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There's a good old Intro to Poetry thing a goonpoet made, where they compare a couple selections of well-regarded poetry and a couple poems written by the posters on the TV Tropes forums. It gets into how important word choice is to poetry, and I agree that it's something novelists should at least know about. Also, short stories! They're the middle ground between poetry and novels, because you can get away with a lot more solely through strength of voice. Ray Bradbury's a pretty prolific short story writer and that's where I got my start reading for the sake of improving my writing, but any writer that strikes your fancy will probably work. An extra benefit of short stories, similar to poems, is that because they're short, there's a lot of variety and you'll be able to see the author trying different hings. And if you don't know where to go for short stories, find a short story anthology/compilation at the library, read 'em, and follow up on any of the authors that pique your interest. When I go to the library for book runs I like to check the new arrivals for short story collections. I don't get through all of them before I have to bring them back, but reading some is better than reading none.
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Jan 19, 2023 21:41
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 17:53 |
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While the pursuit of completely non-problematic writing is noble, it's the kind of perfectionist pursuit that stalls actual creativity with self-consciousness. If you want to use the term, go ahead, people will probably notice it far less than you do. Books aren't Twitter, no one's scouring your book to make a callout post. If you don't want to use the term, pick a more specific word that's closer to the non-mental-illness meaning of 'crazy' you're going for. You could call them unhinged, or obsessed, or detached from reality, or weird, or erratic. Ultimately what you do with your writing is up to you. You're the number-one person who needs to be happy with your book.
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Mar 21, 2023 22:42
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I think the way Branderson Sanderson writes books is fine, but he does write a specific kind of book. The comparison to shounen manga is a good one, I think, because it demonstrates both the range and the limits of the worldbuilding-heavy pulp fiction space he writes in. You can use his model to write Bleach or Full Metal Alchemist, but you couldn't use it to write Aggretsuko or Paprika. It's reminiscent of stuff like Save the Cat or the Hero's Journey, where they're frameworks for building a specific kind of story and not particularly useful beyond the specific genre they're working in. (Hollywood movies and coming-of-age travel stories, respectively.) More broadly, worldbuilding is fun, but it's a paranarrative pursuit. You can write a story without once stopping to build out the world beyond what's presented on the page. On the other hand, part of the social contract between author and reader is that you're presenting a coherent narrative which, while fictional, exists and is real within its own context. Worldbuilding helps with that, especially if the setting is fictional and thus needs the reader to suspend their disbelief for longer. It's a reassurance that there's a point to all that the author is telling you—but it isn't the point itself. It's probably fine to watch Brandon Sandon's videos if you want. It's probably better for your writing than an episode of Monster Factory. I'm still going to recommend Steering the Craft by Ursula K Le Guin as the best book on writing I've read because it focuses so much on putting Good Words on the page.
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Apr 4, 2023 20:20
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LitRPG is popular because it plays into the strange power fantasies that video games (and by extent other media that quantify their mechanics) cater to. It's not so much the experience of a game that they're after so much as it is the story of someone playing a world like a video game, and acting out the sorts of power fantasies you can have in video games. Like they want a story where you can grind EXP on rats all day and then become a demigod when you come back to the fighter's guild and turn in 30,000 rat heads all at once. Or what if you could use Persuade to talk people into anything, or what if the world had to react to you turning on godmode in the console. The crunchy system stuff is part of the appeal, but not quite as core as the expression of video game-style power. It's similar with cultivation stories. Part of the appeal is the setting and the skills they learn, but part of it is also just the progressive power fantasy. Structurally it's not unlike porn, since it's written to appeal to to the id in a similar way. I can't say how many internet porn stories I've heard on the F Plus that are just an excuse to describe the hot thing over and over for several thousand words. Sometimes people just want the thing they like to start happening at the start of a story and keep going until the end.
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Apr 6, 2023 07:32
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There's up/down plots, strange/charm plots, and top/bottom plots.
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Apr 12, 2023 03:29
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Writing stage directions often comes from trying to describe a scene exactly as you're imagining it. In film, those details add versimilitude, making it seem more naturalistic than a video of two people on stage reading lines to one another. In writing, it those stage directions become extra noise that crowds out the important* detail. The goal is that all of your words serve some purpose. *Important to the work. Sometimes 'setting a tone' or 'sounding repetitive' is important, even if the actual details of what you're saying are mundane.
