Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 6

What elements give away generated prose?

When I started doing posts with excerpts from real novels versus ChatGPT, such as this one and this one, and a while ago, this one, and more recently this one and this one, I noticed the following:

A) Bad dialogue tags.

By “bad,” I mean first, too many adverbs, and adverbs used in clumsy and silly ways. I also mean cliched dialogue tags. His heart pounds, her eyes narrow, and while this sort of thing can be fine if used with exceptional smoothness, they leap out at the reader as complete cliches if the smoothness is less than exceptional. ChatGPT gravitates to the most cliched of all cliched dialogue tags, and it does this so often and so consistently that it’s a major tell.

I also mean a category of dialogue tags that I’ve started to call “trying too hard, getting silly.” I mean dialogue like this, from an example of supposedly good dialogue that is in fact bad:

“John, are you listening?” Mary fidgeted, her heart aching at the way he was ignoring her.

“What? Oh, sure. Why are you wondering if I love you? Of course I do—how could you think such a thing?” John went back to reading his book, his brows furrowed in concentration. Mary waited for more, but he said nothing else. Then his face brightened. “Hey, what’s for dessert?”

“Chocolate cake—your favorite.” She played with her apron strings, then, with clenched teeth, she threw the apron to the ground. “I’ll go get you a piece.”

These tags are overdone and therefore obtrusive and silly. And the thing that really struck me at the time was how much this looks ChatGPT dialogue. Here, for comparison, is a sample of ChatGPT dialogue. I modified it a tiny bit to smooth it out because I want to just look at this specific problem, not other problems.

Alex gently brushes a strand of hair behind Jamie’s ear, their eyes locking. “You know, even on the toughest days, just seeing you makes everything feel right.”

Jamie smiles, her heart racing as she leans closer. “I feel the same. It’s like you’re my safe place in a world full of chaos.”

Alex takes Jamie’s hands, fingers intertwining, and whispers, “I never want to leave that safe place, not now, not ever.”

Here is another example, pulled from one of the earlier posts linked above. In this case, I had ChatGPT continue a story by feeding in a few paragraphs and saying, “Continue the story.” Then, in my blog post, I asked, “Can you tell where ChatGPT took over, and if you could, what gave it away?” And what gave it away to me was ChatGPT “trying to hard, getting silly” with dialogue tags. Here’s the example that showcases this the best. The first paragraph here is real, then the next two are ChatGPT, and this is OBVIOUS:

“Sure, but a teenager who never got over his son, and was still in love with his wife.” Theo turned his head over his shoulder, looking back, but not at anything in the room. “When Dave missed a few days at work – well, you can guess the rest. He’d collapsed in his kitchen. One of his neighbors called me with the bad news.”

Greta reached across the table, placing a comforting hand on Theo’s. The weight of Dave’s story lingered in the air, a somber reminder of life’s unpredictable turns.

“I’m so sorry, Theo,” Greta said softly, her eyes reflecting empathy. “Losing a friend, especially one who carried such heavy grief, is never easy.”

The shift from real to generated is instant and obvious. All the tags are overdone, cliched, obtrusive, and silly. These tags call attention to themselves — that’s what I mean by obtrusive. It’s hard to read past or through them without noticing them. It’s hard to read them without SEEING the author trying too hard. Any reader even moderately aware of writing craft is probably going to think, and ought to think, “Oh, this is someone who was told to show, not tell, and so here she is, trying super, super hard to show everything. She’s trying too hard and it’s getting silly.”

So this is a tell for generated fiction OR for bad writing, not just for tell for generated dialogue, which is what I initially thought. The overuse of silly adverbs in dialogue might be more of a tell, but it’s famously a feature of bad writing as well, so it might not be a way to distinguish between bad (but real) and fake generated fiction.

I realize you all already know that I don’t have a problem with adverbs personally. Since I’ve said that emphatically a lot of times, I thought I’d look for something from another author on the topic, not the sort of author who pounds the pulpit and shouts NEVER USE ADVERBS, but someone who is substantially more in agreement with me about this. Even though I haven’t actually liked the books I’ve tried by Jeff VanderMeer I’ve seen him on Twitter or Facebook or somewhere declaring forcefully that adverbs are fine, so I went and looked for a quote of his about this, and here it is:

One reason that a beginning writer should be wary of adverbs and heroic speeches, as emblematic of all kinds of other elements in fiction, is that the beginning writer is more likely to botch the uses of both—or to misunderstand the context in which they work. For beginning writers, although I try not to be absolute myself, saying “I’m going to cut a third of all adverbs from my stories” is a useful mechanical way of learning how they work—a banishment that suggests an eventual return from exile at the right time. The advanced writer isn’t as likely to fall for advice that’s absolute, and also knows better than to make general pronouncements about anything—and, hopefully, has enough mastery to make things like heroic speeches work, in part because you’re hopefully always thinking “yes, but” when considering any admonition about any aspect of writing.

I rather like this, because I do think that suggestions such as “cut a third of all your adverbs” can work the same way as suggestions like “cut one sentence per page.” These aren’t suggestions to follow. They’re ways of building awareness of what adverbs are for, or of what the words are doing on the page and which words seem dispensable and why. Of course I also like the implicit statement that absolute advice is bad advice, and that general pronouncements are likely to be wrong.

But back to the actual topic. Besides overdone dialogue tags with or without overused adverbs, what else gives away generated text?

B) Super cliched, overdone reactions.

This is often seen in combination with dialogue tags, but it can occur separately, during exposition.

My jaw dropped as the radiant silhouette of a man steadily gained definition and solidity.

Too stunned to make a sound, I remained motionless by the pool.

I could only gape at the spot in the treeline where he had vanished, my mind reeling. 

Lena’s eyes softened with gratitude.

On and on, there are zillions of lines like this in a lot of generated fiction. On the other hand, if you specifically ask ChatGPT to generate something with a literary style, you can get this:

The morning after the funeral, I awoke with that peculiar weight behind the eyes that follows too much thinking and not enough sleep. Outside, the Georgia sky had turned the color of old tin, low and expressionless. The air was thick with the early onset of June heat, and somewhere beyond the back porch, a mourning dove called out like it had something important to say and no one left to say it to.

I moved through the house barefoot, the pine floors cool against my soles. Mama’s house—mine now, I supposed, though the thought still landed strange in my mouth—was quiet except for the rhythmic tick of the old Seth Thomas clock on the mantel. It ticked the same way it had my entire childhood, steady as judgment. The smell of coffee had not yet touched the air. That was telling.

