Anthony Lee Collins

First: I was very sorry to read about the death of Joan Acocella.

As I’ve said before, I always enjoyed reading her writing, particularly about dance (although I have no real interest in dance).

And now, on to the regularly scheduled blog post.

 
I am not, so far, excited by, or even interested in, artificial intelligence (except in a very general way). By the way, I do not think that artificial intelligence will end the human race. If that happens, at least in my lifetime, it will be accomplished by human beings.

Would I use artificial intelligence to help me write my stories? To paraphrase Orson Welles, the stories might end up being better, but they wouldn’t be mine.

Also, even if my writing could be improved by artificial intelligence, where would be the fun in that?

If writing was my business, of course, that might make a difference, but obviously it isn’t. I do want my writing to be read by an audience of more than one — that’s why I make it publicly available for free — but I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t fun.

But there is another, and more decisive, reason I won’t use artificial intelligence to write stories. The question that really hangs me up is not the question of fun — important as that is — it’s the question of ownership.

If I went to ChatGPT, or whatever, and developed a prompt to get it to write a story in my style and with my characters, who would own that story? Maybe there’s some fine print somewhere which says that I would own it, but what if tomorrow that fine print was changed to say the opposite?

Not worth the risk.

[Later: For an interesting article on the current legal situation with ownership, go here: “Is A.I. the Death of I.P.?“]

Now, it has been a while since I’ve started a new story, but that’s up to me to do. I’ve written some scenes, but until now they haven’t started to fit together.

But now, I think something is starting to come together. The turning point for me is usually a title. As I’ve talked about before, if you write a story in the conventional way, you can write it first and then title it later. When you write and publish serially, you need the title before you start posting, and now I think I may have a title…

There was an article in the September 2023 issue of Wired Magazine, called “I’m a Batch Guy in a Loop World,” by Paul Ford. When I read it I wanted to write about it and link to it, but it wasn’t on the Wired website.

I figured that maybe there was a delay between some articles being in the print issue and being posted on the website. So, I waited for a while, but, as I write this, the article is still not there.

So, I’m going to talk about it anyway.

The main point of the article is that people used to interact with computers mostly in “batch” form. For example, you’d come up with an idea for a computer program, you’d code it in a language like FORTRAN (which I sort of learned way back when), creating a stack of punch cards, which you then passed to somebody who could run the program by feeding your punch cards into the computer, sometimes sooner and sometimes later.

Some time after that, you’d get your stack of cards back, along with a printout showing a series of error messages which could lead you in the direction of figuring out why your program wasn’t working. (I’m generalizing out of my own school days, obviously.) (In theory, of course, it was possible that the printout might show that your program had actually worked — but I wouldn’t know that from my own experience.)

A lot of modern interactions with computers are not “batch” at all, but “loop.” You do something in real time, and the computer reacts right away. You click on a link, you go to the place that link points to. You change a color in a graphic, you can print it out or post it on the Web right away. You post something on social media, you can get a response or a Like in seconds.

Like Paul Ford, who wrote the Wired article, I’m kind of a batch guy. Blogs are a “batch” experience. You come up with an idea, write the post, edit and polish it (I hope), and then post it. You can even set it to post later, at a time you choose. I knew a blogger once who had trouble sleeping one night and wrote several blog posts — I think at least four or five — setting each one to post on a different day over the following few weeks.

Novels are an extreme “batch” project, like movies and symphonies and plays. It took James Joyce seven or eight years to write Ulysses.

I do some “loop” stuff. Sometimes I comment on YouTube videos, and sometimes I get a quick response or a Like or whatever. I’ve even had a few of my comments quoted in later videos. All of that is fun, but it’s very ephemeral. As I said before, I’ve had this blog for 24 years and I’ve made over a thousand posts. I’ve written two novels and a bunch of short stories and novellas. When Inherent Vice came out, I studied it for six months, writing about it in depth, here and on the Pynchon wiki. Those are things I take some pride in.

If I’d ever written a FORTRAN program which had actually worked, I’d take some pride in that also.

