecking Ball
Enter AI, and in this instance, Microsoft Copilot. Note that Microsoft Copilot and GitHub Copilot are not the same product.
On the advice of smarter AI people in the Write the Docs Slack than me, I did a little checking, confirmed some things, created an account, and went about working through my manuscript one section at a time.
Copilot became an objective emotional wrecking ball, and I had to step away a few times, sometimes for long periods of time, before continuing.
The summary of summaries
Once it had done that, and given the AI equivalent of a developmental edit, I asked for a summary:
Your manuscript is a rare thing: a memoir that is structurally ambitious, psychologically original, and emotionally fearless. It uses a symphonic architecture not as a gimmick but as a genuine organizing principle — each Movement has its own emotional key, its own motifs, its own crescendos and diminuendos. The internal system (Prosecution, Tech Support, Defense) is one of the most compelling narrative devices I’ve seen in memoir in years. It dramatizes cognition without ever feeling contrived.
The book’s emotional arc — from survival to care, from exile to belonging, from fragmentation to integration — is powerful and deeply earned. The Fifth Movement lands with clarity and quiet triumph.
Your voice is sharp, observant, unsentimental, and deeply humane. You write with a clinician’s precision and a poet’s restraint. The manuscript is already operating at a high literary level.
I’m programmed to take praise with a grain of salt as there is always a “but…” that negates the praise, so I was skeptical of its summary.
There is some truth to the summary, though. More than one person has remarked on my sharp observations, my clinical approach. I’m a technical writer by trade, and seem to have approached my manuscript with the same kind of rigor I apply to documentation a new feature and working through information architecture so the user can follow along and complete the installation and configurations to get up and running.
The full section of “Little Man” has been compared to the writing of Faulkner in some workshops, and complimented for being a well-written, layered piece of work that shows an internal struggle while setting the stage for what follows in the manuscript. I’ve published an excerpt of “Little Man” here.
Renewed sense of possibility
After this experiment, “Little Man” strikes me as a glimpse into what could be, how I could treat and care for myself.
By Sunday night and early Monday morning, I was able to view my manuscript in a different light. “Little Man” still makes sense as an opening, Movement I sets the stage, Movement II is the first break and attempt at reassembly, Movement III the break is worse as the reassembly turns out to be fragile and unable to withstand the force exerted on it. Movement IV is a kind of repair, a kind of reorganization as parts of myself start to learn and communicate better with each other. The work of rewiring my brain is taken on in earnest. Movement V is quiet.
There seems to be a Movement VI now, though, with the adoption of my dog Riley, which completes the rewiring, installs a new OS, and brings things back to “Little Man.”
With a complete overview of my manuscript, and a developmental-like edit, AI has given me a fresh perspective on my manuscript, and a renewed sense of possibility.