Below are nine novel excerpts. Each one includes the first paragraphs of chapter three. The crucial first sentence, first paragraph, first page, and first chapter are behind us. We are still in the beginning, but well in. The protagonist, the setting, the style, and the situation should all be pretty clear by this point.
All but one of the excerpts below are from real novels. One was generated by ChatGPT. I expect you can probably tell which one that is … or can you? I’ll list the titles and authors at the end. Many of you will recognize some of these excerpts. Nobody’s going to recognize them all.
I’m going to put these excerpts in order by ranking them according to these criteria: VOICE, CATCHINESS, STYLE, SITUATION. I’m aware all ranking is idiosyncratic, plus because I know what the books are and who the authors are, I’m sure to be biased at least some of the time. Nevertheless, best to worst. I’m also aware linear ranking emphasizes differences while disguising similarity, so I’ll try to compensate for that.
I’m not sure how to define voice, because it’s an intrinsically nebulous term, but let’s say, for the purposes of this post, voice is the sense that a specific person has stepped on stage, that you don’t have a protagonist-shaped façade going through the motions of being a real character.
I’m not sure how different catchiness and style will turn out to be. For me, I think catchiness has a lot to do with style, but for other readers I think catchiness may have more to do with the situation or something else. The character, maybe. The dialogue, perhaps. These are all short excerpts, so there’s not a lot to get hold of. Even so, see what you think.
***
1.
My room was empty even of the wolfhound. I climbed on my bed and leaned my elbows on the windowsill, and stayed there a long while alone, while outside in the pear tree’s boughs the thrush sang, and from the courtyard beyond the shut door came the monotonous clink of the smith’s hammer and the creek of the windlass as the mule plodded round the well.
Memory fails me here. I cannot remember how long it was before the clatter and the buzz of voices told me that the evening meal was being prepared. Nor can I remember how badly I was hurt, but when Cerdic, the groom, pushed the door open and I turned my head, he stopped dead and said, “Lord have mercy upon us. What have you been doing? Playing in the bull-shed?”
“I fell down.”
“Oh, aye, you fell down. I wonder why the floor’s always twice as hard for you as for anyone else? Who was it? That little sucking-boar Dinias?”
—
Voice: Ultra clear, and so subtle. The author is establishing this character by having him stand still and say three words, which is amazing.
Catchiness: High.
Style: Everything is great here, with the you-are-here description followed by lively dialogue with a historical feel that perfectly suits the story.
Situation: Alive, non-static. That’s what catchy dialogue will do.
***
2.
As the ferry strained forward to reach top speed, it left behind long garlands of white water at the edge of a turquoise wake. A rope hanging loose from a davit swung back and forth in the crosscurrents of wind and with the slight roll of the boat as it reached open water. He had been waiting for her for the longest time, although he had not known he had been waiting. And there she was, standing before him, too beautiful for words.
She spoke first, accusingly, but enjoyably. “Have we met?”
“No, we’ve collided.”
Lost in infatuation, he had moved incautiously ahead to the point where he was in love with even the smallest detail of her. Had she known of each or perhaps any one of the specifics, she would have had the evidence that she had begun to sense, and that had begun to sweep over her in the rare feeling of being adored. Although she had neither designed nor sewn her blouse, nor accomplished the sinuous, restrained embroidery, nor given to the embroidery the gray and rose color of mother-of-pearl, she had put it on, and it embraced her hour by hour, absorbing the heat of her body and the scent of her perfume. The collar, the buttonhole, the button, the threads that made a basket knot within the button’s ivory recess, became for him more than just a symbol, for he had never loved just a symbol, but a part of her – touched, regarded, accepted, and chosen by her.
—
Voice: Wonderfully clear.
Catchiness: High. The “No, we’ve collided” lifts the excerpt to a higher level than the beautiful sentences could do by themselves, adding delightful humor that contributes to the sense that this is someone’s point of view, someone specific, not a generic robot going through the motions of playing the protagonist.
Style: Lovely. Literary.
Situation: Fine with me, even though insta-infatuation is basically a turnoff for me. Everything else here is great, so I don’t care. Not static. The interaction so far already promises action, even if the action is a conversation instead of a fight.
