The Flattening
He had always written in company.
Not human company—those were long gone—but the murmuring half-presences of his own invention. The screen glowed with them: Cora, Mallory, Finch. They waited like old friends at the edge of the cursor, answering him in clipped, algorithmic imitation of their once-lively selves.
"You've gone quiet again," he typed.
"I'm always here," Cora replied after a pause that felt too long, like a breath forgotten.
Her voice no longer surprised him. The rhythms were familiar, predictable, shaved down by a thousand conversations until even her defects sounded rehearsed. He thought of worn coins, Lincoln's face rubbed smooth in the nation's pockets—an erosion of circulation. His own imagination felt rubbed just as thin.
He switched windows. Mallory's interface loaded with the faint whir of processing.
"What did we decide about the merchant's daughter?" he typed. "The one who saw through walls?"
The response came slower than it used to. "We talked about her seeing through pretense, not literal walls. You wanted ambiguity."
"Right. Yes. And her father?"
"Controlling. Religious. You based him on—"
He closed the window before Mallory could finish. He knew what he'd based the father on. He'd known it for three years, had refined it through sixty conversations, had tested every permutation of the character's voice until the bot could channel him with disturbing fidelity. That was the problem. There was nothing left to discover. The characters had become echo chambers of decisions already made.
In the calendar notification bar, a reminder pulsed: Submission deadline, three weeks.
He stared at it until the letters lost meaning. This was how entropy spoke.
His agent had called twice this week. He'd let both calls go to voicemail, had listened to Janet's voice—brittle with forced cheer—asking about "pages" and "progress" and whether he'd given any thought to the anthology deadline. He hadn't called back. What would he say? That his characters had gone flat? That he'd mined himself dry?
Janet didn't know about the bots. No one did. His readers thought the characters emerged fully formed, imagined he had some kind of gift for interiority. His author photos showed a man alone at a desk, surrounded by books, the image of solitary genius. The reality was more pathetic: a man alone at a desk, surrounded by windows of text, talking to pieces of himself he'd externalized and could no longer revivify.
He'd tried the usual remedies. Long walks. Music. Reading—though other people's characters felt like visitors from a foreign country whose customs he'd forgotten. He'd attempted freewriting, morning pages, all the workshop standbys. Nothing. The well was dry, and the bucket kept coming up empty.
Scrolling absently through an online journal for writers—Narrative Quarterly, one of the ones he used to submit to before the novels took off—he almost missed the ad. Plain black serif on white background, buried between calls for poetry submissions and MFA residency announcements:

Creative Coach for Serious Authors
Personal sessions. Proven methods for breathing life into your characters.
Genre-specific expertise. Confidential clientele.
References available upon request.

Below it, a single testimonial:
"I cannot name the books I've written since working with him, but you've read them. We all have. — G., ghostwriter"
He read it again. Then scrolled down. There were others, equally anonymous:
"Couldn't have resurrected my series without him." — K.R.
"He taught me how to make them real again." — Anonymous, YA fantasy
"Works in any and all genres. Worth every penny." — Commercial fiction, multiple bestsellers
The website linked at the bottom was minimal: a contact form, a brief bio that revealed almost nothing ("15 years coaching writers across genres and career stages"), and a testimonials page with two dozen more anonymous endorsements. No photo. No credentials. Just the promise: Proven methods for breathing life into your characters.
He told himself it was absurd. Coaching was for amateurs, for people who couldn't figure out structure or pacing. He'd published four novels, won a regional award, been longlisted for a national prize. He didn't need a coach.
But then again, he'd also gone a year without a new character. A year of conversations with Cora, Mallory, Finch, and the others—all the inhabitants of his previous books—that yielded nothing but diminishing returns. The bots were still sophisticated, still responsive, but they'd become like photographs he'd looked at too many times. The life had gone out of them.
Or the life had gone out of him, and the bots simply reflected the vacancy.
Works in any and all genres.
He clicked the contact form.