It had been three days since they pulled Robert’s body from the Oconee, his skin gone blue as river stone, and still no one had come forward with anything worth believing. Sheriff Cade had asked his questions, clipped and perfunctory, like he already knew the answers and didn’t care for the details. I knew better. Cade never did like details; they had a way of unraveling his version of things.

I stood at the kitchen sink and looked out over the back field, now nothing but scorched weeds and bent fence posts. In the distance, a figure moved—a slow gait, almost hesitant, like he was waiting for someone to wave him off. I squinted against the light and caught the glint of a badge.

And nothing here has that unbearably cliched feel to it. Do you wonder whether ChatGPT searched for text tagged with “fiction” and “mystery” and “georgia” and “literary” and then stole whole sentences from somewhere? Because I certainly do wonder that.

Someone — SarahZ — in the comments to one of the recent posts about voice linked above, said, The plagiarism of the training materials bothers me way more, meaning way more than the prospect that authors writing terrible fiction might have trouble competing with generated stories. I totally agree. I was very much not okay with finding that Meta stole all my books, and I mean all of them, traditionally published or self-published, they’re all in that stolen database. At the link, an author can click to a search tool to find out if Meta stole their books and click to a cease-and-desist letter to send to Meta, which will of course do nothing in the short term, but I certainly wish Author’s Guild the best of luck with their various lawsuits against the theft of intellectual property for AI training. Especially since I joined Author’s Guild last year, so more power to them. But my point is, Cade never did like details; they had a way of unraveling his version of things looks a lot like it might have been lifted whole from some real work. Don’t you think so? Then the selection gets incoherent about characterization, because “almost hesitant, like he was waiting for someone to wave him off,” doesn’t fit the character who was suggested by the previous sentences.

C) Weird analogies and figures of speech.

Outside, the Georgia sky had turned the color of old tin, low and expressionless.

The thought still landed strange in my mouth.

The hum of the station was constant now—like a heartbeat no one wanted to acknowledge.

Europa’s ice stretched in every direction like a frozen ocean caught mid-roar.

D) Never being creative with punctuation or grammar.

I mean almost never rather than actually never, because I have in fact seen (very occasionally) use of nonstandard punctuation or grammar. In particular, current text generators seem to be able to use occasional fragments, particularly if they’re asked to write “in a literary style.” But it’s relatively rare. Text generators almost always seem to prefer the most ordinary grammar and punctuation, sentences that are of average length rather than unusually short or long, syntax and word choice that is ordinary. This is one of the characteristics that seems to make generated text “seem” or “feel” artificial.

***

None of this has to do with the overall impossibility — I think probably this is in fact impossible — of a text generator sticking to the story. I mean, creating a coherent plot, keeping characters consistent, keeping details consistent, infusing a theme into a novel-length work. I can’t see how a text generator could do any of that, considering it has no actual thought process or ability to judge anything except the probability that one word would follow a different word.

***

Recently, a student handed me a paper to review and I said, as gently as possible: “If I were your instructor, I would think this was generated and I would first run it through every AI detector I could find and then I would look at the history of the document, and if your instructor is requiring you to enable track changes, that’s a giveaway. Here, I’m highlighting all the sentences that strongly suggest this is generated text.”

Then I highlighted a lot of the text of the paper according to a single different criterion that has nothing to do with anything above:

E) Implausibly professional for the student in question.

Let’s look at an example of generated text for a typical student paper topic:

ChatGPT, please write two paragraphs about the impact of modern technology on creating opportunities for musicians.

ChatGPT:

Modern technology has dramatically transformed the music industry, creating unprecedented opportunities for musicians worldwide. Digital platforms like Spotify, YouTube, and TikTok allow artists to distribute their music instantly to global audiences, bypassing traditional gatekeepers such as record labels and radio stations. This democratization of music distribution means that artists from any background can gain exposure and build fanbases independently. Additionally, social media enables direct engagement with listeners, allowing musicians to cultivate loyal communities and receive immediate feedback on their work.

Beyond distribution and promotion, technology has also revolutionized music creation itself. Affordable home studio equipment and powerful digital audio workstations (DAWs) have made high-quality production accessible to virtually anyone with a computer. Collaboration tools and cloud-based software enable artists to work together remotely across continents. These advancements not only reduce the cost of music production but also encourage innovation by giving musicians access to a vast array of virtual instruments, effects, and sound libraries. As a result, modern technology continues to level the playing field, empowering more people to turn their musical passions into viable careers.

Everything boldfaced is text I would say is unusual to extremely unusual in student writing. Almost every sentence plus the overall coherence is unusual. Students really struggle with transitions. This two-paragraph mini-essay shows the use of an echo transition, which is all very well — I specifically teach students to use transitions of this exact type — but until I explain how to use echo transitions, students almost never use them. The transitions within the paragraph — beyond, not only but also, as a result — are rare in student papers. (Don’t get me started on how dismal the writing ability of students is today.)

Fundamentally, none of the text generated by ChatGPT sounds like student writing. It sounds like something you’d see in an editorial or a pretty well-written Substack essay or something like that. It’s more shallow than a good Substack essay, not as focused in topic as a good editorial; it tries to introduce and conclude the topic too fast; there’s nothing personal in it as might be expeted in a student paper, and overall it just does not sound like a student wrote it. I’ve seen a (small) number of students who could write well, and this doesn’t sound like their essays either, though it’s closer.

As a side note: When this specific student dropped his paper into TurnItIn, as required by the class instructor, the sentences I highlighted all turned up as “plagiarized.” AND, the paper was on the topic above, and it was basically identical to what ChatGPT just handed me. Some of the sentences are so similar, they’re almost word-for-word. Digital platforms like Spotify, YouTube, and TikTok allow artists to distribute their music instantly to global audiences, bypassing traditional gatekeepers such as record labels and radio stations. The chance that a student will use the word “bypass” this way is low. If the student is not great at writing, then the chance is zero.

***

I haven’t a great eye for detecting generated text “in a literary style,” but people more familiar with literary fiction seem to have much more facility with this. Remember this post?

The morning after the funeral, I awoke with that peculiar weight behind the eyes that follows too much thinking and not enough sleep. Outside, the Georgia sky had turned the color of old tin, low and expressionless. The air was thick with the early onset of June heat, and somewhere beyond the back porch, a mourning dove called out like it had something important to say and no one left to say it to.

I moved through the house barefoot, the pine floors cool against my soles. Mama’s house—mine now, I supposed, though the thought still landed strange in my mouth—was quiet except for the rhythmic tick of the old Seth Thomas clock on the mantel. It ticked the same way it had my entire childhood, steady as judgment. The smell of coffee had not yet touched the air. That was telling.

