Before we start:

This blog post will contain reflections about my body and how it works. I’m not suggesting anything about your body or what you should do with it. Mine is the only one on which I have the right, the qualifications, or the willingness to comment.In the same vein, I am not a doctor; this post does not contain medical advice; nothing in this constitutes a recommendation for anyone; why are you even listening to me; fly you fools fly.EXTREMELY EXTENDED METAPHOR KLAXON. The writing stuff comes later.

I have weak ankles. Runs in the family. I’ve twisted my ankle more times than I can remember; I have literally fallen off flip flops because my ankle went sideways. Stupid bendy ankles.

I started running in my late 20s. After a few iterations of going over on my ankle and landing on my face, I went to a running shop. They analysed my gait and sold me expensive shoes with built up interiors and bulky heels. My ankles got no better. My knees hurt a lot. The running people said I was heel striking (landing on my heels rather than the balls of my feet) and sold me shoes with extra padding to absorb the impact. My knees still hurt. I stopped running.

So then about seven years ago I started wearing minimalist shoes. No heel drop, no internal structure, no ankle support, nothing but a very thin sole to keep out the rain, dog poo, and broken glass. I loved the feel of the ground under my feet, the way my feet moved. Over the next few years I transitioned to wearing exclusively barefoot shoes.

And a bit ago, my husband said, “Do you realise you haven’t twisted your ankle in years?”

I noticed how my ankles flexed confidently over rough ground these days, and how secure I felt with no thick sole or heel drop. I tried running again, this time in barefoot shoes.

It hurt like hell, because I was still thumping down on my heels, which sent pain shooting up my knees and spine. I adapted my gait to land on the ball of my foot (easier to do without an inch and a half of padding on my heel), and as I got used to that, I realised it felt far more natural for me, at my pace and stride length. My knees don’t hurt any more. Yesterday, running on rough ground, my foot landed sideways, and my ankle flexed in a way that previously would have had me folding up like screaming origami. And then it straightened effortlessly … because my ankles have got stronger.

What was wrong was not that I had weak ankles, although I did, or that I heel struck, although I did. What was wrong was that, instead of tackling my specific problem, I went for an artificial solution to avoid tackling it, which caused me to develop and maintain a damagingly poor technique.

The Writing Metaphor Klaxon should be deafening you by now.

I was chatting idly on Bluesky the other day and a writer suggested to me that surely it was legitimate to use AI for query letters and synopses. They’re time-sucking tedious tasks, why not automate them?

And the answer to that is: my weak ankles.

Writing synopses can be a slog. Blog post here on how to do it. But it can also be an incredible way to get a bird’s eye view of your not-quite-right MS and identify what’s not working. Write a concise summary of your main character arcs and plot action, and watch in horror as it demonstrates that you forgot to include the romance in your romance novel, that the villain is actually the sole focus of the action, that it’s all plot and no character or vice versa, that you have to distort the actual events of the book for the synopsis to make sense (yes, I have done this), or that nothing actually bloody happens.

Here is a blog post on me identifying that in my own work by doing a summary (scroll down to the big screengrab); here is a post that uses a summary to demonstrate the fatal flaw in a Heyer novel.

If you tackle writing a synopsis as a structural analysis exercise, you’ve got a genuinely useful tool in your arsenal that can save you a book doctor’s fees, or an editorial rejection. If you ask Chat GPT to do it (feeding your book into the sausage machine to do it, you idiot), you’ve just bought my expensive running shoes. It might fix your immediate need for a synopsis, but it won’t help you with your actual problem.

Same with query letters. People make a huge fuss about these but there’s only two elements that matter:

a) writing a snappy two line summary of your book,
b) offering comps (titles to which your book can be compared).

Well, a) if you genuinely can’t write two snappy lines, I’m worried about the other 100,000 words of your book. You haven’t got a single concise line in the whole thing? Really? Either you’re wrong and you’re perfectly capable of crafting a snappy line, or you’re right and you need to do some serious work on your technique.

And b) if you are writing in a field in which you are so poorly read that you can’t think of two relevant comparative titles, then…those are some weak ankles you’ve got there, mate.

The plagiarism engine is not a substitute for pinning your plot to the page and forcing yourself to break it down and take a hard look at the structure. It will not help you learn to analyse your own work. It won’t give you experience in polishing a sentence till it sparkles. It cannot substitute for reading in your field.

Granted, it is hard work to strengthen your writing muscles and learn proper technique. It’s easier to use Chat GPT to spit out its weirdly soulless garble. But then, it would be easier to get Chat GPT to generate the whole damn book, and most of us don’t actually want to produce the easiest book possible. We’d like to make it the best, and we do that by improving our techniques and building up our natural abilities. Not by using artificial support to avoid confronting our problems.

Obviously, physical bodies have a wide varieties of failings, most of which can’t be fixed as easily as my ankles, and I am not speaking to those issues at all. But as a writer? Baby, you were born to run.