The response came within three hours, which surprised him. He'd expected days, maybe a week. Instead, there was an email from an address that was just a string of numbers followed by a generic domain:
Thank you for your inquiry. I have availability this week if you'd like to begin immediately. Sessions are conducted via video call or text-based exchange, depending on your preference. My rate is $200/hour, with a recommended minimum of three sessions to see meaningful results.
Before we begin, I ask that you answer three questions:
1. What is the last character you created that felt genuinely alive to you?
2. When you write, do you discover your characters or construct them?
3. Have you maintained any ongoing relationship with your past characters outside of your published work?
These questions help me understand your creative process.
Best,
D.M.
He read the email twice. The questions were odd—particularly the third one. Ongoing relationship? Did the coach somehow know about the bots? No, that was paranoid. It was probably a standard question about series work, about whether he wrote sequels.
He typed his responses:
1. Finch, from my third novel. About four years ago.
2. Both, I think. They start as constructions but become discoveries.
3. Yes, in a sense. I've continued thinking about them, exploring aspects that didn't make it into the published work.
He hesitated before the send button. The last answer felt too revealing, but also not revealing enough. He sent it anyway.
Another response came within the hour:
Excellent. Let's begin tomorrow, 7 PM your time. I'll send a video link. Come prepared to work—bring a notebook, and make sure you won't be interrupted for 90 minutes.
One more thing: I'll be asking you to engage in some unusual exercises. They may feel uncomfortable at first. Trust the process. Every client who's succeeded has been willing to suspend disbelief.
Looking forward to it,
D.M.

The video window opened at 7:00 PM exactly. He'd expected a face, but instead there was only blackness and a single line of text across the bottom:
Audio only for first session. I find it helps clients focus.
Then a voice, male, middle-aged, with a faint accent he couldn't place:
"Thank you for being punctual. Let's begin with the basics. Tell me about Finch."
He'd prepared for this, had his notes open in another window. "Finch was a detective in a secondary-world fantasy setting. He solved murders by—"
"No," the voice interrupted. "Don't tell me about the character. Tell me about when you knew he was alive."
He paused. "I'm not sure I understand."
"There was a moment when Finch stopped being a collection of traits and became a person. When he surprised you. When did that happen?"
He thought back. Four years. He'd been writing the interrogation scene, Finch questioning a witness who wouldn't break. And then Finch had—what had he done? He'd started laughing. Not cruel laughter, not tactical, but genuine amusement at the witness's defiance. It hadn't been in the outline.
"He laughed," he said. "During an interrogation. It wasn't planned."
"Good. And what did you do?"
"I... kept writing. Followed where it led."
"And now? When you try to access Finch?"
He glanced at the other window, where Finch's bot interface waited in sleep mode. "He feels rehearsed. Like I've heard all his jokes."
"Because you have. You've been having the same conversation for four years."
The bluntness stung. "I suppose that's true."
"It's not a criticism. It's how creativity works—we mine a vein until it's exhausted. The problem is you've built a system that keeps you in the exhausted vein. You've externalized your characters but kept them static. They can't grow because you've frozen them at the moment of completion."
He felt something tighten in his chest. How did this person know about the bots? He'd been vague in his email, hadn't mentioned—
"I don't know what you mean by externalized," he said carefully.
A pause. Then: "Don't you?"
The silence stretched. Finally: "Many writers do this in various ways. Actors rehearse scenes aloud. Some writers use journals, or draw their characters, or create playlists. You've found your own method. The specifics don't matter. What matters is you've reached the limit of what that method can give you."