It had been three days since they pulled Robert’s body from the Oconee, his skin gone blue as river stone, and still no one had come forward with anything worth believing. Sheriff Cade had asked his questions, clipped and perfunctory, like he already knew the answers and didn’t care for the details. I knew better. Cade never did like details; they had a way of unraveling his version of things.

Some of you caught that this was generated and lots of you didn’t. I’m almost sure I wouldn’t have. But someone I know who has a lot more experience with literary fiction than I do pointed to it immediately, despite the distraction provided by the (many) selections from pretty bad novels that were offered as distractors.

This does remind me of the AI art turing test offered by Astral Codex Ten, and in particular the way Elaine T’s Teen immediately perceived fakeness in a way I just could not until specific fake elements were pointed out.

The tables are uniformly lit as if from above, not by the warm light from the cafe windows or from the lamp and sunrise. The condiment pots on them have highlights but cast no shadows. The shadows of the tables are vast by an overhead source of some kind. Chairs don’t all have shadows. The foreground lamp post doesn’t have any shadow at all, not from any of the assorted potential sources- it ought to be falling either foreground left or foreground right. — And so on, detailed explanation from the Teen, and none of this was obvious to me until it was all painstakingly pointed out.

This, I think, is something like looking at generated text. A student generates it and thinks it sounds great. I look at it and think, “Definitely not student writing and it looks generated.” Except I’m still learning how to pick out the elements that make me say “looks generated,” while I’m pretty secure with being able to say, “Doesn’t look like student writing.”

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post What elements give away generated prose? appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Update: so, that was a week

Okay, so I did get various things done this past week — I now have one and a half chapters to go for Sekaran, unless I change my mind, plus probably an epilogue, so as you see, I’m getting there. Might have a complete draft by August 1, not sure, I guess we’ll see.

Plus, I’m doing proofreading corrections and tweaking for Eight Doors, of course, so that’s moving toward completion.

However, I also had a somewhat distracting time last week because Ish had recently developed a problem that I thought was a UTI but — this won’t surprise any veterinarians who read this; Hi, Camille — to involve the prostate instead.

Anara Call Me Ishmael RN RA RE, as a young dog

Ish is eleven and a half, not what I would call old, but not a youngster either. He’s a beautiful dog with an amazingly mellow, relaxed temperament about life. He didn’t love performance as much as my Pippa, so I stopped showing him in Rally a long time ago, although he made me look good and we did go through the Rally Excellent title, which is quite demanding. Astonishingly, I don’t find a lot of YouTube videos showing rally performances, so here’s a site where someone shows a decent performance in RE with a Chesapeake Bay Retriever. Visualize the whole thing happening at twice the speed because Cavaliers are a lot faster in these small courses than this Chessie. Actually, the second demo video with the light-boned Golden is a lot closer to what I’d call a normal pace.

Anyway, so, Ish is having a complicated time right now. With an intact older male who suddenly shows signs LIKE a UTI, but it isn’t a UTI, the choices are (a) prostate cancer, which is, it turns out, a fairly dire prognosis for dogs; or (b) benign hyperplasia, where you neuter the dog and wait for the problem to resolve, as it eventually will, though not as fast as you might like.

So on Monday, I ran up to St L for an emergency appointment at Veterinary Radiology Associates, which is a FANTASTIC practice and ALL the emergency services in the country should take notes on how VRA runs their practice and do it JUST LIKE THAT.

***

So, side note: Veterinary Specialty Services, I am looking straight at you and pointing out that your staff radiate contempt for your clients, fail to return calls, do not appear to care a whole lot about the pets they see, and overall your practice is roughly one thousand times less pleasant to interact with in every possible way, plus I don’t trust your doctors. I used to, but now I don’t, and there are reasons for that. Given a choice, anybody in the St L region should absolutely go somewhere else, and where should they go if they need any kind of radiology? They should go to VRA, that’s where, which is about a mile away from VSS, it turns out.

***

Anyway, my vet told me VRA would be great and they would work me in on Monday for an emergency appointment and therefore we could go ahead and schedule a neuter at the earliest possible opportunity, which was Wednesday, and then if Ish turned out not to have prostate cancer, we could neuter him and move on. My vet did not come right out and say directly, “And I don’t think this is cancer,” but this was pretty clearly her guess.

And my vet was right: this looks like benign hyperplasia, BUT, the specialist at VRA said, “However, I am seeing multiple lesions in the small intestine, and my best guess is this is some kind of cancer, but it could be irritable bowel syndrome. If you would want to do chemo, you should do exploratory surgery and biopsy a lesion and maybe remove one of the larger questionable areas; if you would not want to do chemo, then my recommendation is don’t do the exploratory surgery at all, handle symptoms if and when they appear, and have me look again in five months.” And what HE did not come right out and say directly was, “And in my opinion, chemo would more likely not lead to any great outcome,” but again, this was fairly clear.

I guess I’ve listened to a lot of vets say things over the years, and as a much briefer side note, the way to pry an honest opinion out of a vet is often to ask, “If this were YOUR dog, what would you do?” That won’t always do the trick, but it can help.

As it happens, I tried chemo for my first dog, many years ago, and was not at all enthused about the idea of putting another dog through anything similar, so I’m going to go with the wait and see approach. Especially because Ish is not showing any particular symptoms. I will just note that “come back in five months” suggests a significantly better outcome than you’d expect with prostate cancer, so it could be worse.

Ish with a daughter; he fathered sixteen babies in the past few years, all but two show quality.

So Ish was neutered this past Wednesday and is now doing fine, but probably wondering why he is confined to an x-pen. He is such a mellow guy, though, that he is not particular concerned about it. Stitches will be out in a couple of days and then, with luck, he will continue to show no particular sign that anything is wrong for a good long time, and in that case the prostate-related issues should have time to resolve and we will both by happy about that. In the meantime, many extra treats are in Ish’s immediate future, while I decline to listen to the winds of mortality blowing in our direction.

AND

I hope that’s it for unexpected distractions of a medical nature and that next week the only important news is that I have sent out the draft of Sekaran to early readers.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Update: so, that was a week appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Let It Grow . . . parody edition

Just happened across this parody of “Let It Go” from Frozen that I thought you might enjoy.

