Horror vacui

I planned to write an article yesterday in Medium’s new platform, TK which is launching publicly Nov. 9th. I made good progress, but didn’t quite finish. I have a good beginning and the bones of a middle, but I still have a lot to fill in. I struggled at the beginning to find a good opening, and slowed down at the middle because I wanted to check a fact, and tracking down that fact took a lot of time. Both could have been avoided if I’d used the old editor’s trick of writing TK, meaning “to come”, which is what the app is named after. Write first, improve it later. Still, I’m set up to finish the article today.

I did also write a note at the end of the day. TK has a daily notes section that can generate a writing prompt. This is what I like from an AI-enabled app. Have AI prompt the writer instead of the writer prompting the AI.

My Custom Prompt: Rather than a topic, give me a suggested format, an approach, or an audience outcome. Please explore the conceptual space beyond the context in my own files. Take me somewhere new rather than repeating what I’ve already done.

This morning that produced:

TK: Try a glossary today: six to ten terms a reader would need to follow you around for a week, each defined in a sentence or two, in your own voice rather than a dictionary’s. The entries don’t have to agree with each other.

Nature abhors a vacuum. A prompt like this adds just enough scaffolding to suggest the first line. And from there it’s just a matter of filling the space out to the edges.