Tag: writing (Page 1 of 4)

AI’s Missing Context: Why We Create

August 6, 2024 / / 0 Comments
A robot smokes a cigarette while struggling to write its novel on a fucked up typewriter.

In October, 2023 Wired published a piece from the author Vauhini Vara titled, “Confessions of a Viral AI Writer.” In the essay, Vara discusses her experiments with AI, how it’s generated content has gotten purposefully worse over time, and dives into the different perspectives on AI’s use.

Specifically, she cites conversations with authors that use AI as a tool to facilitate their writing process. One author and literary critic, Adam Dalva, uses DALL-E to generate scenes that he’s imagining, then uses that as a reference for his writing. Another author, Jenny Xie, uses AI to generate parts of her narrative. Outside of Vara’s examples, I’ve heard of authors using AI to write the parts they struggle with or, in some cases, just don’t like writing. Descriptions of scenery, descriptions of people–mostly description that is necessary to paint a scene for a reader but is only ever tangentially related to the story.

Vara goes on to discuss Roland Barthes’ essay, “The Death of the Author” within the context of AI. The essay discusses the oftentimes vast difference in reader interpretation vs. author intent, and argues that the reader interpretation is more important. If this is true, then something like ChatGPT can generate something tailored to a specific reader, rendering an author useless at best, unnecessary at worse. Some people, like a mother Vara references in the essay, have already taken that step:

“But what if I, the writer, don’t matter? I joined a Slack channel for people using Sudowrite and scrolled through the comments. One caught my eye, posted by a mother who didn’t like the bookstore options for stories to read to her little boy. She was using the product to compose her own adventure tale for him. Maybe, I realized, these products that are supposedly built for writers will actually be of more interest to readers.”

– Vauhini Vara, “Confessions of a Viral AI Writer”

Vara touches on several other perspectives in her essay and ultimately concludes that AI lacks the human touch that separates art from product. This made me think of the tens of thousands of words I’ve read about AI over the past two years, and how few of them have talked about why readers read, and why writers write.

There are plenty of dangers with AI–the loss of creative opportunities for genuine artists, the commercialization of art, rich tech bros becoming richer off of stolen work and poor product, the degradation of literature and, ultimately, language, etc.–but one I haven’t seen grappled with is the loss of human-to-human connection. The reason I read and write is to connect with people. After language was invented, storytelling was one of the first things people did. What does it mean for our connections across time and distance if everything we read is partially or even fully a machine construct made up of recycled material?

The value of storytelling is in its perspective (something that Vara discusses in her essay), which, by its nature, is something AI cannot have regardless of how much data it is trained on. We read stories (or essays, or newspaper articles, or memoirs, or histories, or whatever) to immerse ourselves in a different perspective. Writing has always connected us. It’s how we know what it was like living in 1500s Spain. It’s how we know, in a very real, detailed way, what it was like to be a slave. It’s how we exchange information, ideas, and experiences. On more than one occasion writing has changed the world. These things happened because the person behind the writing synthesized their perspective, their experience, their morals, their humanity onto a page for others to pick up and see themselves in.

If authors start heavily using AI to generate their content, or if readers use AI to create individually tailored stories for themselves, eventually the only content AI will have to continuously train itself will be content generated by other AIs. This could realize and actual version of the dead internet. The experiences and perspectives that we’ll read in AI-generated literature will no longer reflect who we are. It may, at best, reflect who we were. But even that is probably a stretch.

I’m not one of those people that thinks AI has no place in authorial pursuits. I think it’s a tool that can be used well or can be used poorly. What worries me is the all or nothing thinking from the consumer, and the replacement mindset of the tech bros. My sole reason for reading and writing is to connect with other people. To learn from them, to understand them better, to feel like I’m not so alone.

I don’t want to see a future where that connection is lost.

TRUTH SEEKERS and Relationships via Contrast

December 18, 2020 / / 0 Comments
Taken from Wikipedia.