***
3.
With his sword and his cloak, there was really no further reason to stay where he was, and his feet itched to be moving. To see this land he had all but forgotten, and which had surely forgotten him. And good riddance! Tamsin was neither bard nor butcher now.
He did not know what he was, but he could assure himself of that: he was not who he had been.
Even if a melody had started to curl through his mind, and his hand rested in its accustomed curve on his sword hilt.
– If his family were alive – if his mother had not gone Over the Seas with them, after all –
Elves died by violence, very rarely from something like grief. Tamsin’s mother had certainly grieved their going, husband and sons throwing their lives away. But somehow he couldn’t imagine her giving in like that.
Perhaps this unmoored feeling was anticipation. It wasn’t as if he’d had much call to feel that for a while. Hope, yes, he’d held grimly onto that idea of the one day. But anticipation? After he’d realized he was the last elf left Over the Waves, he’d hardly expected anything.
—
Voice: Very clear. There’s no feeling at all that this could be a wooden façade propped up with the pretense that it’s a character. This is a specific person with a clear personality.
Catchiness: High.
Style: Lively, engaging.
Situation: Immediately interesting. This is not static. I realize all these excerpts are so short, it’s impossible to tell what’s going to happen next, whether we’re moving or active or standing still or what. But the anticipation built into this excerpt is so clear, and would be clear even if that last paragraph didn’t pack in words such as anticipation, hope, and expected. With all those words loaded into that paragraph, tension goes way up, and it’s a good tension, not dread of what’s going to happen, but, yes, anticipation.
***
4.
I was not in St Cecelia’s that afternoon. I was seventeen. I had come down from Dublin on the train, not exactly in disgrace – my grandparents, Doady and Ganga, were too contrary and crafty for that – but certainly distant from grace, if grace is the condition of living your time at ease on the earth.
What I was like then is hard to capture, the Crowe-ness in me manifest mostly in self-contradiction, my character an uneven construct that swung between flashes of fixedness and rashness, immovability and leap. One such had landed me in a briary boarding school in Tipperary. Another had put me down in the thorny austerity of a seminary, and another out of there when I woke one night with a fear I couldn’t name, but later came to think of as the fear I might not discover what it meant to live a fully human life.
I’m not sure what I thought that was at the time, but I had enough sense to know there was a lack, and somehow that was to be feared. If it is true that each of us is born with a natural love of the world, then the action of my childhood and schooling had been to vanquish it. I was too afraid of the world to love it.
—
Voice: Clear. This is an elderly man looking back, the second one in this set of novels, which is pure coincidence. His voice is literate, educated, wry, more tolerant than judgmental. I’m not sure I like him particularly. I don’t, in fact, think that grace is “the condition of living your time at ease on the earth,” so I’m not sure we’re going to be all that sympatico.
Catchiness: Medium-High, but I’m a little wary of the protagonist.
Style: Excellent.
Situation: Static.
***
5.
“Where did you find it?” Sam asked.
“Near Raka, Prince Samahti.” The trader was short and trim, with a mustache that grew wild as trailing ivy, the tips brushing against his collarbone. “We found a nest on the beach on one of the outer islands. There were three eggs, but we only had time to take the one.”
“We could see its mother swimming back,” the second trader added. They appeared to be close family. Brothers or cousins, not yet thirty. “We barely made it off with our skin still on.”
They were in the royal menagerie on Tamarind. Catamara stood by the door, dressed in his practical animal-keeper clothing, along with Sam’s guards, Liko and Bayani. The menagerie’s distinctive odors drifted their way. Seaweed and kelp, along with the earthier aroma of land animals.
The traders had brought with them a large crate that, when pried open, had revealed an egg, at least three feet tall. Its color was a brilliant, blinding pink.
—
Voice: Weak, but not nonexistent. This prince goes by Sam, for example, and he’s interested dragons or dragon eggs, which right there is neat. I can guess that you’d get a much better feel for the voice if you read more of this story than just this excerpt.
Catchiness: Medium-high.
Style: I like it. It’s not at all literary, but it’s good. The dialogue is lively. The details are vivid.
Situation: Ooh, dragons! Tell me more! Not static. Something is going on right now, and more will be going on as the scene unfolds.