The fur grows brown on the jawline tonight, not a razor to be seen
A kingdom of gentlemen, it looks like I will be king
The hair is sprouting like the manliness inside
I couldn’t keep it in, Jesus knows I’ve tried
Don’t let them trim, don’t let them shave, be the burly man every girl will crave
Don’t shear don’t fear just let them know, you’re letting go

Let it grow, let it grow, can’t hold it back anymore
Let it grow, let it grow, shaving clean is such a chore
I don’t care, what my boss will say
Let the beard flow on, the itch never bothered me anyway

It’s funny how some whiskers for a month can grow so long and that the Gillette that once controlled me can’t get to me at all
It’s time to see what this hair can do, to test the peach fuzz and break through
No right, no wrong, no rules for them, we are men

Let it grow, let it grow, I am one with Gandalf the white
Let it grow, let it grow, You’ll never see me slice
Take your hand and feel my face
Let the beard flow on

My bristles thicken to a hefty facial crown
Expanding from a stash into a legendary mound
In one month I am shocked at how it’s grown so fast
I’m never going back, Barbasol’s in the past

Let it grow, let it grow I refuse to mow this lawn
Let it grow, let it grow, that chiseled chin is gone
Here I stand with my caveman face
Let the beard flow on, the itch never bothered me anyway

 

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Let It Grow . . . parody edition appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Interesting Critters

An old post, but I thought you might like to take a look at this peculiar shark.

They’re thought to have a 42-month gestation period, but beats me whether anybody actually knows that for sure. Oh, Google’s AI thing says that this estimate is based on embryonic growth rates and guesswork. Okay, that seems at least possible. These are deep sea sharks, so very poor nutrient availability. Here’s the actual source for that.

One reason this species caught my eye is that they are ovoviviparous, which is SUCH a great word. How many other words pack three v’s into the single word? It means — you may know this — that the young start out in eggs, but the eggs hatch inside the mother so she then gives live birth.

They’ve got fancy teeth, too — sort of frilly, in fact, though that’s not where the name comes from — but the vocabulary associated with that isn’t as neat as “ovoviviparous.”

This Wikipedia entry is pretty good! I’m impressed.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Interesting Critters appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Poetry Thursday: Hart Crane

You know, my motto could be: So many poets, so little time. It’s amazing how many poets I’ve never heard of, and then you read a little bit about them and it turns out they were at least somewhat important and at least somewhat well-known. Some more than somewhat, too.

From the Poetry Foundation:

Hart Crane is considered a pivotal—even prophetic—figure in American literature, who is often cast as a Romantic in the decades of high Modernism. Crane’s version of American Romanticism extended back through Walt Whitman to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and in his most ambitious work, The Bridge, he sought nothing less than an expression of the American experience in its entirety. As Allen Tate wrote in Essays of Four Decades, “Crane was one of those men whom every age seems to select as the spokesman of its spiritual life; they give the age away.” 

Wow, look at the description from this book: Hart Crane’s Poetry: Appollinaire lived in Paris, I live in Cleveland, Ohio

In one of his letters Hart Crane wrote, “Appollinaire lived in Paris, I live in Cleveland, Ohio,” comparing –misspelling and all –the great French poet’s cosmopolitan roots to his own more modest ones in the midwestern United States. Rebelling against the notion that his work should relate to some European school of thought, Crane defiantly asserted his freedom to be himself, a true American writer. John T. Irwin, long a passionate and brilliant critic of Crane, gives readers the first major interpretation of the poet’s work in decades.

Irwin aims to show that Hart Crane’s epic The Bridge is the best twentieth-century long poem in English. Irwin convincingly argues that, compared to other long poems of the century, The Bridge is the richest and most wide-ranging in its mythic and historical resonances, the most inventive in its combination of literary and visual structures, the most subtle and compelling in its psychological underpinnings. Irwin brings a wealth of new and varied scholarship to bear on his critical reading of the work — from art history to biography to classical literature to philosophy — revealing The Bridge to be the near-perfect synthesis of American myth and history that Crane intended.

Irwin contends that the most successful entryway to Crane’s notoriously difficult shorter poems is through a close reading of The Bridge. Having admirably accomplished this, Irwin analyzes Crane’s poems in White Buildings and his last poem, “The Broken Tower,” through the larger context of his epic, showing how Crane, in the best of these, worked out the structures and images that were fully developed in The Bridge.

Thoughtful, deliberate, and extraordinarily learned, this is the most complete and careful reading of Crane’s poetry available. Hart Crane may have lived in Cleveland, Ohio, but, as Irwin masterfully shows, his poems stand among the greatest written in the English language.

And I’ve never heard of Hart Crane! Have any of you? The Bridge does not appear to be easily available as an ebook; the link goes to an annotated paper edition. This edition’s description says:

Hart Crane’s long poem The Bridge has steadily grown in stature since it was published in 1930. At first branded a noble failure by a few influential critics― a charge that became conventional wisdom―this panoramic work is now widely regarded as one of the finest achievements of twentieth-century American poetry. It unites mythology and modernity as a means of coming to terms with the promises, both kept and broken, of American experience.

The Bridge is also very difficult. It is well loved but not well understood. Obscure and indirect allusions abound in it, some of them at surprisingly fine levels of detail. The many references to matters of everyday life in the 1920s may baffle or elude today’s readers. The elaborate compound metaphors that distinguish Crane’s style bring together diverse sources in ways that make it hard to say what, if anything, is “going on” in the text. The poem is replete with topical and geographical references that demand explication as well as identification. Many passages are simply incomprehensible without special knowledge, often special knowledge of a sort that is not readily available even today, when Google and Wikipedia are only a click away.

There is a scanned version you can find if you google, but looking at it would be really annoying.

Here is a shorter poem by Crane:

To Brooklyn Bridge

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
—Till elevators drop us from our day . . .

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky’s acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry,—

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path—condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City’s fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

***

Brooklyn Bridge is rather a Gothic cathedral of a bridge:

Image from Pixabay

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Poetry Thursday: Hart Crane appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

A Deep Dive Into Articles

Here’s a Quora answer about articles — the, a, an — written by a non-native English speaker, first language Russian. It’s super long and super interesting, or I thought it was interesting.

When you’re living in your household, or 2000 years ago in a Germanic tribe in a forest when articles just had developed, everything that you will use every single day, all your posessions, everything and every creature that lives nearby you and you keep interacting with as well as, roughly speaking, things that are static and stand within an 1-hour walk from your place of living, this all is definite to you. This is a group of the “KNOWN”, “FAMILIAR” things: THE Definite Things they are. You will say “THE” when referring to them. They are kind of within the definite group to you.

Then you will have specific and non-specific members of this definite group you are thinking about and dealing with all the time. You will say “THE” for the specific ones and “A” for non-specific ones.

Somebody who has a tendency to be overly wordy or is like me, trying to explain this concept to myself and somebody else can think to themselves: Oh, I’ve just woken up. It’s 7 in the morning. THE dogs. THE dogs must be walked and fed right now. THE dogs in my household where I’m currently living, they are THE 3 dogs of mine. THE dogs that I own, THE dogs that I feed and walk, THE dogs I deal with all the time”. This is the group of dogs most familiar to that person. I get to know the person in question and after the conversation with him, I already know he has 3 dogs and can think like that. But he doesn’t really think about them in such a wordy way because, well, he has no time for that and rather always feels his relationship with THE dogs he owns; this relationship is in the air at his home and in his brain. And everyone around him treats THE dogs he has got in a similar way.

