Data Graham posted:

Thanks, this is good -- and it feeds into the continuum of exercises I'm apparently doing in order to really understand and internalize the idea of appreciating a work on its own merits, separated from the author's intent, and the nature of adaptation and fanwork, and really about the whole concept of using language to imperfectly express a platonic "ideal" of concepts and thoughts, like whether there is such a thing as "correct English" or if it's important for people to understand the meanings of the colloquial expressions they're using, or if it's okay if they just repeat meaningless syllables as long as people get what they intend. It's part of why I keep listening to those Olsen podcasts, since they lean very hard toward that idea of evaluating an adaptation in and of itself and not in comparison to its source material, which of course is what you find is what Tolkien was so bothered about in On Fairy-Stories in the first place, where he talks a whole bunch about the various struggles you have trying to envision a textual story versus what you get when a story is rendered by dramatic actors, like where in text you're free to imagine "a piece of bread" in any of a million different ways, as many as there are readers, but as soon as you try to stage it as a play or a movie you have to make a choice about what kind of bread, what shape, on what sort of dish, and for 999,999 viewers those choices will be "wrong".

It's a difficult and lifelong struggle, coming as many nerds I'm sure do from a place where having things "correct" was the foundation of my self-image during school, and learning to accept "wrong" things as just another interpretation, equally valid, is an uphill battle. As Olsen himself says, he had to undergo that same painful transition, from scandalized "true fan" to actual academic analyst, and I feel like I'm having to train myself out of the temptation to understand the context of a thing in order to understand the thing itself, which seems super counterintuitive and counterproductive, but that's just part of the process. It's like I'm doing that galaxy-brain-meme "causes of the Civil War" thing:

"Slavery" => "Just do a book report on the story itself, because we don't know anything else about its circumstances"
"States' rights, economic issues, matters of representation in new territories etc" => "Study the story's possible allegories, speculate on the author's state of mind and influences, study the effects of culture and politics on the work and of the work on culture and politics, etc"
"SLAVERY" => "Just study the story itself, because the circumstances are irrelevant and really only detract from our understanding of how the mechanics of the story itself work"

Which isn't to say that all those ancillary studies are all useless, just that they are of a different discipline and trying to achieve different things. It may or may not be academically useful to study what a story might be allegorizing, or to try to examine the author directly rather than the work, biographically, through their revealed thoughts as expressed in their fiction. But in studying the fiction itself, you have to put up that death-of-the-author guardrail which seems so very hot to the touch, and exercises like this one just keep reminding me that I'm not very good at it.

All this from "hey should we use italics?" lol

quote:

Ideas (or Meanings) are Objects -> Words (Linguistic Expressions) are Containers -> Communication is Sending

Junpei posted:

Unrelated to all of this but the idea of having to become a Book Guy on like, Tiktok or Twitter/X or Tumblr in order to get enough clout or people interested to sell my book absolutely scares me. I don't hate all social media or anything but I kind of want to be able to keep my shitposting separate from my job.

Stuporstar posted:

This is a great discussion. Part of the problem lies with a basic conceptual metaphor we have that’s so crucial to how we understand communication—which happens to actually be a false conceptualization. The linguist George Lakeoff in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphors_We_Live_By characterized it this way:

So when we write, we tend to think of it as packaging our thoughts in a box with the words written on the outside, which is then transmitted whole, and the person who reads them opens the box and pull our thoughts out intact. But in reality there is nothing in the box—there is no box, just the words on the “package” and the person receiving them reads the outside and has to puzzle out the meaning “packed inside the word” because the “package” can’t actually be opened and our nebulous thought-stuff scooped out. The reader “unpacks” the word using their own experience and comes up with a completely individual interpretation of what the words mean.

