Charley Weber Portfolio

Some passages it worked better on were, somewhat oddly, more artistic or atmospheric writing. Although more often, the results felt a bit muddy, like it was maybe trying to fill in writing with scaffolding or blanks.

For example: Night Work

Working late in those years — editing suites running long, productions overrunning — I’d often walk home in the pre-dawn rather than pick up a cab. New York at that hour is a different city. The uptown party crowd has dispersed. The daytime city hasn’t yet assembled itself. What remains are the people who keep the place running in the hours no one is supposed to see: the cleaners, the delivery workers, the kitchen staff from restaurants that closed hours ago, and on certain corners, women finishing long shifts of a different kind.

There was a particular quality to those encounters — a nod, sometimes a brief word, the recognition between people who had each, in their different ways, worked through the night and survived another one. We were not from the same world by any conventional measure. But at five in the morning on the Upper West Side, with the city still quiet and the light just beginning to change, those distinctions dissolved into something simpler. We were all paying our bills and finding our way. New York had that quality, which London didn’t — or at least not in my experience of it. The city forced a kind of democracy at street level that you couldn’t opt out of. Whatever your demographic, you were walking the same pavement, stepping over the same realities, navigating the same hustlers. You couldn’t deny any of it. I found I didn’t want to.

It is also phenomenal at adapting material from different formats, saving huge amounts of time – like my final chapter on Gezi, which was originally a radio script.

My initial prompt stated that the editing needed to match the existing style of the book. But that lost the immediacy and directness of the quotes. After some back and forth we settled for somewhere between the two styles: using direct reporting, which then merged into journalistic prose. Which worked well.

Reformatting of my original Gezi script by Claude, example:

The bar owner — I’ll call him GeziJuan, as he preferred not to be named for reasons entirely reasonable given what was still unfolding when we spoke — had been closing up his place on the night of the 27th of May when a message came through on social media. Workmen and bulldozers were moving into Gezi Park to tear down the trees.

He went.

‘There were nineteen people when I arrived. We managed to stop the digging machine. The workmen said they’d come back in the morning and left.’

He went home and slept a few hours. He came back in the morning to find fifty people.

‘I was planning to chain myself to a tree. My biggest fear was that I was going to lose control of my body. I had prepared myself for this. I decided I didn’t care.’

He paused. Then: ‘Millions rose up.’

It had the quality of a statement he was still slightly astonished by, even in retrospect. Nineteen people on the night of the 27th of May. Millions within days. The Bosphorus bridge full of people walking across it in the dark toward Taksim. Sometimes history moves that fast.

The Girl in the Red Dress

The image that changed everything was a photograph. A Reuters photograph, reproduced across every platform that the mainstream media blackout could not reach — and the blackout was total and immediate, a hundred television channels showing nothing, the news presenting a world in which Gezi was not happening.

A woman in a red dress, standing quietly in the park. A police officer in full riot gear, spraying her at close range with pepper spray. She was not doing anything. She was simply standing there. The contrast between her stillness and the force directed at her produced an image so stark it required no caption and no context.

An engineer I spoke to — precise, analytical, approaching everything including a street battle with what he called an engineer’s mind — told me the photograph was all he needed.

‘All started with protecting the park,’ he said, ‘but what tempted us was that photograph. The girl in the red dress. The next day we were all in the park.’

On the second day the tents were attacked and burned in the early morning. People were gassed. And all around the park, he said, an odd thing was happening — people reading poetry, in a celebratory mood, while simultaneously keeping watch, calling out to each other across the park: please stay awake. They might come again.

‘That was all I needed. Friday the 31st of May. I called friends I thought felt the same way. That was it for me.’

Original Format Radio Script – Extract:

OzMoll II
01.00 Lower class Benim Baspikan, my president… It’s one o’clock in morning, he’s now the 8th richest leader in the world, what has your prime minister done for you. They might have been given a washing machine or something

I then went for two weeks to live in a Kurdish village, in what was formerly heavy P.K.K. territory and then overland to Istanbul. And all but one or two people were Erdogan AK party or BDP, Kurdish party supporters, Islamic and religious, as opposed to secular Turks that tended to populate the big Cities, like Istanbul.

Turkey is a strange place, population is roughly 75 Million, a third of whom live in Istanbul.

One of the first people I talk to is a director of operations of an executive services company. He’s young and describes the mood of the nation just a few months before.
Entrep 1
1.00 A couple years ago I thought it was going to be much harder to live in this country, the AK party was changing all the laws. How to live, drinking laws, how many babies you can have
2.00 Everybody was like sheep. Nobody would do anything, like sheep. I wasn’t surprised, many things happened, like a bomb in Reyhan, Syrians came with a car and left a bomb. A warning don’t get involved in Syria
3.00Talking to Taxi Drivers, everyone had their reasons, religious, insulting Ataturk, not only Gezi Park

It is also good at analysis and making intelligent suggestions for structure, things you may not have thought of. If like me, and most writers, you need a second pair of eyes to bat things back and forth with, in order to understand your own material better – in that regard, it may really be all it is, like a therapist encouraging you to question and explore further, but reach your own conclusions.

Ultimately, as with any preferred human editor, at a certain point you will need to end the back and forth process, print out both A and B versions and, as you do with a human editor, finalise your manuscript, which hopefully still bears the style and character of your unique voice. If it doesn’t then you may need to ask why exactly you are writing. If it still feels 95% like you, your own work, voice and observations, then to my mind you are using this controversial technology in the way it’s meant to be used: to assist a writer, to offer suggestions and options to a creative rather than to replace a writer with work that’s frankly already been done.

Good luck!