The other thing then. Remember I’m talking only about tangible physical things. Things that are in their only copy or possess the most unique features ever, you will say “THE” for them. Their uniqueness deserves recognition and everyone dealing with this only thing in the world should be aware of that!

Now, here is a case from my own experience. It’s related to dogs as well. The English speaking person in question is very much alive. We interact online from time to time. Almost at the very start of our interaction, I found out he had 3 dogs and 5 cats. Then once he forgot that I’m blind and sent something to me via Quora messages. Not to delve into details, the messaging feature here is not convenient for blind users. When I got his message, I thought it was empty. It should never be this way even when you’re using the PC blind; this is down to Quora. So I asked the guy what that was.

“This is a picture of A dog”, that was his reply. I reminded him I am blind and he shouldn’t send me pictures.

So, without any warning I got an empty message. That turned out to be “a picture of a dog”. I had already heard him tell me about his dogs and cats. Let’s work with this. Hmm, yes, 2 nouns with articles in the last sentence… Do not think about the “picture” word at all right now, I did alert you everything is so raw. His “dogs” is what concerns us.

When he said “A dog”, he meant this is a non-specific dog in the definite group of THE dogs he owns. It doesn’t matter which dog exactly, but they all belong to him and this is one of them. And he might be not the only person who treats his dogs like that. The conversation about him owning 3 dogs we just had could tell me this is most likely one of the dogs he owns as soon as he explains what the picture shows. …

But this is so weird: the “monolithic” animal in general, THE Dogs class isn’t as definite as the dogs that you own, and I cannot see anything specific or definite about those random dogs that got lost, and surely this will happen to other dogs so many times, and you will maybe meet them, but you might say “THE” for this category when referring to it in general. All dogs in the scope, and this is one of them. THE monolithic Dogs class having their petty representatives, whose importance is diminished almost to nothing.

***

Lots more, and this is a truly eye-opening look at how complex this part of speech truly is. I don’t think it’s easy, and it may not be possible, to honestly understand what we are doing with articles and English and how we use them and choose which to use when and all that, unless possibly we really go deep into linguistics. Maybe comparative linguistics, so we can see how wildly strange and complicated this looks — and is — to someone who grew up speaking Russian.

The one thing that becomes ultra clear when reading this super-long answer — I only copied a small part of it — is that the standard textbook explanations for articles are exceedingly simplified and don’t reflect how we actually use articles.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post A Deep Dive Into Articles appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

What Makes Fake Literary Fiction Bad?

AI Can’t Write Good Fiction

From the linked post, this. I’m going to set off text copied from this post with *** because I want to use italics and bold within the copied section of text.

***

When Deepseek came out, there was a lot of fanfare about it being good at creative writing. I like AI and I love creative writing, so I decided to give it a spin. Specifically, I told Deepseek to do its best to write a story that might get accepted at Smokelong, one of the best flash fiction magazines in the business. It came up with:

The morning her shadow began unspooling from her feet, Clara found it coiled beneath the kitchen table like a serpent made of smoke. It didn’t mirror her anymore—not the tremble in her hands as she poured coffee, not the way she pressed a palm to her ribs, as if holding herself together. It just watched.

“You’re not him,” she whispered, but the shadow rippled, ink-dark edges softening into a silhouette too broad, too familiar. She’d buried that shape six months ago, shoveled dirt over its echo. Yet here it was, pooling in the cracks of the linoleum.

The “story” continued from there, but you probably get the idea.

Superficially, the pieces are there. Evocative imagery, a dark emotional theme, sensory metaphors. I once taught a flash fiction course to undergraduates, and I would have been happy enough to see this up for workshop.

Also, though, there’s nothing there. Grief is the most basic possible flash fiction theme. “A shadow” is the most basic possible metaphor for grief. Not that Deepseek stops with one metaphor! We’re shoveling dirt over an echo here!

It’s hard to imagine anything sticking with me, reading prose like this. It’s pretty good to strip-mine for sentences to capture what I call the “gee whiz” feeling, a surprise at the novelty that a machine made art. But if I saw this on a literary review site, I’d immediately wonder what I was missing.

Compare to this, from an actual Smokelong story, by Allison Field Bell:

She keeps saying she’s moving in. When we’re curled into each other in bed, she says yes and yes and yes. She says, I’ll pack my things. And then the next day, she refuses to hold my hand in the street as we pass by some church. She used to be religious. Believe in god and Jesus and all the ways you can sin. Now she sins every day, she says. With me. The fact that our bodies are the same: small and compact and female. The fact that she’s not used to it: people looking twice in the street when I kiss her. This is Utah after all. This is April with all the tulips and daffodils and purple irises springing to life from bulb.

There’s so much going on! The sentence rhythms vary. No comma between “This is Utah” and “after all”, contributing to the parochial, stilted feeling. Then from there straight into flowers blooming, classically sapphic, and also new relationship energy, and also notice how the narrator, who doesn’t get it, really, doesn’t capitalize “god”. “Now she sins every day, she says. With me.”

If I had 10,000 years to live, I could do close readings of really good flash fiction all day. And honestly, it’s worth reading the whole story – I felt bad cutting it off after just a paragraph!

***

What do you think? I haven’t read a lot of fake prose generated with a specific intention of making it sound like a good literary story. To me, the top, fake, paragraphs, do not look especially fake. I think that first sentence is good. It makes me think I’m reading fantasy or horror, not literary — I want to take this sentence literally. I like this whole paragraph. Of course, this is before we get to the thing about making the shadow a metaphor for grief.

I do think the paragraph from the real story looks more obviously real. Why is that? Well, it just feels more real. Also, it’s true, imo, that the stylistic choices such as lower-casing “god” and leaving out the comma after “Utah” make it seem a lot more human-real rather than AI-fake because AI usually — as far as I can tell — insists on writing almost entirely in correct sentences. Maybe not actually all the time? But nearly.

***

I don’t feel like Deepseek simply fails to make something on this level; rather, I feel like it isn’t even trying. The attractor basin around the most obvious choice is too strong, so at every level AI fiction fails to be surprising. If AI comes up with a plot, the plot will be maximally obvious. But also every metaphor will be maximally obvious, and every sentence structure, and almost every word choice. …

***

I don’t know? I think this: The morning her shadow began unspooling from her feet, Clara found it coiled beneath the kitchen table like a serpent made of smoke. — is a really neat image. I just want it to be literal, not metaphorical, and I want to go on from there with a real story. Not a vignette about grief, a REAL story. I’m thinking of Judith Tarr’s Lord of the Two Lands, where the shadow is a character and also the direct inspiration for the Lakasha in the Tuyo world. When I see this line, I want the serpent made of smoke to be a real character and I want there to be a real plot where stuff happens.