This metaphor is so ingrained in our thinking (at least Western thinking), that we’re frequently stumped when people don’t get what we mean. People tend to get angry and think, “How could I be clearer?” and assume someone who misinterprets our words must be thick or something. But the truth is even basic words have completely different schema in other people’s minds, no matter how closely they’re culturally related. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-differ-widely-in-their-understanding-of-even-a-simple-concept-such-as-the-word-penguin1

A longer bit in George Lakoff’s book demonstrates how differently it’s possible to conceive things (sorry I don’t have a version I can copy/paste the text from so I have to use images):

ultrachrist posted:

That penguin article is driving me crazy. People don't disagree on what a penguin is, they differ on useless subjective questions like "What’s most similar to a penguin, a finch or a dolphin?" Or on things most people just don't know like "Is a penguin heavy?" Change that to a kitten and the answers will cluster far closer.

The Berkeley anecdote is neat but presumably the Iranian student's first language wasn't english and if it was then no one around them used that phrase. Given the "disillusioned" descriptor, they no longer use the original integration. They were wrong.

Not to say that people don't interpret things differently, as anyone who has listened to a writing workshop can attest, but you're not casting words into a sea of ambiguity here. For example, "how could I be clearer?" is a weird question, but let's assume there's an issue with clarity. 8 people read it and 6 don't get it. The writer should probably change it since their writing is confused. It's not just a numbers game. If you flip the response around, it's still worth asking the 2 people what their interpretation is. If you italicize a word in dialogue, most people are going to understand how to read it. Some won't. Plenty will read the sentence differently than the precise way you imagined. But it's going to be rare that it's turned into something utterly different like the solution metaphor.

The Cut of Your Jib posted:

my thoughts on playwright chat:

General Battuta posted:

The only thing you need to sell a book is an agent who reads your first page and loves it.

Publishers may at one point have believed that Influencers Do Numbers but I’m honestly not sure that’s panned out.

General Battuta posted:

The only thing you need to sell a book is an agent who reads your first page and loves it.

Publishers may at one point have believed that Influencers Do Numbers but I’m honestly not sure that’s panned out.

Junpei posted:

I definitely want to write somewhere in the children/YA space, but that post was mostly a faraway worry more than anything else, still I appreciate Hard Facts.

sebmojo posted:

Data Graham posted:

where does a scriptwriter get off writing a thing that is flagrantly unfeasible to stage or film, maybe just as a tossed-off aside? Thinking "exit, pursued by a bear" type stuff. Or more recently, I just watched Big Trouble in Little China, and there's this early CGI eyeball monster that shows up and it just sort of floats in a hallway and barely contributes to the plot at all. But from reading trivia about the production, creating that thing was one of the hugest challenges of the movie, consuming vast amounts of money and human effort, and they had to basically invent whole new technologies just to make it happen for a tiny throwaway gag that might well have been the victim of a run-length edit. My question is — do writers have a sense for what kinds of things are costly or unusually challenging to produce? I mean obviously they must, but how often does it happen that someone will just unthinkingly toss in a thing like that and the director just looks at it and goes *flipping pages* "Welp, nothing for it, we have to either blow our whole budget on this one effect or else there'll be no movie"?

Junpei posted:

Dialogue! Doesn't count! I was speaking it! Characters can say that they want to do things all the time!

sebmojo posted:

Honestly it was more the "I worry about having to talk to fans about my wildly successful book series (ps I haven't written anythinf ever)" but you know you started a a really interesting discussion so u may pass, goon

Junpei posted:

So, uh, fun personal fact: Been taking an online college creative writing course. Writing little bits every day for assignments, reading fragments about techniques, all that jazz. I'm Improving! YAYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

Data Graham posted:

That's awesome (and hilarious), but it still really sounds like the least efficient possible way of conveying the writer's intention to the actors. There's got to be a less lossy way to encode the way the theoretical actors in the writer's head will deliver a line. Having to grind it down into all-caps screenplay heiroglyphics and making the actors and director have to apply their own idiosyncratic talents to decoding it seems like the worst kind of game of telephone.

I guess that's why the writer is on-set a lot of the time, huh?

