Sept 22, 2014.
That’s the exact moment I had the idea for The Lost Night. I was typing away in a free-writing doc (a tool I still use today for every single one of my books—I bash on the keyboard, stream-of-consciousness style, to work out plot puzzles, capture half-baked ideas, etc.), desperate to land on a book idea I could pursue. Over the years, I’d started and abandoned a few novel ideas already, and the following streamed out of my fingers, surprising even me:
What if I pick a bunch of characters, put them all in the same room the very same night, where something dramatic happened, someone disappears? Or gets killed, or it looks like a suicide or accident, but something happens that suggests it’s more than that. The case reopens, or there isn’t even a case but it’s still open in someone’s mind, and we hear everyone’s version of events, like Clue—
McKibbin Lofts would be a very interesting place to kill someone. All those nooks and crannies, that roof, all those people, young and drunk or high. There could be a group of people all living there at the same time and all with some reason to be at this party (although there were a gazillion people at every party, hmm) ranging from Greg types to John types to Lloyd types.
Someone comes home to their room after a night of partying and finds their roommate dead on the floor. Is there a gash on her head? Or does it look like a suicide but the protagonist always knew better? Who’d do such a thing and why?
I started writing it that night. It was a mess. I had no idea how to write a novel, let alone a whodunnit, but I wrote and wrote and wrote. I did NaNoWriMo. I lost my full-time job at a magazine in February and redoubled my efforts. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I sensed, correctly, that the only way to become a novelist was to finish a manuscript, so that’s what I did.
May 11, 2015: I sent the manuscript to my friend Leah Rowan, kicking off a decade-plus of trading manuscripts and challenging each other to get better and better at our craft.
She kindly ripped it to shreds. Her notes were long and tough and correct. I rolled up my sleeves and got to work.
On October 31, 2016, almost two years after I wrote the first word, I finally felt the manuscript was in good enough shape for me to query literary agents. I signed with one and completed another revision. She went on submission with it in January.
No one wanted it. All no’s, one after the other. One editor was interested but couldn’t buy it in its current form; she was willing to look at another, dramatically improved version, a “revise and resubmit,” but no promises. I had a call with her—just a litany of the novel’s shortcomings, no troubleshooting or suggestions for improvement. She was not, after all, my editor yet.
I hung up and cried. Took a deep breath.
Got back to work.
On July 5, 2017, exhausted and spent, I sent a new version to my agent. It was very, very different and—I had to admit—much stronger. I felt drained, an empty propane tank, like I’d poured all my life force out of my fingertips and into this draft. I said a prayer, slept a lot.
On July 25, 2017, I got an email from my agent:
Are you around? We have an offer!
I screamed into the phone. After I hung up, I jumped up and down, squeezed my fists to my smile, and cried. That Word document, 100,000 words of my own blood, sweat, and tears, was going to be a book. A book! I could hardly believe it.
The work wasn’t over. I did another revision under my editor’s guidance, then line edits, then copyedits, then page proofs. I made jokes about my nominal hourly rate, how I refused to let myself pause and think about the vast stores of time and energy I’d spent on this story.
Of course it was worth it. Of course I wouldn’t hesitate to spend the time investing in marketing, in PR, in planning a tour and perfecting jacket copy and making this book one people would read, enjoy, learn from, love. That was the point.
The book came out February 26, 2019. Four-and-a-half years after I stumbled onto an idea that stuck, never mind all the cogitating that came before that, the false starts and bad openings that preceded it. The lifetime of reading and decade as a professional journalist, honing my craft, experimenting with figurative language, learning how to line the words up so they matched what I felt in my ribs, my root, my soul.
August 19, 2023: More than nine years after I fanned a spark of an idea into what would eventually become my debut, The Lost Night, I typed my name into the searchable database The Atlantic had created to identify the hundreds of thousands of books in one of the troves of pirated books used to train generative AI algorithms. The Lost Night popped up.
A lump formed in my throat. I was alone in my 380-square-foot studio apartment, hard at work on my fourth book, tuning out the nagging questions plaguing me and every other creator—will AI take my job, and will AI slop supplant my stories? Even now, I can’t quite put into words the sucker punch of that moment: I felt robbed, betrayed, and profoundly violated.
They just…took it. AI companies saw the pirated ebook, the thing I couldn’t have written without a lifetime of reading and writing and revising and laboring, and took it for themselves. Stripped it down to a .txt file and fed it into an algorithm along with a bajillion others, gulp.
So, no, I couldn’t just let it go. A year later, I became one of three named plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against Anthropic, which used my pirated books—and hundreds of thousands of others—to train its chatbot. Along with the terrifically talented nonfiction authors Charles Graeber (whose books include The Good Nurse) and Kirk Wallace Johnson (who wrote, among other titles, The Feather Thief), I spent hundreds of hours fighting for justice.
And then…a very big thing happened. Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to copyright owners in the largest copyright recovery in history (both in terms of the settlement amount and the size of the class), and more recently, a judge preliminarily approved it. The company will pay authors and publishers about $3,000 in damages for each of about ~500,000 books it pirated, and it’ll delete its stolen copies.
Of course it’s only a first, corrective step, and there’s so much more work to be done. But for now: Guardrails and consequences—welcome to the party. (The Authors Guild has an explainer and FAQ here; check if your books are in the class and file a claim if so!)
I get it: AI feels like a runaway train, and its conductors show no signs of wanting to slow things down. Quite the opposite, in fact; recall that AI companies lobbied to have a provision in HR-1 stating that no state would regulate them for the next decade—a provision that congress struck down before passing the government-funding bill.
But we can’t wait around for regulators to hash out new norms, rules, and laws. The clock is ticking and it’s way too soon to wave a white flag. Instead of preemptively capitulating to our Silicon Valley overlords, my co-plaintiffs and I (along with an army of lawyers and stakeholders) pushed one high-profile, moneyed tech company a few inches toward a more ethical path forward. I’m hopeful more regulations and penalties will follow.
And this isn’t only a win for the people who make books. It’s also hugely important for readers who want their favorite authors to continue writing, and you can extend the same logic to fans of music, movies, visual art, and so on.
Big picture, I hope this settlement reminds people we don’t have to sit back and let Big Tech cram its products down our throats. Opt out of programs’ AI features; seek out art, music, and podcasts created by humans; and please, please think twice before using chatbots to put into words certain sentiments that, a few short years ago, would’ve come from your brain.
Yes, it takes more effort to sit down at a keyboard and express yourself than to offload the work to an LLM. Just ask the disgruntled writer who started drafting The Lost Night 11 years ago, almost to the month.
Any author knows writing is difficult. And that’s exactly the point.
It's funny in all my thoughts about this case and AI in general, I have never actually sat down and considered just how much work goes into a book. We are conditioned by everyone to devalue what we've done, but this is such a helpful reminder. And also I am so honored that I have had the privilege of ripping all your brilliant manuscripts to shreds!
Great post. And I am hugely grateful for all the unpaid work you’ve done on behalf of writers and readers everywhere.