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Jun 24, 2023 04:19
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I've done a lot of messing around with neural net generators. They're neat, but also have inherent limitations. Some of these will get better with improving technology, but some are core to the way they work and won't get better unless someone invents some completely new methodology. The current glut of chatbots we've got now are predictive text generators trained on giant corpuses of text. They will rarely, if ever, replicate the actual source they're trained on, because they don't store that information. They store the relationships between bits of text as vector math. The improvement in chatbot tech over the past couple years has largely been economies of scale. With more data to study for relationships and more memory to store the relationships on, they've gotten more consistent and more able to sound like a human. Comprehension is a much trickier skill. Even neural nets that are specifically trained to 'understand' relationships, like image generation/recognition ones, don't understand what they're looking at. They only know the vector math relationships from the training data. There was one where you asked it for a fish, and it would give you a picture of a fish--with two hands holding it in front of a person's chest. Most of the pictures of fish it had seen were people holding fishes they'd caught, so as far as its vector math was concerned, a "fish" had the body of a fish plus some hands and a torso. From personal experience, neural net generators are garbage-in-garbage-out. To get anything useful to a human out of it, you have to put in just as much useful human work. For instance, the image generators need to be trained on tagged images. That tagging itself requires human input. Yes, you can use an AI to automate tagging, but now you're relying on that AI's human input, and it's going to be worse than what you could do if you sat down and manually tagged every single picture yourself. On top of that, the output you get is still like 50% hot mess and requires human input to groom into a presentable state. I could make images with very lovely rendering but I still had to spend an hour in Photoshop painting over all the little bits the AI just couldn't figure out on its own. From what sebmojo's posted, it seems like the same is true of text generators. They're fine at capturing a particular style or vibe, but their output really isn't usable as-is, and it takes actual creative skill to identify and fix the problems. Perhaps not as much skill as it would take to do it all from scratch, and in less time than it would take to work from scratch, but it doesn't make creative effort obsolete any more than Photoshop makes painting obsolete. I wouldn't be surprised if an AI-assisted book makes some best-seller list in the next couple years. A book written entirely by computer is still a long way away.
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Jul 5, 2023 06:53
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tldr: Using your work as training data is not the same thing as plagiarism, although it's for sure a moral area that is still being figured out. Google can't plagiarize your unpublished novel even if they scrape magnum_opus.gdoc for training data. I still think it's right to be mad at them for this, but it's not substantially different than the kind of Big Data poo poo they've been doing for years. As a coda, please enjoy AI researcher Janelle Shane asking neural nets to draw ASCII art and then rate their own art:  
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Jul 5, 2023 06:58
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 This is a good object lesson in what ChatGPT can and can't do. It can match a style, that's a pattern in the data. It can hear the sound of a list, so it can reproduce the structure, down to subtle things like how entries in a list should be similar-sounding but distinct. It can't actually process the information, but It's so good at matching patterns that it can guess correctly because seen it said so many times before. It doesn't know passive tense and active tense, but it does know that when someone says "passive tense" and then writes a sentence with passive tense in it, the next line is the same except some words are switched. Or in the summary, it doesn't know how to summarize a story, but it knows how to sound like it's summarizing a story.If you need a good reminder of how much info neural nets will invent, just think of Greg Obama. 
Djeser fucked around with this message at 08:02 on Jul 13, 2023 |
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Jul 13, 2023 07:58
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If you haven't read Catherynne Valente before, Space Opera is a rough one to start with. I think her Orphan's Tales books are probably the most accessible/most representative of her work. Radiance is also good, but its structure is even weirder.
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Apr 24, 2024 01:20
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My advice on laptops is to check out the business model ones that are 1-2 years out of date. They tend to be pretty sturdy and have good keyboards, and they're often sold at a pretty good discount because corporations will just offload their whole inventory, even stuff that's only lightly used, and being enterprise products, they're usually built to be repaired, and you can usually find ones with dedicated video cards built in.(Business-grade video cards are usually optimized for CAD/multi-display stuff over gaming performance, but Civ and other 4X games aren't really GPU hogs anyway.) Plus they often have nub mice, and those are so much nicer to use than touchpads it's nuts. I think it's the Thinkpad T/P/X models that are Lenovo's business offerings, and there's Dell...Latitudes?
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May 1, 2024 03:39
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 17:53 |
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Write from as many perspectives as you want. There's no such thing as the PoV Police.
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May 2, 2024 02:33
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