It’s always surprising to me that some writers (most writers, maybe nearly all writers) have one preferred method of writing that they stick to for years.

Me, once I decide “this is how I write now,” I pretty much immediately do something else. So, having announced that I now write on my phone, I immediately wrote several pages of my current story in a notebook. With a pen.

Which was fun, but then I remembered the big problem with pen-and-paper writing, which is that then you have to type it into the computer. Which is tedious.

So, I decided to try a dictation app for my phone. I tried Speechnotes, which actually worked pretty well. The text required some cleanup, of course, and it couldn’t handle proper names, but much easier than typing everything in (which usually requires some cleanup as well 🙂 ).

I wonder what method I’ll switch to next?

I’m definitely not writing with artificial intelligence, though. That’s just crazy, right?

Worth reading:

“The End of the Awl and the Vanishing of Freedom and Fun from the Internet“

I’d actually forgotten how fun and cool going online seemed way back when.

I guess I’m old school when it comes to writing and computers. I like to have my files stored locally, not just up in the clouds somewhere. And I never write in Word, since everything I write is destined, at least in theory, for the web.

But every project is different. As the saying goes, you don’t learn how to write a story — you just learn how to write the story you’re writing now.

My project right now is “The Bus Station Mystery.” It’s done, yes, but it’s not done. It needs more work — mostly it needs to be filled out. I listened to it recently, and my main note to myself was: “This story sure whizzes along!”

And not only the pace but the pacing seems off — the big scene where we learn who all the suspects are comes more than three quarters of the way through the story. [And now a pause for me to consider the words “pace” and “pacing”…]

Anyway.

I’ve been figuring out the best way to edit this story. It’s divided up into ten blog posts, so that doesn’t work for making any sort of substantial changes. I can create an HTML file with the whole thing (I wrote a script to pull the parts out of the WordPress database and combine them), but editing a story once all the HTML codes are in place is awkward.

So, I settled on a Google Doc. That seems to be working pretty well so far. I can make notes and edits on my phone during the day and then do more on the computer at night. A whole new way of writing (for me) seems to be working fine.

I’m writing some new scenes (well, one so far) in Google Keep, so I can easily decide later on where they should go in the story, if anywhere.

But I do export the current Google Doc draft to a Word file on my computer from time to time. Just to be safe.

I just saw an ad for Audible (which I guess is a part of Amazon these days), with the slogan “Listening is the new reading.”

I don’t usually pay a lot of attention to advertising, but this really caught my eye. I confess that my immediate reaction was negative, at least in terms of fiction.

I’m not anti-technology, and I’m not anti-Amazon (I’m writing this on a Fire tablet, in fact). I’m not against listening to things being read to me — I have my own drafts read to me all the time, as I’ve talked about before.

And I’ve enjoyed some audio books quite a bit. Douglas Adams reading his own books, Frank McCourt (my high school English teacher 🙂 ) reading Angela’s Ashes, and Ron McClarty reading Inherent Vice (which I’ve listened to many times).

But it’s not the same as reading, because I think reading encourages deeper understanding. For one obvious reason, the fact that you can reread sections until you really understand them, and go back to earlier chapters to check things — either to remind yourself of things, or in light of later developments.

And even something as simple as the ability to go forward at your own pace.

But also, with art, there is always a point to experiencing it the way the artist intended. Most writers wrote their books to be read on a page.

I saw a documentary years ago about the Beat writers which brought this home. As I wrote in my review:

“Johnny Depp, Dennis Hopper and John Turturro show up to read Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg (respectively, and respectfully), but obviously only Depp understands the difference between reading and acting. Turturro is mannered and awkward reading parts of ‘Howl’ (they should have got Patti Smith, or just shown footage of Ginsberg himself) and Dennis Hopper does okay with some Burroughs, but Burroughs himself was one of the great performers of his time, and Hopper doesn’t even come close to his wonderful, arid, sardonic rasp. Depp, however, obviously knows that novels and poems, unlike plays and screenplays, are designed to deliver their effects without any additional help, so he simply reads Kerouac’s words, as plainly as he can, and of course that’s all that’s necessary. I wish he’d done more.”