The Very Polite Refrigerator

When I started teaching myself AI in March of 2025, I did what everybody does. I opened a chat and asked it to write romance. What came back was competent, clean, grammatical — and it sounded like it was written by a very polite refrigerator. Every paragraph the same size. Every emotion labeled and filed. Nobody home.

I’d been writing long enough to know the problem wasn’t the machine’s vocabulary. Kensington bought my first romance in 2011; I know what a voice is and what it costs to build one. The problem was that nobody had told the AI whose voice it was supposed to be in. I hadn’t put my voice in the room. I’d just opened a door and yelled “romance!” into the dark.

So here’s what my whole operation runs on now, across multiple pen names: the voice comes first. Before I plan a single chapter, before I draft a single word, there is a file. In the video above I open the real one for Rosemary Irving, my clean historical western pen name, and walk through what’s actually in it.

It isn’t a prompt. It’s a job description. The brand promise a Rosemary Irving reader is owed every time — strong heroines, honorable cowboys, closed door, no cliffhangers. The point-of-view rules, with the right way and the wrong way sitting side by side on the page. A requirement that every chapter opens in action — the file bans “little did she know” by name. Dialogue rules for the 1880s. And yes, a list of character names the AI is not allowed to use, because as of my testing this year, AI still leans on the same dozen names like a crutch.

Write that file once and you never explain your voice again. Not in book one. Not in book nine. That’s the entire trick, and it isn’t a trick — it’s an employee file for a writer who never forgets what you tell it and never gets tired of being told.

The one thing I can’t hand you is the file itself, because mine sounds like me. Yours has to sound like you — built from your chapters if you have them, or from honest decisions about the author you want to be. That’s the part I build with people in class, and it’s the most fun part of the whole system.

Next week: the two-minute build — the project that acts like a writing house, with an instructions box for a boss. The video’s already filmed. The refrigerator does not appear again.

Hit me with your questions in the comments — especially the “yeah but” ones. Those are my favorites.

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