Stuporstar posted:

So when we write, we tend to think of it as packaging our thoughts in a box with the words written on the outside, which is then transmitted whole, and the person who reads them opens the box and pull our thoughts out intact. But in reality there is nothing in the box—there is no box, just the words on the “package” and the person receiving them reads the outside and has to puzzle out the meaning “packed inside the word” because the “package” can’t actually be opened and our nebulous thought-stuff scooped out. The reader “unpacks” the word using their own experience and comes up with a completely individual interpretation of what the words mean.

Data Graham posted:

It raises another semi-related question/thing I've always wondered about though: where does a scriptwriter get off writing a thing that is flagrantly unfeasible to stage or film, maybe just as a tossed-off aside? Thinking "exit, pursued by a bear" type stuff.

change my name posted:

Please don't take this the wrong way but focus on actually writing the book before you wring your hands over the perils of fame

Junpei posted:

Unrelated to all of this but the idea of having to become a Book Guy on like, Tiktok or Twitter/X or Tumblr in order to get enough clout or people interested to sell my book absolutely scares me. I don't hate all social media or anything but I kind of want to be able to keep my shitposting separate from my job.

Like, if I got published, I'd be fine doing interviews or book signings or what have you but all things considered I wouldn't want to have to constantly be plugging my book all day every day forever.

The Cut of Your Jib posted:

(if the other theater nerds want to resurrect the theater chat thread then we can take more stage direction chat there)

Data Graham posted:

That's all interesting and good to know. Course now I'm imagining what the screenplay for Noises Off must have looked like and

Wungus posted:

directors and producers are not beholden to take a screenwriter or playwright's script and do no changes, poo poo gets changed and cut and added All The Time

Leng posted:

You mean this one? I think it died because not enough of us were, you know, actually posting scripts. But I'd join you there if it started back up again!

Data Graham posted:

My question is — do writers have a sense for what kinds of things are costly or unusually challenging to produce? I mean obviously they must, but how often does it happen that someone will just unthinkingly toss in a thing like that and the director just looks at it and goes *flipping pages* "Welp, nothing for it, we have to either blow our whole budget on this one effect or else there'll be no movie"? Or do directors just say "uhhh this is ridiculous, we're replacing the eyeball monster with a dog in a costume, it'll make just as good a movie"

I don't know why I find things like this so bewildering. It's like one of the great "understanding humans" mysteries that I have yet to figure out, and the Industry is so weird and hidebound and tradition-oriented that no matter how much I learn first-hand about little niche bits of it the more it just bifurcates into stranger and deeper unknowns.

The Cut of Your Jib posted:

Let me read through, I have a full length in the can (and even cribbed from some of my own TD entries for content). Maybe I'll guts up and post.

This is the one I've had bookmarked forever, so maybe there's a newer one that I just missed. Not exclusive to writing, general theatre arts and stage craft.
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3146319

Stuporstar posted:

This metaphor is so ingrained in our thinking (at least Western thinking), that we’re frequently stumped when people don’t get what we mean. People tend to get angry and think, “How could I be clearer?” and assume someone who misinterprets our words must be thick or something. But the truth is even basic words have completely different schema in other people’s minds, no matter how closely they’re culturally related. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-differ-widely-in-their-understanding-of-even-a-simple-concept-such-as-the-word-penguin1

Leng posted:

But I'd join you there if it started back up again!

The Cut of Your Jib posted:

Spit
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ioUDz4MKcl3n-N3UL4BjBeaCfToFgJO6/view?usp=sharing
(Runtime ~1 hour 50 minutes)
On the Fence
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AQ7BJfN0bAab3Bniba--pvWrtu_sD1Rg/view?usp=drive_link

SimonChris posted:

Fun fact: Penguins are named that because they resemble the now extinct Great Auk, or Pinguinus impennis, which was much more well-known at the time. In fact, penguins are not even in the same genus as the Great Auk. The real penguin is dead, and these modern pretenders are not even relatives.

This amusing fact formed the seed for the first story in my collection.

sebmojo posted:

it is in no way a panacea, but thunderdome is genuinely excellent for replacing 'hmm maybe i could write a thing' with 'oh poo poo i just wrote 250,000 words'.