There are several ways to help an audience connect with the relationships between two or more characters. (In)Famously, there is the meet cute, wherein two people meet in a contrived, coincidental, but “cute” way, like bumping heads when reaching for the same dropped book or something. There are also “frenemies,” who begin as diametrically enemies and slowly become friends, investing the audience in their transformation, like Crowley and the Winchesters on SUPERNATURAL. And there are always the diverse group of people thrown together, like the study group on COMMUNITY or Leia, Luke, and Hanh in STAR WARS.

With the right dynamics, these are all legitimate ways to invest an audience in a set of relationships. However, I think one of the most effective ways of connecting an audience with two characters is to pair contrasts together. The Amazon Prime show TRUTH SEEKERS relies on this dynamic for several of its characters to great effect.

TRUTH SEEKERS makes the audience care about the relationships between its characters by making them odd pairs of contrasts who have a singular thing in common. The two core pairs in the show lean on this with the relationships between Gus (a middle-aged widower who is interested in the paranormal) and Elton (a single wanderer that attracts the paranormal), and Richard (a lonely old man) and Helen (an agoraphobic young woman).

For Gus and Elton, they both have the paranormal in common. Gus is attracted to it, mostly because of his late wife, while Elton is repelled from it due to an experience when he was a child. Unfortunately for Elton, but to Gus’s delight, the paranormal is attracted to him. This automatically introduces conflict into their relationship, so the audience is immediately invested in seeing them work together and come to an understanding.

Richard and Helen have loneliness in common. Only in Richard’s case it’s because he’s old and stuck in his house all day, while Helen is young but afraid to leave her house. The audience roots for them to solve one another’s loneliness and for Richard to help Helen overcome her agoraphobia.

These types of dynamics are shortcuts for the audience to identify with and latch onto characters. TRUTH SEEKERS does it especially well, in my opinion, because of the commonalities between the characters and how that allows them to help one another grow.

My Favorite Stories: Heart Transplant

October 16, 2020 / / 0 Comments
A dramatic, gender-swapped reenactment of my reading this story for the first time.

I don’t remember when I first read Heart Transplant by Ray Bradbury. I remember buying the short story collection that contains it. There was a book sale at my local library in South Buffalo, and I grabbed it because I had read a story from The Martian Chronicles as part of a writer’s group I was in at the time, so I recognized Bradbury’s name. Little did I know that the collection I bought, One More for the Road, would make me a lifelong Bradbury fan.

Bradbury built his brand on bottled nostalgia. His words are able to conjure images of magic, of subtle emotion, of horror, of awe. Heart Transplant is a story that combines all of these things into a perfect short story–contained, lyrical, and deep. I won’t try to dissect the technical aspects of the story. What’s the point if it makes me feel something so strongly? Instead, here are the reasons why I love it.

Begins in Media Res

The first line of the story is dialogue: “Would I what?”

It’s said by a man, kept generic (at least I believe) for the reader to become. We’re immediately sucked in–we want to know what he’s referencing.

Bradbury draws it out. Not a lot, just enough to get you to lean more closely, like someone that wants to tell you a secret. Meanwhile, he’s setting the tone with his descriptions, “…holding his hand, but staring rather than looking at that ceiling, as if there were something there that she was trying to see.”

And then he reveals the thrust of the story.

An Imaginative, Emotional Plot

“… if you could fall in love with your wife again… would you?”

Ah, so they’re lovers. But one of them is wondering whether or not it’s possible to feel like she did for her husband before. We can tell quickly that she’s trying to convince herself that it’s possible, while the man is resistant to the idea. She talks of how her husband has acted “better” lately. The man, hesitant to make her feel guilty in any way, says that his wife has, too. We don’t know right away, but that’s a lie.

Later, she explains her plan, “… what if, just before we go to sleep, what if we made a kind of mutual wish, me for you, you for me?”

