How AI Claude Would Imitate Didion
A friend asked her AI - Claude - how it would approach imitating Didion/Yalom. ## my friend [bq] asked AI to write his story about meeting a person in a coffee shop and discussing a dog -- as if it were written by joan didion, and again as irv yalom. What principles would guide your editing of a story given that prompt. Claude Opus 4.7: Great question — to edit such a piece well, I'd hold these principles in mind: **1. Honor the voice, not just the vocabulary.** Imitating Didion isn't about scattering em-dashes and California place names; it's about *sensibility*. Cool detachment, the sentence that turns on itself, the small concrete detail standing in for dread. Yalom isn't just therapy-speak; it's warmth, existential stakes (death, freedom, isolation, meaning), and the therapist's own vulnerability surfacing in the encounter. Edit toward the underlying worldview, not the surface tics. **2. Diagnose the prose rhythm.** Didion: short declaratives punctuated b...