Fat Jesus posted:

Well i clicked Best Sellers in Short Story Anthologies & Collections and lol. https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/digital-text/7588876011/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_digital-text
I recall getting similar results when googling what kind of 'western / country fiction' people read, thinking I'm going to write True Grit, and got pages of books of shirtless cowboys with six packs. I do not believe this is my genre though they seem very popular.

Leng posted:

Oh look, the AI botsploitation books continue to take up most of the best seller lists. It took a few days for the last category they took over to get cleared. It's like whack a mole from here on out.

Ihmemies posted:

So, I guess it's bad to let an AI write a book for you. I guess it's OK to ask book-related questions from AI though. I want to vent my climate change doom somewhere, and writing a post-apocalyptic sci-fi book would fit the bill. I'm not trying to be original or write something new, I just want to vent, and forums have a limited capacity. I've thought about it for a few years, planned it, made notes etc. I'm writing finally in Finnish since my capacity to express myself in English is not good enough for bookwriting.

Problem is, that I'm not the best ideas guy. Like if my guy wakes up from cryo in a vault, is it Ok to ask ideas from AI like what the guy could feel and think, how would a person act in such a situation (assuming he went in ice voluntarily)?

Or what could he do in the vault, what could push the guy out of the vault, how to get the story moving etc. It's like new Mission Impossible movies. I have all kinds of scenes in mind, but I'm not the best at figuring out really how to tie them together. Seems that's not easy for movie script writers either, so I'm not alone

Stephen Wolfram posted:

So let’s say we’ve got the text “The best thing about AI is its ability to”. Imagine scanning billions of pages of human-written text (say on the web and in digitized books) and finding all instances of this text—then seeing what word comes next what fraction of the time. ChatGPT effectively does something like this, except that (as I’ll explain) it doesn’t look at literal text; it looks for things that in a certain sense “match in meaning”. But the end result is that it produces a ranked list of words that might follow, together with “probabilities”

And the remarkable thing is that when ChatGPT does something like write an essay what it’s essentially doing is just asking over and over again “given the text so far, what should the next word be?”—and each time adding a word.

Wungus posted:

AI can't help your writing if you're trying to do anything cool or interesting, because what's cool and interesting is never the safest option that has been done a lot of times and averages out to being the standard thing to do. If that poo poo'll help you, literally just go read the 7 Basic Plots and do exactly as prescribed for the kind of story you're telling.

The thing about telling stories is that you've got to come up with the things that happen in the stories. It's hard sometimes. That's the fuckin' thing of it. Sometimes writing's hard, and you can either give up, or you can learn how to get more gooder at doing the things you find hard, or you can not put yourself in situations where you have to write the hard things. If you want random ideas, go and get some StoryCubes. Click a plot randomizer. Watch a movie and imagine what your characters would do in the cool scenes--then write that. You won't write a 1:1 copy. I promise.

AI's going to make your writing worse if you rely on it. Period. It's not a crutch, it's trying to replace you, and the only thing it'll help you with is speeding up to the point where you decide you don't wanna write any more.

GPT posted:

Certainly, here are a few ideas of what the man might do upon waking up in the vault:

• Exploring the Vault: He could wander around the vault, exploring different rooms and finding various objects that hint at the world he left behind. This would allow you to provide some backstory and world-building.
  
• Understanding His Situation: He could find a computer or some sort of document that explains why he was put into cryostorage and gives him a vague idea of how much time has passed. This could be a puzzle for him to solve, giving him an immediate goal and creating intrigue for the reader.
  
• Preparation for the Outside World: There might be a room in the vault dedicated to preparing those who wake from cryostorage for the world outside. This could include clothing, tools, basic survival equipment, etc.
  
• Testing Physical Abilities: After coming out of the cryostorage, he might need to test his physical abilities, get used to his body again. This could lead to a training or physical rehabilitation scene.
  
