Covenant City - How One Human-Generated Novel Got Made

Artificial intelligence agents are the most prolific authors in the world today. Amazon, for instance, estimates that thousands of AI-generated books are on their site, and one author has bragged about launching hundreds in different genres. These books, if I understand correctly, are mash-ups, the Large Language Models scraping (I'd prefer to say stealing) narratives from human-written novels to shape their tales. I don't think I've read an AI-composed novel, but I hope they're lousy and people see through them. It's hard to imagine how anything readable, much less affecting, can come from the word sorting process that LLMs use, but who knows? That said, I must admit that my own writing derives in no small part from a lifetime of reading. I too scrape, one might say, the books I've read in shaping stories. Here's an example:

My upcoming book is about a boy and his dog. The boy is an orphaned teen living in a near-future Richmond, Virginia, which the White House has made the prototype for a "homegrown-heritage" all-white neo-nationalist society and renamed Covenant City. The dog is fluffy and the boy’s best friend. So I guess the book’s genre is speculative fiction, and maybe it’s a young adult book, too. Though the coming-of-age theme and curse words and sex might bump it up to a “new adult” or even just adult slot. Anyway.

Rather than recount the plot here, thought it might be fun to look back at the experiences that coalesced into this tale, maybe as one example of where human-composed fiction comes from. For me, in this case, a lot of it was things I've read.

My wife Christine and I went to Spain last spring, our first ever visit there. We were in Madrid for their brief total power blackout and rented a car for a week touring Andalusia’s magnificent historic cities. On our return home, I fell into an unfortunate doom-scrolling habit and wondered if there was some way all that anxiety could be put to good use. I signed up to volunteer with the local chapter of the International Rescue Committee, marched in all the protests, but wanted to write something, damn it.

Here’s where the fiction spider began to spin her web. Dazzled as I was by our holiday in Spain, I checked out a ton of books from the library on the Medieval Muslim era, the Inquisition, and the Civil War. I re-read George Orwell’s gripping Spanish Civil War memoir Homage to Catalonia and, recalling that Hemingway had loved Spain, re-read the Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, and then all of his Spanish books, including the non-fiction bullfighting tomes, along with a couple biographies focused on his experiences in Spain.

By pure dumb luck – which is always my preferred what next to read style – I moved on to a couple of the American hard-boiled detective novelists (all of whom owe their careers to cribbing Hemingway’s sparse prose and tough guy male stance) Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald, burning through several of their pulp triumphs. Oh, gotta add in another key novel of last summer, Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, his style too a chip off the old Hem block. And up in the attic, I came across the paperback Robert Fitzgerald translation of the Odyssey that was assigned in college, many of its yellowed pages underlined in red ink by my 19-year old hand.

I never know where a story’s headed at the start. I’m not an outliner, like to let the characters lead me on. The unfolding of that mystery is the chief benefit of sitting on my ass and typing all morning, in case you were wondering. All summer, I’d been struck by what happened in the Spanish blackout. What do people do when the power, even the Internet, goes out? In Madrid, folks went to the park and enjoyed a brief Monday off work (that gentle shrug instantly winning my heart). But what if the power stayed out, what then? Could I make something of that?

So I sort of had an opening. Here’s how all that reading went into the blender that came out as Covenant City. The notion arose of attempting a hard-boiled style swiped from MacDonald and the rest. Ditch the adjectives, first person past tense, show not tell kind of thing. I’d been struck by the first page of Hemingway’s WWI novel A Farewell to Arms that simply describes a winding stream outside his window, the weather and trucks going by. So I thought, okay, and then on a walk with our dog Buddy, I glimpsed how a similar rustic opening might blossom into a sketchy plot. What if a blackout signaled a new civil war? And what if I adapted the plot of For Whom the Bell Tolls, which centers on a ragtag crew of rebels attempting to blow up a bridge, and framed my tale around a similar idea? One of the things I loved about that novel (and A Farewell to Arms, too) was how the actions of a few people on the outskirts of battle implied the whole war, just as one infers a dystopia in The Man in the High Castle through one average joe’s experience.

As Buddy lounged at my feet, an orphaned late teenaged white boy (his personality a mix of my two sons') and his dear pup emerged to tell my tale, and it seemed appropriate (and easy) to set that tale right here in Richmond, the home of the Confederacy and as likely a place as any to launch what the Trump team would so dearly like to see, a homegrown white Christian nation, as J.D. Vance would put it. So there was my civil war, rebels struggling in the Chesterfield County hinterlands against the new Covenant City. I had a hard-boiled style to play with, a callow protagonist (and his pup), a plot elided from Hemingway (always steal from the best), a setting that I know like the back of my hand (oh, what’s that new freckle?), and the terrifying daily news about ICE assaults, AI, autonomous robots, trad wives, epidemics, climate change, military invasions, Trump worship, End Times and other neo-nationalist yearnings from which to speculate a near-future that some might call a utopia. And then, just for fun, chose to add a little classical spice, sprinkling updated versions of Odysseus’ many ordeals into the mix.

By Thanksgiving I was done with a readable draft. Chris and friends kindly pored through it and responded with edits that kept me busy for the past couple months, son Stephen created a cool cover, the novel has dropped in paperback and e-versions, and soon – right now projecting June 6th – I’ll hold some kind of book launch, maybe at a brewery here in town. So, that’s one way that a novel gets written, at least this novel by this writer. How different, one might ask, is that process from the way that artificial intelligence composes? Both involve adaptation and synthesis of plot, style, and characterization "learned" from other books. One would hope that an author's experience, intelligence, and taste would make for a better tale? You can be sure that the techies programming LLMs are aware of this caveat, and that they're working hard to "teach" their AI-scribes how to better simulate a human author's process. As one friend said the other day, who cares if the book was AI-written if I like it? To which I can only say, eek!

As our dear leader would say, thank you for your attention to this matter. Read on, friends.

The book cover my son Stephen made.