Rank: 5th place. Situation does matter, it turns out, because I would choose to read this over the novel I ranked 4th and depending on my mood maybe above the one I ranked 3rd.
***
6.
“Hello? Kate? Are you there?”
She should have been. Whichever one went first had sworn to come back to guide the other into the Beyond: for decades, we had held this as an article of faith between us.
Except … no Kate. Not even any light.
A fog had descended, so dense I could barely see my hands until they were in front of my face. Shingle rolled under my feet. Off to my left, I could hear the hushed surge of the sea, muffled as by layers of padding.
“Kate?” I turned on my heel and called her name to all four directions: front and back, left and right. Nothing.
I had no idea what to do. I had genuinely believed I knew what was coming. We’re born alone and we die alone, but I hadn’t expected still to be alone here.
Desperate, I turned a slow circle on the shingle. The fog was growing heavier. Now, I couldn’t even hear the sea.
Alanna?
The call came from my right. Giddy with relief, I turned to walk inland, and then, tentatively, testing the feel of it, I ran.
—
Voice: Clear. This is a real person in a real situation.
Catchiness: High.
Style: Engaging. Not yet clearly literary or clearly lively, but I think it’s already engaging.
Situation: By far the most active situation out of these examples. Here, the situation is definitely pushing up the catchiness.
***
7.
The hum of the station was constant now—like a heartbeat no one wanted to acknowledge.
Rael adjusted the seal on her helmet for the third time, more out of habit than necessity. The decompression chamber’s walls were close, claustrophobically so, even for someone who’d grown up in the orbital stacks above Ganymede. Outside, beyond the final door, Europa’s ice stretched in every direction like a frozen ocean caught mid-roar.
“Telemetry stable. Suit integrity at ninety-nine percent,” came the voice of Navin through the comms. “But Rael, I’m telling you—if that signal spikes again, protocol says you wait for a full team.”
She ignored him, eyes fixed on the flickering screen on her wrist. The signal—still pulsing in that precise triplet pattern—wasn’t natural. That much she knew. Radio interference didn’t repeat with that kind of mathematical clarity. Something was transmitting beneath the crust. Something deeper than the probe drones had ever dared to go.
The inner hatch cycled open with a hiss, cold mist flooding her boots. Rael stepped forward onto the icy surface. Above, Jupiter loomed like a wounded god, amber bands swirling in silent fury. The stars barely flickered, swallowed by the giant’s radiance.
She moved carefully, boots gripping the crystalline terrain. A hundred meters east: the fissure. The source. Her breath fogged her visor despite the anti-condensers.
Navin was still in her ear. “You’re five clicks from the tether line. If that ice shifts again, there’s no retrieval window.”
“Then you’d better make sure it doesn’t,” she muttered.
—
Voice: Decent. I think Rael comes across as a real character, not a wooden puppet pretending to be a real character.
Catchiness: Good
Style: Fine
Situation: Active. Intriguing.
***
8.
The Bombadier flew for about two hours.
We could be anywhere in southeast Asia, CJ thought. Thanks to the blacked-out windows, she didn’t know if they had flown in a straight line or in circles.
The Chinese were very keen to keep the location of their new zoo secret.
When it finally landed, the Bombardier taxied for a few minutes before coming to a halt at an airbridge. The six American guests disembarked to find themselves sanding inside a brand-new airport terminal. The walls and floors gleamed. None of the many shops were open but they looked ready to go. The entire terminal, built to handle the movement of thousands of people, was eerily empty.
High floor-to-ceiling windows revealed the landscape outside: spectacular mountains and moss-covered limestone buttes.
“Ah-ha, we are still in southern China,” Seymour Wolfe said. “If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say we are in the north of Guangdong province.”
—
Voice: Nonexistent. Why can’t CJ have some sort of not-totally-neutral reaction to the situation?
Catchiness: Low.
Style: Annoyingly short paragraphs, which is becoming a pet peeve of mine when there’s no reason for it, as here.
“We are still in” and “we are in” are both stilted. If this character is supposed to sound like he’s speaking natural English, he doesn’t, because normally both of those would contain contractions. But maybe he’s ESL or extremely formal, and in either case this would be fine.