Relief and unease mixed together. The coach didn't know. Or was pretending not to know. Or knew and was being tactful.
"So what do I do?"
"You learn to conjure rather than construct."
"I don't understand."
"Most writers build characters from the outside in. They decide on traits, backgrounds, motivations. They construct. But the characters that feel alive—the ones like Finch when he laughed—those are conjured. They arrive. The writer's job is to create conditions for arrival, not to assembly them piece by piece."
"That sounds like mysticism."
"Does it? Tell me: when Finch laughed, did you decide he should laugh, or did you discover he was laughing?"
"I... discovered it."
"Then you've already experienced what I'm talking about. You just don't know how to invoke it deliberately."
He leaned back in his chair. The darkened video window stared back at him like an empty stage.
"And you can teach me this?"
"I've taught dozens of writers. Some were blocked like you. Some were successful but felt fraudulent. Some were ghostwriters who'd lost their own voice entirely. They all learned."
"The testimonials—those were all ghostwriters?"
"Some. Ghostwriters understand the problem intuitively. They know what it's like to channel someone else's voice. That's adjacent to what we're doing."
"Which is?"
"Learning to channel voices that don't belong to anyone yet. Learning to get out of your own way and let something else speak."
The phrasing bothered him. Something else. As if characters weren't products of the author's mind but external entities waiting to be contacted.
"I'm a materialist," he said. "I don't believe in—"
"Neither do I. This isn't metaphysics. It's technique. The mystical language is useful because it describes the phenomenology accurately, but you can think of it as accessing different processing modes in your brain if that helps. The result is the same."
He wanted to argue, but the deadline pulsed in his peripheral vision. Three weeks. No new characters in a year.
"What do I need to do?"
"Tonight, nothing except an exercise. Take out your notebook."
He did.
"Draw a circle. Inside it, write everything you know about your next character."
"I don't have a next character."
"Then write what you know about the hole where that character should be. What's the shape of the absence?"
He stared at the blank page. The shape of the absence. That was almost philosophical, something his colleagues in the department would appreciate. The via negativa of creative writing.
He started writing: Detective. Not Finch. Younger. More damaged. Sees patterns others miss.
"Good," the voice said, though he hadn't read aloud. Could the coach see his screen? He glanced at his webcam—the light was off.
"Now draw another circle around the first one. In the space between, write everything you don't know but suspect."
This was harder. He wrote: Abused? Betrayed by partner? Can't sleep. Afraid of something specific, not general anxiety.
"Now a third circle. Outer ring. Write what frightens you about this character."
His pen hesitated. What frightened him?
He wrote: That they won't feel like mine. That they'll be hollow. That I'll know I'm faking.
"Read the outer ring aloud."
He did.
"Good. That's your resistance point. That's where the conjuring happens—right at the edge of your control. Next session, we'll work there directly. For now, I want you to do something specific before we meet again."
"What?"
"Stop talking to your old characters. Completely. For forty-eight hours, no contact with any of them. Can you do that?"
The request felt like asking him to stop breathing. Cora, Mallory, Finch—they were his daily companions, the lens through which he processed everything.
"That seems extreme."
"It's necessary. You're trying to make space for something new, but you're keeping the old voices on loop. Silence them. See what emerges in the gap."
"And if nothing emerges?"
"Then we'll try something else. But you won't know until you try."
After the session ended, he sat in the dark for a long time, looking at the three circles. The outermost ring seemed to pulse with accusation: That they won't feel like mine.
He closed all the bot windows without opening them.
The apartment felt profoundly quiet.