• Interacting with an AI: Perhaps the vault is not entirely devoid of company. An AI system could be in place to assist or guide those who wake from cryostorage. Interacting with this AI could provide important exposition and introduce a non-human character.
  
• Finding Traces of Others: The man might find signs that others woke up before him and already left the vault. This could create a sense of mystery and give the man a clue that he is not alone.
  
• Facing Unexpected Dangers: There could be unexpected dangers in the vault - perhaps some systems have malfunctioned over time, or there are creatures who have made the vault their home. This would add tension and excitement to the initial chapters of your book.
  

These activities can serve to establish the character and the setting, providing information about the world that was and hinting at the world that now is. They also set up immediate objectives for the character to achieve, engaging the reader's interest.

GPT posted:

The man's decision to leave the vault could be driven by a number of factors:

• Life Support System Failure: Perhaps the vault was designed to sustain life for a certain period, and that period is coming to an end. Essential systems could be failing - the air filtration system, the water purification system, etc.
  
• Limited Resources: Food, water, and other supplies in the vault could be running out. In order to survive, the man would need to find more resources, forcing him to venture outside.
  
• A Signal or Message: The man could receive a signal or message from outside the vault. It could be a distress signal, a beacon, or even just a faint radio transmission that hints at other survivors.
  
• An Intrusion: Something from outside the vault could make its way inside - an animal, a drone, a flood of water. This would show the man that the vault is no longer safe or isolated from the world above.
  
• Natural Curiosity: The man could be driven by a desire to know what happened to the world and what it looks like now. This curiosity might outweigh any fears or concerns he has about leaving the safety of the vault.
  
• Automated Eviction: The vault could be programmed to evict its occupants after a certain period of time. Once the man wakes up, he could be given a certain amount of time to prepare before the vault's systems forcibly eject him.
  
• An Artificial Intelligence’s Suggestion: If there's an AI in the vault, it could be programmed to assess the world outside and determine when it's safe to leave. The AI could tell the man that now is the time to go.
  

All these potential reasons involve some level of danger or urgency, which would add tension to your story and provide a strong incentive for the man to leave the relative safety of the vault. The specific reason you choose could also give some hints about the state of the world outside and the challenges the man is likely to face once he leaves.

quote:

Waking from cryostorage, especially after a long duration, could evoke a wide range of thoughts and feelings in your character. Here are some possibilities:

• Physical Sensations: Initially, his thoughts might be dominated by his physical sensations. He could be experiencing intense cold, muscle weakness, or disorientation. There might be a sharp, gasping moment as his body is shocked back into consciousness.
  
• Confusion and Disorientation: Despite volunteering for cryostorage, he might wake up feeling confused or disoriented. He might struggle to remember where he is, why he's there, or how much time has passed.
  
• Fear and Anxiety: The uncertainty of waking up to an unknown world could be terrifying. He might feel a deep sense of dread or anxiety about what he'll find when he leaves the vault.
  
• Loneliness and Loss: He might feel an acute sense of loneliness, especially if he realizes that everyone he once knew is likely gone. He might also grieve for the world that used to be, feeling a sense of loss for the places, culture, and experiences that are no more.
  
• Relief: If he voluntarily underwent cryostorage to escape the immediate effects of climate change, he might feel a sense of relief upon waking up. This could be especially true if the vault gives him any indication that the world has started to recover.
  
• Curiosity and Determination: He might feel a strong sense of curiosity about the world outside the vault. His determination to explore and survive in this new world might gradually overtake his other feelings.
  

As for how he acts, he might initially move slowly and cautiously as he regains control over his body and explores his surroundings. He might search for information about what has happened in the world outside. He might also spend some time preparing himself physically and mentally before he finally decides to leave the vault. Throughout this process, his actions should reflect his thoughts and feelings, as well as hinting at his character traits and the kind of person he was before he entered cryostorage.

Junpei posted:

Oh someone made a tumblr post I liked using the Chinese Room experiment as a comparison.

https://www.tumblr.com/arp1033/713647484759670784/chinese-room-2?source=share