Situation: I mean, there’s a zoo, so that’s automatically interesting. Static. We’re going to draw the scene, I presume. If I didn’t know there was a zoo, I would be uninterested.
***
9.
“Captain on the bridge!”
“As you were, Jackson said with a dismissive wave. He climbed up into the raised command chair and began navigating through menus on the display attached to the left armrest. “Ensign Davis, what is the crew status?”
“All crew accounted for, seven still not aboard,” the short, shapely operations officer reported, consulting her display. “Those even are being brought to the ship by local law enforcement. A ship’s officer will need to meet them at the gangway to secure their release.”
“XO to the bridge,” Jackson said loudly. The computer would automatically ping Commander Wright’s commlink and inform her she needed to report to the captain on the bridge. “OPS, tell the marines at the main gangway that the new exec will be down shortly to deal with the locals.”
“Aye, sir,” Ensign Davis said, speaking into her handset.
—
Voice: Nonexistent. This is exactly what I mean by “a protagonist-shaped façade going through the motions of being a character.”
Catchiness: Low. Really low. Anti-catchy. Negative catchiness.
Style: Uninteresting to the point of being off-putting. The worst thing here is the explanation that the computer would automatically ping etcetera. Yes, we know, that’s totally obvious from just saying, “XO to the bridge,” especially doing so “loudly.” Oh, wait, the actual worst thing here is that Ensign Davis is apparently saying, “Aye, sir,” into her handset rather than to her captain.
Situation: Static.
***
1. The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart. I know I’m surely biased here, but honestly, I do think this is very good.
2. In Sunlight and In Shadow by Mark Helprin. I haven’t read it; it’s on my TBR pile.
3. The Bone Harp by Victoria Goddard. I haven’t read it; it’s on my TBR pile.
4. This is Happiness by Niall Williams. I’ve only read to this point so far, but it’s beautifully written.
5. Dragonfruit by Makiia Lucier. This is the author of The Year of the Reaping, which I liked a lot. I picked up this book on the strength of that one, and I know some of you have recommended it.
6. Any Human Power by Manda Scott. I want to post about this novel eventually, because many things about it are worth comment. It’s a novel with enough power that I had trouble with it — it’s infused with anger, and I set it aside for a long time because I could not read it. For various reasons, that bothered me less later and I have finished it now.
7. Chat GPT. Who guessed that? Anybody? I think there are two elements in this tiny excerpt that suggest that, but I also think I would have missed those if I hadn’t known this was generated. The first is drones daring to go wherever. I mean … they’re drones? They don’t dare or fail to dare under any circumstances, do they? That line about not letting the ice shift, how in the world could anyone prevent the ice from shifting? I will add that in my opinion, the generated feel came through more clearly three lines after this excerpt and I deliberately cut it off before it got to that point.
8. The Great Zoo of China by Matthew Reilly. It’s both static and boring, the pov protagonist has no life in this excerpt, and the stilted dialogue did not seem right, though if the character had been established properly before chapter three, it could have been fine. The zoo is filled with “dragons,” actually dinosaurs of some kind, I happen to know, though I have not read the book. This is an internationally bestselling novel, it says at Amazon. Nonstop action, say the reviews. I guess none of that action happened to appear here at the beginning of chapter three.
9. Warship by Joshua Dalzelle, who is, it says on the cover, a USA Today bestselling author. Unbelievably bad and boring, well below ChatGPT, at least in this very short excerpt. All of this, everything here, is so blandly boring that if you picked it as generated, I wouldn’t be one bit surprised. The pointless and cliched tags – he waves a dismissive hand for no reason, and look here, she’s “shapely,” and good God, never describe a female character like this.
If I hadn’t known which entry was which, I would almost certainly have picked this one as generated. Since I’m not familiar with this author, I don’t even know for sure it ISN’T generated. Okay, I just checked the date of publication, which is 2015, so I guess not.
I picked this book up because it was free via Amazon Prime reading, and I have to say, looking at it makes me less inclined to pick up the next thing I see that is free and could be interesting, because I find this deeply unimpressive. If readers can remotely suspect that your novel is generated, seriously, that is not great and you ought to up your game, and I mean a lot.