But I guess as you go on with the story, the continuing obviousness of the metaphors probably becomes pretty noticeable. How about the feeling that there’s nothing really there? Does that go along with obviousness? Maybe the word I’m looking for here is “trite.” I know I have said — this is not at all an original observation — that fake AI fiction is enormously heavy on cliches. That’s one of the points this post is making.

The author of this post says: just go to Smokelong, if you doubt this, and read 3 or 4 of them at random. There’s a chill of “ooh, that’s sharp” that the best ones have, even with just a few hundred words. It is totally dissimilar from “ah, yes, I evaluate that as passable”, which as far as I can tell is the current AI ceiling.

I like this because it is a clear-cut dichotomy of perception. Good human writing = Ooh, that’s sharp — I’m sure we all know that feeling. Bad AI writing = Ah, yes, this is passable. I have not noticed that particularly. I’ve mostly thought: This is terrible. But when I’ve thought, “Hey, this is actually good,” maybe that is in fact this feeling that it is passable, distinct from the “Ooh, that’s sharp” feeling when you hit a really good turn of phrase in a real story. I’ll have to pay attention to that now and see if I agree with this dichotomy.

The linked post continues. It’s a long post, not something facile the author tossed off on a whim. You should certainly click through and read the whole thing. The comments are worth reading too.

Then there’s this, from a different post that linked to the one above.

***

Apart from the question of whether R1’s story was better or worse, I couldn’t help but notice that the two stories [generated by different AI generators] felt very, very similar.

I couldn’t shake the sense that the OpenAI story was written in “R1’s style” – a narrow, repetitive, immediately recognizable style that doesn’t quite resemble that of any human author I’ve ever read.

I’m not saying that OpenAI “stole” anything from DeepSeek, here. In fact, I doubt that’s the case.

I don’t know why this happened, but if I had to guess, I would guess it’s convergent evolution: maybe this is just what happens if you optimize for human judgments of “literary quality” in some fairly generic, obvious, “naive” manner. (Just like how R1 developed some of the same quirky “reasoning”-related behaviors as OpenAI’s earlier model o1, such as saying “wait” in the middle of an inner monologue and then pivoting to some new idea.) …

The first time I asked R1 to generate fiction, the result immediately brought this term to mind.

“It feels like flashy, show-offy, highly compressed literary cyberpunk,” I thought.

“Crammed prose full of eyeball kicks: that’s exactly what this is,” I thought. “Trying to wow and dazzle me – and make me think it’s cool and hip and talented – in every single individual phrase. Trying to distill itself down to just that, prune away everything that doesn’t have that effect.”

This kind of prose is “impressive” by design, and it does have the effect of impressing the reader, at least the first few times you see it. But it’s exhausting. There’s no modulation, no room to breathe – just an unrelenting stream of “gee-whiz” effects. (And, as we will see, something they are really just the same few effects, re-used over and over.)

***

This is a different trait of AI generated “literary fiction” — not cliche exactly, but specific literary techniques used over and over so that the technique itself becomes a cliche. The author of this linked post says, identifying the specific technique: In particular: conjunctions that combine one thing that is concrete and/or sensory with another thing that is abstract and/or incorporeal

Which is really interesting, and evidently becomes a strongly obvious “tell” of generated “literary” fiction. Here are other “tells” identified by this post, followed by what the author thinks good writers are doing that AI told to write in a literary style can’t do:

***

First: personification of nature (or the inanimate). “The wind sighed dolorously,” that sort of thing. R1 does this all over the place, possibly because it’s a fairly easy technique (not requiring much per-use innovation or care) which nonetheless strikes most people as distinctively “literary,” especially if they’re not paying enough attention to notice its overuse. …

A vibe in which the suppressed past constantly emerges into the present via echoes and ghosts and whispers and shadows of what-once-was, and the alienating built environment around our protagonist is constantly buzzing and humming and hissing, and also sometimes pulsing like a heartbeat (of course it is – that’s also personification and abstract/concrete conjunction, in a single image!). …

Finally, in case it needs stating: this is not just “what good writing sounds like”!

Humans do not write like this. These stylistic tropes are definitely employed by human writers – and often for good reason – but they have their place. And their place is not “literally everywhere, over and over and over again, in crammed claustrophobic prose that bends over backwards to contort every single phrase into the shape of another contrived ‘wow’ moment.”

If you doubt me, try reading a bunch of DeepSeek fic, and then just read… literally any acclaimed literary fiction writer. … If you’re anything like me, and you actually do this, you’ll feel something like: “Ahh, finally, I can breathe again.” Good human-written stuff is doing something much subtler and more complicated than just kicking your eyeballs over and over, hoping that at some point you’ll exclaim “gee whiz, the robots sure can write these days!” and end up pressing a positive-feedback button in a corporate annotation inference.

Good human-written stuff uses these techniques – among many, many others, and only where apposite for the writer’s purposes – in order to do things. …

This LLM-generated stuff is not “doing anything.” It’s just exploiting certain ordinarily-reliable cues for what “sounds literary,” for what “sounds like the work of someone with talent.” In the hands of humans, these are techniques that can be deployed to specific ends; the LLMs seem to use them arbitrarily and incessantly, trying to “push your buttons” just for the sake of pushing them. (And most of their prose is made up of the same 3-4 buttons, pushed ad nauseam, irrespective of topic and – to all appearances – without any higher-level intent to channel the low-level stuff in any specific, coherent direction.)

It’s fine if you like that: there’s nothing wrong with having your buttons pushed, per se. But don’t come telling me that a machine is “approaching the food-preparation skills of a human-level chef” when what you mean is that it can make exactly one dish, and that dish has a lot of salt and garlic in it, and you really like salt and garlic.

***

Here’s that link again if you’d like to click through. Both these posts plus the links from these posts plus the comments are all worth reading, if you’re at all interested in the question: What do actual skilled authors do that LLMs are not doing? I wasn’t familiar with either author linked above until I happened to follow a link from Astral Codex Ten and went down this rabbit hole, which I hope you will also enjoy following.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post What Makes Fake Literary Fiction Bad? appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Update: Moving Along

A very simple week last week, basically.