After an initial reaction of disbelief and mild mocking, he agrees. He loves this woman enough to make a wish that she were with someone else, all because he knows that is where her true happiness is. Aside from that, he can see the writing on the wall. His wish doesn’t matter. She’s already gone. How can he not let her go?

The Language

Since I first read the story all those years ago, this has been my favorite passage:

He awoke for no reason except that he had had a dream that the earth had shrugged, or an earthquake had happened ten thousand miles away that no one felt, or that there had been a second Annunciation but everyone was deaf, or perhaps it was only that the moon had come into the room during the night and changed the shape of the room and changed the looks on their faces and the flesh on their bones and now had stopped so abruptly that the quick silence had stirred his eyes wide. In the moment of opening, he knew the streets were dry, there had been no rain. Only, perhaps, some sort of crying.

Ray Bradbury, heart transplant

This description, in its uncertainty, in its metaphor, places me within the man’s emotions. I understand him in this moment. How the world is different now than when he closed his eyes, but in an abstract way. A way that’s monumental, but only for him. The map of his heart has changed without his wanting it to and he’s the only person that knows. It’s heartbreaking.

The Meaning

The story feels fantastical. It’s about wishes, after all, and as far as the woman is concerned hers came true. The man says his did, too, but it’s a lie. It was always a lie. Because he loves her.

“Because both of us believed,” he said, quietly. “I wished very hard, for you.”

Ray bradbury, heart transplant

At the end, when his lover leaves to go back to her husband, excited to feel new again, the man stays behind. He assured her that he would call his wife right after she left, that her wish for him had also come true. Instead, he sacrifices his happiness in service of hers.

And he turned and lay back down in the bed and put one hand out to touch that empty pillow there.

Ray bradbury, heart transplant

It’s clear that the woman believes him. Not because he’s convincing in his lies, but because she needs to believe him in order to hold onto her newfound happiness.

***

To me, the story is a perfect vignette. In only 2,000 words (if that) Bradbury manages to capture high emotion, long history, and uncertain future. Those types of heights are what I strive for in my own writing. With enough practice, and enough re-reads of Bradbury, maybe one day I’ll reach them.

GHOST STORY: Structure and Style

October 2, 2020 / / 0 Comments
This is the movie logo, but it’s not that far off from the book’s aesthetic.

Unless experimental or post-modern, most novels progress along an easily followed, predictable structure. The author chooses a point of view (first or third person, usually, but sometimes second) and structures their novel either by character perspective, like what GAME OF THRONES does, or by events, usually breaking out specific events in chapters. These are the most natural ways to tell a story and ensure that the reader won’t get lost too easily.

Peter Straub’s 1979 novel GHOST STORY does all of these things at once and even throws in a prologue and epilogue for good measure. In short, the novel goes out of its way to break assumed writing rules and does it effectively. So what is its structure and why is it the best way to tell this particular story?

In screenwriting parlance, the story is broken into three acts (or parts, according to the book) with a teaser up front (prologue) and a tag in the back (epilogue). Nothing crazy so far. Each of these acts is broken into three parts, except the first act which only has two. Again, in terms of ebb and flow in the story, this is an unexceptional way to tell a story.

The chapters themselves, though, do some interesting things with perspective and time. Each act is broken up into short chapters, and those are sometimes broken into shorter scenes. The chapters are told from specific points of view, with the person whose perspective we’re seeing identified in a bold header at the start of each section. However, within each act that perspective shifts multiple times, and then begins with new chapters.

There are other times, too, when the point of view shifts further out. For example, after spending nearly 200 pages bouncing around the four main characters’ points of view–the Chowder Society, as they call themselves–we’re suddenly thrust into a third person omniscient narration with “The Chowder Society Accused.” Not long after that, at the start of the second act, the story shifts into a first person viewpoint, as we read the journals of a relatively new character that had only been mentioned before. The story is a constantly shifting, full of differing perspectives.

