Craft and Craft Resources

Write Into Realms AI Can’t Follow Bluntly, here is my premise. Probability Engines (AI) can’t write beautifully. They are fed too much crap, and they can only produce the literary equivalent of tapioca. So write into the beauty, move to the country where the actual language matters, and provide an emotional and aesthetic experience that the reader needs. The reader, or at least the one that matters, will walk away from PE pulp and turn to you. Let me give you some examples. F

It’s Only Zeros and Ones MFA programs are inadvertently designed for hostile takeover by Probability Engines, because at the lowest level they teach dogma and Rules. [Of course you’ve heard “Be creative. Learn the rules and then break them judiciously.”] Probability Engines love rules. They reverse-INVENT the rules from the thousands and millions of texts upon which they have trained. They need the guardrails, the connect-the-dots, the predictability. More precisely, they inv

BUILD-OUT OF YOUR COMPETITOR At the Santa Fe International Literary Festival, Jenifer Eagan was asked about AI and what it meant to “writers,” as persons, as a collective, as a profession. Her response was largely, “Look, we’ve faced these upheavals before, and the book world has been knocked on its head, and the answer is always the same. As writers, we have to get better.” OUR upheaval is AI. I like talking about the large language machines as Probability Engines = PE, and

Whose Story Is It? Let’s talk point of view [WHAT! AGAIN?]. Most fictional work, and most of my work, is in third person point of view. It’s so strong, so adaptable. You can have a separate narrative voice, one that knows more (or less) than the protagonist. You can play distance tricks to fit the book’s situation—move in closer to the main character or zoom out. You can treat the protagonist coldly, or in using informal indirect discourse, get right into her head with the wr

There is a street that plunges down straight away from the front windows.

One of the better teachers I’ve encountered in the literary craft world (yes, we all know about John Gardner) is Rebecca Makkai, through Story Studio Chicago. Besides being one of the most limber, twisting and slouching participants on Zoom, she also is hilarious, making up completely quirked examples on the fly. There are several conceptual architectures she’s invented that at least seem truthful even if as complicated as a Mid-East Peace Plan. Let’s take one – her framework

Another Take on Writers and LLMs

Here's Some Hints on Improving Hybrid Zooms Or Google Meet, WebEx, and Jitsi As writers circles become less local and more connected...

Those Awkward Clumsy Sentences: # 5 Broken By Its Own Weight Loose Sentences That Break Under Their Own Weight: This set of examples is...

Those Awkward Clumsy Sentences: # 4 Take Five Minutes to Fall Off A Cliff Subordinate trailing clauses with past participles and past...

Those Awkward Clumsy Sentences: # 3 Outfox Your Bad Writing -- Focus on The Sentence Introductory Clauses with infinite (“ing”) verbs:...

Those Awkward Clumsy Sentences: # 2 Hemingway Throwing A Baseball in a Bar The Three Beat Drum: Think you’re Hemingway? Live for short...

Those Awkward Clumsy Sentences: #1 The Passive Voice: Your goat wrecked my garden – versus – My garden was wrecked by your goat. Ready...

In a series of craft notes, we’re illustrating Point of View. If you want to see the first step in this process, click here to see Alice...

In a series of craft notes, we’re illustrating Point of View. If you want to see the first step in this process, click here to see Alice...

See here for Part 1 Living On The Mountain ... When Vietnam had done filling him up with long-term poisons, Dave Ambrose came home to own...

In a series of craft notes, we’re illustrating Point of View. If you want to see the first step in this process, click here to see Alice...

Craftier and Craftier In a series of craft notes, we’re illustrating Point of View. If you want to see the first step in this process,...

Third Person Point of View - the most used -> But there are three kinds.

It All Depends On Your Point of View In a series of craft notes, we’re illustrating Point of View. If you want to see the first step in...