Curtis Sittenfeld: "As With a Naked Ken Doll, Something’s Missing..."

It's called excitement. Passion for life. A real story to tell...

Ms. Sittenfeld has conned the opinion editors at the New York Times into paying her to write a short romance story about a middle aged woman on a dating app who meets a fella (no sex in the story) and phones a friend after her date to discuss.  BoRing.

Ms. Sittenfeld then "competed" against an AI bot who also created a boring story about a middle aged woman seeking romance.  What percentage of newspaper readers are into romantic short stories with no plot or excitement?

Other than middle aged women with no romance in their own lives who are yearning to find something more in fictional stories but not in real life, I don't think either tale appeals to men or women with healthy sex lives.  It has nothing at all to do with current events or real life discussions adults undertake on dates even.

I wish whoever wrote the headline about the naked Ken doll had been offered up a commission to write a story from a male character point of view (enough with the lonely middle aged lady protagonists with no lives and nothing happening internally?).  Heck, you can diss Ken but give that man a prosthetic to call his own, and he's dating Barbie on the beach, not pining with a beach read at his feet, paid for producing what the market already overrates...

Think diversity, NYT!

Think about offering up something FRESH, not the same old same old from the same old same old writers hacking about the same old same old tales about middle class white people with romantic troubles?  Maybe you should start reading about other people's lives and learning instead of offering up the same old slop that readers long ago tired of?

Here are some of the things I did to write a summer-themed short story that I’m pretty sure ChatGPT didn’t do:

• started writing more than a week before I knew what the reader-selected prompts would be, because I was worried that if I tried to write too quickly, the results would be sloppy.

• drove from my house in Minneapolis to the park in St. Paul where I’d decided to set the story to see what it looked and felt like.

• included in the story a real Twin Cities-based David Bowie cover band, called The Band That Fell to Earth, whom I’d seen perform.

• asked a biking enthusiast friend if Brian’s dating app handle MtnBiker1971 was so obvious that no self-respecting biker would use it.

• asked the same friend what trail Brian would recently have ridden on, but then didn’t name any of the places he suggested because of space.

• got feedback on my first draft from several family members and friends, including a friend who, like Cassie, lives in New York, is in her early 50s and intermittently uses dating apps.

• changed the location of where Brian grew up from Mankato to Duluth because Kamala Harris selected Tim Walz as her running mate during the weeks I was working on the story, and Walz’s ties to Mankato made the mention of it feel distracting.

• interrupted the writing process to look at the menu of a Thai restaurant I’ll be eating at soon and to check flight times to Cincinnati in October (and no, there’s absolutely nothing in my story that’s relevant to Thai food or Cincinnati — this was recreational).

• wrote a first draft that was almost two times too long.

• cut that draft but still asked my editor if I could exceed the agreed-upon 1,000-word length by about 200 words.

This is something I did that ChatGPT may have done:

• chose character names by looking at popular baby names from the 1970s, when the characters would have been born, on the Social Security Administration website.

Something I definitely didn’t do that ChatGPT did:

• wrote its story in 17 seconds.

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