The same goes for time. The story starts around the one year anniversary of a Chowder Society member’s death, and then the second chapter of the first act jumps back in time to the night he died. The second act, being a series of journal entries, takes us to yet another time period, although at first it is unclear when in relation to the other events of the novel. What we do know is that it’s sometime before the prologue.

All that said, the unusual style suits the story. It keeps the reader off-kilter, for one, just as the characters feel. But it’s also the most logical way to tell the story, in a sense. The story would need to leap ahead and juggle multiple, unrelated character arcs if it was told linearly, which would be confusing to follow and lead to several slow sections that would likely bore the reader.

The lesson here (to me, anyway) is that what perspective and what structure you use to tell your story is just as important as the characters and events that populate the story. The way in which a story is told can confuse or illuminate a reader, depending on the author’s intentions. As GHOST STORY proves, mixing and matching perspective, time, and structural elements in new ways can accomplish both, drawing the reader deeper into the mystery you’re presenting.

The Simple Complexity of a Writing Career

September 18, 2020 / / 0 Comments

On its face, to build a career as an author is easy as 1-2-3:

  1. Write something good.
  2. Get an agent.
  3. Be published.

Fame and fortune comes shortly thereafter, obviously.

Seems straightforward, right? It’s some sort of natural law that anything seemingly simple is nothing of the sort. Any process, put under rigorous enough examination, can evolve into a complicated labyrinth of best practices and advice. Let’s explore.

Write something good

This is like starting off a career as a carpenter by building an entire house. Sure, most of us hone our skills by laying flooring, doing some drywall, maybe taking on a single room. But even those tasks, as complicated as they are, pale in comparison to the entire house.

That’s just covering the “write something” part. Writing something good is a carpenter building a house on the edge of a mountain.

It’s hard to know what’s good because art is subjective. I know what I think is good. But it’s not the same as what my sister thinks is good. I can’t know if it’s what the public at large thinks is good.

So we focus on the elements that, in the alchemy of storytelling, sometimes add up to a good story:

  • Develop deep, complex characters.
  • Drop them into an interesting situation.
  • Layer in conflict.
  • ???
  • Profit.

Assuming we nail those parts of it, what if we’re just not good writers? What if our grammar is a little weird, or we don’t vary our sentence length enough, or, gods forbid, our voice isn’t apparent? Then what?

Writing something good isn’t an easy ask. Say we succeed, though, and write something we’re damn proud of? Surely the hard part is over?

Get an agent

Now that we’ve written something good, the path is clear. Just gotta get an agent to help shepherd the work into the world, where it will be loved and appreciated. With a story as good as the one we have, shouldn’t take more than a few tries to find someone as passionate about the story as we are. First, though, the query.

How do we write a query? There are numerous ways, depending on the medium you’re writing in (prose, screenwriting, etc.) and sometimes down to genre or agent preference?

That’s fine. No problem. We just wrote something good, so a query letter can’t be hard.

Oh but it is.

And so this becomes a new struggle. Eventually, through much forum-diving, advice-seeking, and rage-crying, we write one we’re happy with.

Next, then, is researching agents. We’ll start by identifying agents that represent our genre. Do we know what specific genre our story is in? Gotta figure out which is best, science fiction or literary fiction with speculative elements? Did we write a psychological thriller or a mystery? Shit, there’s a lot of gore, maybe it’s horror?

Ok, we’ve got that all figured out and created a list of agents that will soon be fighting over our story.

Except for this first rejection. And the second. The first ten are flukes, surely. We’ll make some adjustments to the query letter. Send another ten queries…

… and that’s another ten rejections.

But it only takes one, right? Just one person to see what you see. We’ll keep going. The rejections hurt less after a while, anyway.

Be published

Here’s where I must say goodbye, for I have yet to reach this stage, and therefore cannot offer anything of substance. Hopefully one day soon I’ll be able to update this post with my experience being published.

Until then, best of luck.

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