Having decided to finish Sekaran, that’s what I worked on, almost exclusively. Thus, at this point, I have three chapters to go rather than five. BUT, probably an epilogue? I think it’s likely to be an epilogue instead of a chapter. Not sure whether that means it’ll be shorter than most chapters or not because that part can go either way. The thing is, the final chapter tied things up in a way that looks to me like the ending, so if I write another bit that’s set later than that, I think I should call it an epilogue.

This sort of question is, of course, totally trivial. The point is, I have three chapters to go. One of them naturally got added recently, largely because I realized there was a fourteen-year gap between one chapter and the next, so I thought I’d put something in that gap, especially because the earlier chapter leaves a somewhat fraught situation hanging and I should resolve that to some degree. Today I will be distracted, but I ought to be able to MOSTLY finish this draft by this time next week, PROBABLY, and then we’ll see.

MEANWHILE

The cover artist who’s doing the cover for The Book Formally Known As World Of Tiers — thanks to whoever referred to the book that way, because it’s funny and I keep sort of thinking of it by that unofficial title — anyway, the cover artist hurt his hand. He thinks the cover shouldn’t be delayed by more than a couple of weeks, so it’s not a big deal, but it means I won’t be showing you the cover this week, which I had thought might well be possible. But, no.

I’m still dithering about what to put in the newsletter. I’m doing The Book Formally Known As W of T (Eight Doors) at my Patreon. I’m still thinking mid-August will be the most likely date to drop the full novel there, September 2 at Amazon, provided the hand injury does not prove worse than expected. But what about the NEWSLETTER? I was going to put Sekaran into the newsletter when I thought it would be shorter, but it’s not going to be shorter, so …? It just tipped over 75,000 words, by the way.

I may still drop the first chapter of Sekaran into my newsletter because it’s right there.

However, I’m also thinking of writing a short story from Vayu’s point of view, fleshing out the little story that Arayo tells Tano about Vayu in Hedesa. That previous sentence strikes me as funny because wow, I just crammed a lot of names into one clause of that sentence. Anyway, does everyone remember who Vayu is? He’s the young man who arranged to give Tano a chance to escape from the inTasiyo and then took his little brother and joined the inKera. We meet Arayo briefly during the events of Hedesa and he tells Tano that Vayu is doing fine and there’s this little story involved, and I think that would be fun to write. So I dashed off a couple pages of this potential story, purely with an eye to perhaps dropping that into the newsletter. Not this month, but next month, because I don’t think I can complete that story in the next few days AND because it should probably go into the newsletter after everyone has had a chance to read Hedesa.

Any story that appears in my newsletter will also appear on my Patreon, either close to the same time OR as the story is finished. Given that everything always turns out to be longer than anticipated, if the Vayu story goes to two chapters, then it’ll appear in two consecutive newsletters and then in finished form on my Patreon.

MEANWHILE

It amuses me that ridiculously generic tabby cats can be so charming and beautiful. Magdalene jumped off the railing to say hi the first time I tried to take a picture of her, but later decided to pose properly.

Maximilian

Magdalene

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Update: Moving Along appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

What is talent?

So, this is a question that comes up from time to time, along with things like, “What is quality?” or “What is excellence?” And in the same breath, “Is there such a thing as quality or is it all opinion?” And in this previous post about excellence, I said, There is clearly such a thing as excellence, and added a fundamental conclusion, which can be recognized by experts in the field, who find the excellent thing absorbing in a way that non-excellent things just aren’t.

So that leads to this different but related question: Is there such a thing as talent? And if so, what is it? The link in this paragraph says:

[B]readth and depth of expertise is typically acquired through 10 years of deliberate practice, where a motivated individual constantly strives to learn from feedback, and engages in targeted exercises

And this strongly suggests that talent = dedicated practice, which is not a bad answer, in my opinion. The linked article is all “directed by a mentor” and I’m not so sure that’s a thing in learning to write, because few skilled novelists have a parent who was a novelist. I mean, I’m sure it’s not zero, but it’s not a lot. Almost no novelist is going to have a mentor to guide them in practice for ten years. This is going to have to be self-directed practice for almost all novelists, I think. I don’t think I’m wrong or misled by my own experience, which basically included zero mentors.

The linked article continues: While deliberate practice is a large part of the story of success, it is unlikely to be the entire story. After all, what contributes to the motivation to practice in the first place?

And that latter question is the part I think matters. In the context of writing, related questions get asked, such as, “Is talent a thing when it comes to writing fiction, or is it all learned skill? Can you teach someone to be a good writer of fiction if they aren’t already gifted?” Gifted, here, in this sense, is the same thing as talented.

You get people such as James Scott Bell saying, “Sure, I can teach you how to write fiction,” and you get things like the exceedingly well know Clarion workshop, which apparently yields a positive return for a good many attendees, such as here and here, though presumably not all of them. I agree, in a way: I think once someone has reached a certain level of sentence-level skill, then it’s probably mostly possible to teach that person something like basic story structure and they can probably learn to write at least passible stories, and I’m thinking of a handful of bestselling novels with fairly terrible first pages, such as this one, and some of these, and concluding that it probably doesn’t take that much for someone to learn to write to that standard, maybe even a better standard than that.

Which does not say anything about talent, unless it says talent is unimportant. Which I don’t actually believe. I think talent is very important, which kicks the question back to “What is talent?” and “Is talent the same thing as practice?”

And what I am thinking of here is Mira Grant saying that, when she was in high school, she wrote a sonnet every day. I am almost totally sure I saw her say that somewhere. (Twitter?) I’m going to assume for the moment that I did see her mention something like this someplace, even though I don’t recall where I saw it and can’t provide a link. For my purposes, what matters is that this is totally believable.

How many professional novelists did something like that, I wonder? Because I bet it was a lot. Not exactly this sonnet-a-day thing, of course, but something LIKE that. This is where the ten years of dedicated practice happened: when the novelist was really young, self-directed, for fun.

I did not do that exact thing, and actually I kind of wish I had thought of it, but that didn’t occur to me. I did do other things. I wrote some poetry – I’m sure it was quite terrible. My impression was and is that a lot of young people play with poetry, and that certainly should build a feel for language provided they are not seduced into the “ordinary prose expressing trite ideas with random line breaks thrown in” fake poetry thing that is exceedingly common these days. (I realize this indictment is a bit over the top, but on the other hand, I’m not sure it’s all that far over.) Personally, I played with sonnets and other structured forms, because I liked structured forms far more than freeform poetry. Writing a villanelle is a kind of solitaire except with wordplay instead of cards, and the rules are part of the game.

