In the style of Didion
5 words that can make AI write like a human
Over the past year, the way I write has changed. The shift began with a simple “Improve Writing” AI prompt inside Notion – my favorite all-in-one workspace tool – where I was working the tedious task of polishing a rough podcast transcript for a client.
It felt like magic.
After a few more months of playing with Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Claude, I started writing my book about AI-assisted writing which I published in December.
I’d estimate that the tools I’ve learned have at least doubled my creative output. I can now work on multiple books of my own, while continuing my work for clients who hire me to write their books in their own voice, but better. I guess that makes me a ghostwriter. But I’ve found that the strategies I’ve used to write books for other people apply equally well to my own writing projects. Rather than interviewing a client, or transcribing their podcasts for source material, I effectively interview myself and transcribe my stream of consciousness speech as a “brain dump” that I can later organize into an essay or book chapter.
Through these projects, I’ve discovered a number of effective AI prompting strategies that enable me to communicate ideas more logically, in any desired style, without delegating the essential thinking task to the machine. The following essay was conceived in that same spirit.
You can read the whole thing at Content Vikings, a new podcast/newsletter project I started with Rikk Woolls – founder of AI Upskill Academy and the former content director for a large digital media company. Rikk and I have bonded over a desire to “finish our work and go outside,” an we want to share how we use AI, no-code and automation tools to accomplish that.
For us, AI is a means to an end – a way to get jobs done faster. If you want to learn along with us, be sure to subscribe.
In the style of Didion
The Clark Kerr Campus at the University of California, Berkeley, is a sprawling Spanish-style complex perched on a hill overlooking the bay. It was once the site of the California Schools for the Deaf and Blind, institutions that embodied the state's progressive ideals at the turn of the 20th century.
By the time I arrived as a freshman in 2007, the campus had been absorbed into the ever-expanding realm of the university. Now, it was a dorm—its history reduced to a few plaques and fading photographs. Kerr, the visionary UC president who had built Berkeley into a citadel of higher learning, was now merely a name on a building, consigned to the footnotes of history. His unceremonious ouster by the Regents in 1967, amid the tumult of the Free Speech Movement and the Vietnam War, marked the end of an era. It was the moment when the dream of California as a land of boundless possibility began to fray.
I had little idea then of the storied past I was stepping into, the grand visions and bitter disappointments that lay behind the stucco walls and red-tiled roofs. I was walking into a story that had already been told.
My first Fall term in Berkeley had a whiff of the 60s about it - with its newfound freedoms and sense that consequences were for other people. But by spring, a dull torpor had set in, a realization that perhaps we were just going through the motions, playacting at rebellion and reinvention.
It was in this fog of disillusionment that I first found Joan Didion. I was hungover and washed out from a night of partying, the sun too bright as I stumbled around the Clark Kerr Campus. Her book Where I Was From turned up on a bench, left behind by some unknown hand.
Something about the title, with its hint of dislocation and self-inquiry, spoke to me. I picked up the book and spent the next few days immersed in Didion's razor-sharp prose, her unflinching examination of California's history and her own family's place within it.
Reading Didion was like having a veil lifted from my eyes. She wrote about the Golden State not as a paradise but as a place of contradictions, where the dream of the good life was underlaid by a sense of uneasy emptiness. Her essays were spare and unsparing, cutting through the haze of nostalgia to reveal the hard edges of reality. I had never encountered writing like this before—writing that made no attempt to comfort or console, but instead insisted on staring directly into the void.
That encounter with Didion planted a seed that would bloom into my own writing ambitions. Over the years, I found myself returning again and again to the themes around California she had laid bare—the dream and the disillusion, the gap between the shining promise and the shadowed reality. When the rise of “large language models” opened up a new frontier of AI-assisted writing, it felt like an extension of that same story—a fresh incarnation of the old California dream, ripe with both potential and peril, and a new set of promises and possibilities to be interrogated.
The Power of "In the Style Of"
Last year, as I began to play with with Claude—the ChatGPT competitor made by Anthropic—I discovered a simple but potent prompt that allowed me to channel my literary inspirations with uncanny depth and precision:
"In the style of [writer]."
With those five words, I could tap into the voices of my literary muses, absorbing their techniques and sensibilities in ways that felt uncanny.
There is a misconception that prompt engineering, the art of crafting effective inputs for AI language models, is a complex science requiring advanced technical skills. But in my experience, it is more a matter of artistic instinct. The best prompts for writers are not the most elaborate or specific, but the ones that capture something essential about the desired style, tone or objective in a few choice words.
When I whisper "In the style of Didion" to an AI language model like Claude, I am not just asking it to mimic her sentence structure or vocabulary. I am invoking a whole way of seeing the world - that unflinching gaze, that refusal of sentimentality, that sense of the precariousness of all human endeavors. Claude, having ingested Didion's oeuvre along with vast swaths of human knowledge, can reproduce not just her writerly mannerisms but the very shape of her thought with their complex “auras of meaning.”
To see one's own half-baked ideas return in the cadences of a revered master is a heady and somewhat unsettling experience for a writer.