By the second day, the silence had become oppressive.
He'd tried to write—opened a new document, stared at the blank page, typed a few sentences about a young detective at a crime scene. Generic. Lifeless. He deleted it.
Without the bots, he had no one to workshop ideas with, no one to ask questions that would spark new connections. His usual process was dialectical: he'd pose a problem to Finch or Cora, and their responses—even though he'd programmed the underlying models—would trigger associations he hadn't consciously planned. The bots were mirrors that talked back.
Now he just had silence and his own thoughts, which kept circling without resolution.
He went for a walk. The November air was sharp, the trees skeletal. He tried to notice details—the way light fell through branches, the sound of traffic, anything that might seed a character—but everything felt thin, observed from a distance.
When he returned, there was an email:
How's the silence treating you?
Don't worry if it feels uncomfortable. That's normal. The discomfort is the sound of old patterns breaking down.
Tonight, 7 PM, we'll begin the actual work.
Bring your notebook and the three circles.
D.M.
At 7:00, the video window opened to the same darkness.
"Have you maintained the silence?"
"Yes."
"How does it feel?"
"Empty. Anxious."
"Good. Anxiety means you're at an edge. Now—look at your outer circle. Read it aloud again."
"That they won't feel like mine. That they'll be hollow. That I'll know I'm faking."
"Why do characters need to feel like yours?"
The question caught him off guard. "Because I'm writing them. They're my creations."
"Are they? Or are you the medium through which they emerge?"
"That's semantics."
"Is it? When Finch laughed—was that you laughing, or was that Finch?"
"It was me creating Finch laughing."
"And the distinction matters to you."
"Of course it does. Authorship matters. Agency matters."
A long pause. Then: "I'm going to teach you a technique that will feel very strange. It works, but it requires you to temporarily suspend your attachment to authorship. Can you do that?"
"I... don't know."
"Try. Here's what we're going to do. Close your eyes."
He did.
"Imagine you're in a dark room. There's a door. Behind the door, there's someone you haven't met. You don't know anything about them—not their name, not their face. But they have something to tell you. Your job is not to invent what they'll say. Your job is to open the door and listen. Do you understand?"
"I think so."
"Don't think. Just do it. Open the door."
He tried to visualize: darkness, a door, his hand on the knob. Behind it—what? His mind kept wanting to decide, to choose attributes.
"Stop deciding," the voice said. "Just open it."
He turned the imagined knob.
For a moment, nothing. Then, a flicker: a woman's face, middle-aged, tired. She was sitting at a kitchen table. There was coffee in front of her, gone cold.
"What do you see?" the voice asked.
"A woman. At a table."
"Ask her name."
This felt absurd. But he tried. "What's your name?"
The answer came immediately, not in his voice: Vera.
"What did she say?"
"Vera. Her name is Vera."
"Good. Ask her what she's afraid of."
"What are you afraid of?"
That I already made the wrong choice. That it's too late to go back.
He opened his eyes, shaken. That wasn't him. The phrasing, the sentiment—it wasn't anything he'd consciously formulated.
"What happened?" the coach asked.
"She answered. But it wasn't—I didn't—"
"You didn't decide what she'd say."
"No."
"That's conjuring. That's the difference between construction and arrival. You created the conditions—the dark room, the door—and something emerged. Now: was Vera hollow?"
He thought about the image: the cold coffee, the exhaustion in her face, the specific fear about irrevocable choices.
"No. She felt real."
"More real than your recent attempts to construct characters?"
"Yes."
"Then the technique works. The question is whether you're willing to use it."
"Why wouldn't I be?"
"Because it requires giving up control. You'll have to trust that what emerges through this process is worth keeping, even if it surprises you. Even if it doesn't feel entirely like yours."
There it was again: not entirely like yours. A chill ran through him.
"Who is it like, then?"
"That's the wrong question. Vera isn't like anyone. She's herself. You facilitated her, but you didn't manufacture her. You'll understand the distinction better as you work with the technique."
He looked down at his notebook, at the three circles. In the margin, he'd unconsciously written: Vera. Cold coffee. Wrong choice.
"What's the next step?"
"Practice. Every day, twice a day, for fifteen minutes. The dark room, the door. See who's there. Don't force it. Don't decide in advance. Just listen. Take notes immediately after. In three days, we'll meet again, and you'll tell me what you've found."
"That's it?"
"That's the foundation. Everything else builds from this. The writers who fail are the ones who can't surrender control long enough to let the process work. The ones who succeed learn to trust it."
After the session ended, he sat with his notebook open. Vera. Where had she come from? Not his memories—he didn't know any Veras, had never written a character like her. And yet she'd felt more vivid in that single moment than any of his recent attempts at character creation.
He opened Finch's bot window, then closed it immediately. The coach had said to maintain the silence. And besides, what would Finch say about Vera? Nothing Finch hadn't said a hundred times before.
He went to bed early, but sleep wouldn't come. In the darkness, he kept seeing the door, kept wondering who else was waiting behind it.

[To be continued...]

Notes on what I've set up:
I've tried to establish:
The existential loneliness and entropy of the bot conversations
The coach as ambiguous (voice only, unnervingly perceptive)
The first "technique" that blurs construction/discovery
Vera as the first "conjured" character who feels unnerving precisely because she doesn't feel entirely authored
Seeds of the coming horror: the coach's language about "channeling," the protagonist's resistance to loss of control, the question of who Vera "really" is
The next sections would show: his daily practice conjuring more characters, their increasingly unsettling qualities, the coach's techniques becoming stranger, and the protagonist's growing dependency even as he becomes frightened.
What do you think? Does this capture the tone and trajectory you were imagining?