What do you think? Agree / disagree? Anybody spot the ChatGPT one? If so, what made you peg that one?
Please Feel Free to Share:
I would have guessed with you that the last one was ChatGPT. The actual AI one had the distinction, as I read it, of boring me and I skipped ahead. Which is something of an achievement in this short an excerpt. I remember thinking it might be the AI but wasn’t sure. Rereading, it seems to me there are similes that don’t really make sense – “like a heartbeat no one wanted to acknowledge” and “like a wounded god.” Those don’t have the sharp-edged clarity of good figures of speech; they’re fuzzy, somehow.
I am with you in being intrigued by the dragon’s egg in #5. The protagonist doesn’t have a strong voice in this excerpt, but the egg has – not a voice, but a presence. It’s not just any dragon’s egg, it’s an egg with a specific history and physical presence.
OtterB, I was caught by the heartbeat line later, after posting this. I read over that at first, but thought, Huh, what? when I skimmed all the entries again. Now I think that’s possibly the biggest tell in the excerpt.
If a writer has one of their characters say “Aha” non-ironically, I immediately have concerns about their writing.
I thought it was CJ – there’s no sense of the characters at all, to the point where I was wondering if I had the right one as the protagonist.
Excerpt 6 confused me a bit, in a way that made me wonder – it seems like it’s super foggy, and then she starts running towards someone she can’t see?
Chapter 13 of book 3, but I must say the book I’m reading is positively overflowing with voice. Thus:
“The shelves were overcrowded in the same way that a brick wall is overcrowded with books. The shelving itself was virtually irrelevant, like a stencil used for the construction of solid walls. At some point, Antigone thought, they had to have bent under the weight of it, but now the weight of it was actually holding the shelves up. It was hard to comprehend this much . . . . stuff . . . being so intensely neat and organized.
At first, what Antigone had thought of as the jam section had turned out to be the jar section. Strawberry jam was packed in tight next to jars of seeds, jars of tiny screws, jars holding animal-she hoped-eyeballs, jars holding yellow Lego bricks, and jars holding shells, ash, and colored sand. But regardless of the contents, every jar was the exact same size, with the same company name on the glass, turned at the exact same angle. Then came the slightly larger jars. Then the coffee cans. Then a whole section just of books with blue spines, organized in ascending height. Then red books. Then green books. it didn’t matter if they were children’s titles that Antigone recognized or bizarre titles clearly taken from some O of B collection, they were all sorted by color and size.
Pythia didn’t seem to mind, or even notice. She moved slowly but steadily, trailing her hair behind her as she rounded corners or made hard turns. She knew where she was going.”
And thus we get characterization for not two, but three characters: Antigone, our protagonist, Pythia, the oracle of Delphi, and Lemon Chauncey, the obsessive and paranoid resident of a freighter-turned-greenhouse – who we have not yet met.
I would rate this as voice: idiosyncratically literary (especially for a children’s action-adventure), catchiness: variable (depends on the chapter), style: rhythmic, rather catchy, and fast-paced, and situation: active.
I doubt any AI model would describe anything the way this author does. I doubt anyone else in the world would describe almost anything the way he does, but it sure is distinctive!
E.C. I like that excerpt! what book is it from?
As far as I’m concerned, the last three could all have been AI generated. The actual AI was a lot better than the last such sample you posted for opinions. Even the line about making sure the ice doesn’t shift works if you take the speaker as being sarcastic. But there’s no personality in anything in those last three. Except maybe in that last bit of stilted dialogue in the China Zoo one, which could be characterization.
I sort of recognized the Goddard as probably ‘that Silmarillion knock off I tried a while back’, and the narrator of this excerpt came across as probably (what we in this household have christened) ‘the wandering wuss’. The character who exists to be woebegone and elicit ‘feels’ from the reader. Usually in fanfics done to protagonists who are actually not that at all, so it’s very annoying and I’m sensitized to the signs so may be being unfair to this character.
And the Crystal Cave excerpt sounded familiar but I haven’t actually revisited it as opposed to recalled fondly for …. many years. Recognized the Helprin. For his work I need to be in the right frame of mind and have enough time to make a good start before I have to put the book down. I put the sample down before finishing it.
