Croydon Writers

Yes, really. ChatGPT has an AI that will critique a passage of your writing and offer suggestions and tips. It’s called Creative Writing Coach and you can find it here. As an experiment I gave it the piece I wrote during our session at The George (you can read them here: mine is the one called Weeping in the Dark).

This is what the gpt came up with, almost instantly.

Quick Rating: 8.5 / 10

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✅ What’s Working Well:

**1. Atmosphere & Tone

You’re creating a quietly eerie mood that feels grounded and literary. The mysterious crying, the isolation, and the subtle psychological unease are evocative and artfully understated.

**2. Voice & Style

Your prose style is intelligent and reflective. Phrases like “electric fear,” “for form’s sake,” and “like someone letting go, piece by crumbling piece” show maturity in narrative voice. It reads like the opening of a psychological ghost story by someone like Shirley Jackson or Sarah Waters.

**3. Imagery & Setting

The setting is striking—the contrast between calling it a “cabin” and then revealing it to be more like a “factory worker’s cottage” creates a vivid, unexpected image. You’re world-building through quiet, telling detail.

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🛠 Suggestions for Improvement:

1. Tense Consistency & Pacing:

• Sentence: “She closed the door and she was alone. It must have been well after midnight when Ann heard someone crying in the next room.”

This creates a slight temporal jolt—did she close the door and then later hear the crying, or is it all happening at once?

Suggestion:

Consider clarifying the timeline:

“She had closed the door and was alone. It must have been well after midnight when Ann first heard the crying…”

2. Slight Overlap in Descriptions:

• You mention the sound “startled her and for just a moment filled her with electric fear,” which then “passed instantly.” Later, you say “this time it was not at all frightening.”

The repetition is okay for emphasis, but it might be worth slightly rewording to avoid tonal redundancy.

Suggestion:

Soften the earlier fear just a touch so the later contrast lands more strongly:

“It jolted her—not terror exactly, but a sudden, involuntary alertness that passed in seconds…”

3. The Line About “Unborn and Unregretted”

• This phrase is haunting and poetic, but slightly jarring in the paragraph’s emotional arc. It dips into a darker, almost mythic register without much lead-in.

Suggestion: Either set it up a little more clearly as Ann’s associative thinking or simplify:

“Cats at night howl like babies, after all—like all the infants that never came into the world…”

Alternatively, lean fully into it and clarify it’s Ann’s thoughts, not the narrator’s intrusion.

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💡 Optional Enrichment Ideas:

• Internal contradiction: Ann hesitates to believe what she’s hearing, but something compels her. A line hinting at a past experience—“She had learned not to trust her imagination—but this felt different”—could layer in subtle backstory and deepen tension.

• Sound motif: Consider extending the theme of sound—was the forest “too quiet” earlier? Were there any creaks in the cabin that now feel ominously silent?

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🧠 Final Thought:

This piece is polished, literary, and filled with subtle psychological detail. It has the tone of an unsettling short story or the beginning of a gothic novella. You’re working in the quiet, uncanny tradition with a confident hand.

Would you like help developing what happens next? You could take this into horror, magical realism, or even psychological drama depending on your intent.

That seems surprisingly good to me, though I do think the bot has missed the point a couple of times. If you decide to try it out, remember it doesn’t actually understand anything. Its advice may be terrible and either flattering, mistaken, or even offensive.

There will be more of this, though. Writing competitions will start using this kind of thing for the first sift, and literary agents will turn it on the slush pile – mark my words.