The only one I might actually want to read is the Dragonfruit. That excerpt was the most engaging. Maybe I’ll fish the sample out of the hundred on my kindle and try it next.
I know you don’t like The Bone Harp, Elaine. Since I don’t remember anything about The Silmarillion, I won’t be bothered if this is essentially a retelling of it. I do have to acknowledge that a droopy, woebegone protagonist does not sound very appealing.
Reactions to the actual generated one are SO interesting. Since I knew it was generated, I couldn’t have honest reactions to it. I was mostly dismayed to find the last one massively less appealing than the generated one. Though I do think the generated one looked more and more generated and fake as you went past this excerpted tidbit, while for all I know Warship might improve … I guess … though it’s hard to imagine.
SarahZ on #6 I took the character to be dead and looking for someone who had died earlier. Places for dead spirits can be weird and inconsistent. … After looking for what gave me that idea, it’s the lines about whoever went first and the capitilized Beyond.
This time I noticed the narrator turning on her heel, which is an action description I’ve been finding more and more irritating.
I use that expression sometimes, Elaine, but I’m aware that it’s rather rare for someone to actually do it. But “turned on his toe” seems a little odd, even though it’s generally more accurate. What do you think is a good expression for that kind of movement? Turned sharply? Whirled around?
And yes, that’s the afterlife in that excerpt.
The Bone Harp is excellent. While I admire The Silmarillion, I don’t love it, and I wouldn’t reread it. I would absolutely read The Bone Harp again. A beautiful story about someone reconnecting with a world they never thought they would see again.
Whirl is definitely an option. My brain next offered pirouette which I don’t think works unless the character is a dancer, or there’s a dance context of some sort. Others… whip around, spin, twist, pivot, along with turn sharply. about face for a particularly sharp form of the movement. There’s a French equivalent volte-face.
For some reason I actually tried to make that motion: turn on my heel. It is not natural. So I now notice it in writing.
Ok, afterlife makes more sense for 6 :)
Re: the two authors whose excerpts are arguably worse than the AI, I admit that I had been scoffing a bit at the hand-wringing about AI generated content driving actual artists out of business, because nothing I enjoy reading is as bad as 8 & 9. I guess authors like that may have something to worry about, but I can’t feel too worked up about that. The plagiarism of the training materials bothers me way more.
Elaine, it’s from a children’s series called The Ashtown Burials, book 3 being Empire of Bones. Imagine a mashup between all the myths and legends (ALL of them), a good old American tall tale, and an adventure story, and you’ve got Ashtown. It also has, in my opinion, some of the best sibling interactions ever written. Highly recommend for that alone – the author clearly has siblings and spent time with them when young.
I had *not* guessed #7 as AI-generated, but I think that says something about how I approach SFF – I treat seeming inconsistencies as world-building hints at first.
So, “Something deeper than the probe drones had ever dared to go.” -> Drones are sentient, maybe like Culture drones?
““Then you’d better make sure it doesn’t,” she muttered” -> They have some way to stabilize the ice, but it’s not perfect.
It works better if I already trust the author.
E.C., I love that series! And the 100 Cupboards series, too. Really rich and imaginative.
I, too, would have said the AI was the last one. I actually thought “Jupiter loomed like a wounded god” was evidence of a human writer, since I didn’t think an AI would come up with that connection. And I thought the “frozen ocean caught mid-roar” was a great image, but in retrospect it doesn’t describe Europa’s ice at all! I feel like I should be able to learn something about how AIs create metaphors from this passage, but I’m not sure what. Just that they don’t quite get it, I guess.
Dragonfruit was really fun (I still haven’t gotten around to Year of the Reaper, which sounds less fun, though I believe it will be very good). I didn’t finish The Bone Harp because nothing much seemed to be happening. Goddard’s books I either gobble up and reread immediately and love to pieces, or bounce pretty hard off of. Andrea Höst is like that for me too.
I’ve had the first book of the Ashtown Burials on my TBR pile for age … someday, someday …
I will be VERY interested in whether anybody correctly identifies the fake in the similar post that will go live next week. My guess is, that’ll be tough for everyone, no matter what they normally cue on when they read.