I liked diagramming sentences, too. That’s as much a kind of wordplay as writing a sonnet. I also noticed specific words and phrases, and remembered them. I learned “supererogatory” from Jack Vance – even though I didn’t like Vance’s books. I learned “chatoyant” from Cherryh. When I was just a tiny kid, I read the Jungle Books and from then on thought of the spots of a black leopard as showing through the background black of the coat “like watered silk,” even though I hardly even knew what silk was and had no idea what drops of water would look like on silk. Lord Peter Whimsey handed me, “Entrancing as it may be to wander through a garden of bright images, are we not distracting our minds from a matter of almost equal importance?”

Come to think of it, when I sat down and memorized mammal taxonomy for fun as a teenager, I bet that was also partly because taxonomy is yet another kind of wordplay, and my knack for remembering taxonomic names came from that.

 Also, which I think was more important, I collected lots of poetry and some prose passages, writing them longhand in a series of thick notebooks. Those are still around for sure; they’re on a shelf in a closet downstairs. Lots of random poems, anything I happened to like that was reasonably short, because I was hardly going to re-copy the Epic of Gilgamesh. The longest poem in there, as far as I can recollect, is “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” Which is a kind of extended wordplay in itself, come to think of it.

When I think about it at all, I can recall many lines of poetry from those notebooks.

If the red slayer thinks he slays or the slain think he is slain.

And who, tolling, tolling, tolling, in that muffled monotone, feel a glory in so rolling on the human heart a stone.

Does the road wind uphill all the way? Yes, to the very end.

Be in me as the eternal mood of the bleak wind, and not as transient things are – gaiety of flowers.

Lots of poems from Tolkien and The Dark is Rising and who knows what all are right there, mixed in with classic poetry. Whatever caught my eye.

What does that have to do with talent? Well, it draws a neat arrow that I think is absolutely  fundamental to talent, like so:

Attentive interest at a young age  —————->  Lo! Talent!

With a lot of years embedded in the arrow. Those years are where actual dedicated practice takes place, and I wonder how many professional authors practiced writing stories in their early teens? Not with a mentor, but on their own? Because I bet it’s a lot, and I also bet it’s more than it seems. If you were conducting a poll and you asked me, “So, Rachel, when did you write your first real story?” I would think about it and say, “When I was an undergrad, I think, but it might have been when I was in grad school.” But that misses the astronomical amount of practice embedded in making up stories with plots while pretending to pay some sort of attention in class, which started long before that, and I was really good at faking paying attention, by the way. If a teacher asked me a question, I could literally replay fifteen seconds of class lecture or discussion in my head and respond as though I had been paying attention when I had absolutely not been paying any attention whatsoever, which probably puzzled the teachers who could tell I wasn’t paying attention. [I learned the class material by reading the books and doing the homework, mostly.] [I have totally lost that skill, which every now and then I regret very much.]Most of that storytelling practice was absolutely ridiculous self-insert storytelling, which is of course perfectly fine and probably just about universal for young teenagers who are telling stories.

But of course a ton of young writers do write down stories, and a lot of them write fanfic, which may teach them, rough estimate, one thousand times more than they will ever learn in a classroom. I mean, not if they don’t want to learn storytelling craft. But if they do, then fanfic can be a great place to do that. I never wrote fanfic because (a) there weren’t any fanfic forums at the time, as this was way before the internet, and also (b) I would probably have been way too shy, but also, (c) I couldn’t capture the voices of other people’s characters. This is not a skill of mine. I think today I might be able to do it for some characters and stories, but I’m not sure and it might be just impossible. I’m sure a fair number of young authors still write just for themselves, though. I mean, that just seems likely.

But no matter whether someone wrote poetry or stories or both, I think that probably, as a rule, if you look at somebody who is in their thirties or above and talented at something artistic, or actually at anything, then the odds are extremely high they didn’t start playing with that thing when they were twenty-nine. They started when they were nine, maybe earlier, and if they’re talented at writing, then they started just by being interested in words and sentences, paragraphs and poetry, and then they put a whole lot of attention into practice, possibly not very visibly. This is the practice that led to their talent. And this actually ties back into the idea of excellence, because another associated concept is that the pursuit of excellence is intrinsically motivating. Not for everyone, and this pursuit of excellence can be directed in all kinds of different directions, but this is why pursuing excellence in writing doesn’t require a mentor. The actual striving to write really well was intrinsically motivating for authors who later are called “talented.” It was motivating for a long time, for years, and that’s why skilled writers got to be skilled and then people point to them and say, “How talented.”

That’s what I think explains a whole lot of talent, anyway.

Not that I’ve taken a poll. I wonder what the results would be, if someone did put together a poll like that? I wonder whether, say, Scott Alexander would say, “Sure, I played with words and sentences all the time as a kid.” If you found a significant number of people who are obviously very talented at writing but said No to a question like that, that would be a puzzle and I guess I’d have to ask, “Fine, what besides INTEREST and DEDICATED PRACTICE combined with STRIVING FOR EXCELLENCE could lead to obvious TALENT?” And I don’t know whether there’s an alternate pathway to get there, but right now, I think that’s the basic equation. With savants being an exception, and how that works I have no idea. Though I doubt very much it’s possible to have a real child savant novelist, the way you can sometimes see that for music.

***

What isn’t talent?

Desire. The desire to do something isn’t talent.

This isn’t just the classic “want to have written a novel, not write a novel.” I’m thinking of an essentially infinite number of questions on Quora that fall into this genre: “I’m thirteen and I’ve finished my first novel. How can I publish it?” “I want to publish a novel before I graduate from high school, how can I do that?” and so on.

And the only sensible answer is: Good for you, finishing a novel! Put it away and write something else, and when you are eighteen, take a look at that novel again and see what you think of it.

As a side note, for a lot of practical reasons, it’s unwise for a kid to attempt to publish a book before the kid is old enough to legally sign contracts. I mean, if the kid publishes using Mom’s Amazon account and screws up badly enough, it’s Mom’s account that will get permanently nuked, and I bet that would cause a certain amount of family friction. I also think it’s unkind to encourage a kid to self-publish some really direly terrible novel, though a self-published book can always be unpublished later, so it’s not as bad as it could be.

But my point is: The feeling that you should publish or must publish looks to me like something that is likely to specifically interfere with the long years of practice while striving to write a novel that isn’t just finished, but is objectively excellent. Where in this push to publish is the drive for excellence? To me, it looks like it drowned in the drive for speed above all. In the case of the very young author, what you have is

Attentive interest at a young age  ————–>  You probably aren’t here yet, sorry.

There are also a whole bunch of questions written by older people that fall into this genre: “I want to write a novel; is it okay to have more than one point of view character in a novel?” I mean, it’s some sort of question that makes it clear the person has never read any significant number of novels, or if they have, somehow they failed to notice that a whopping huge proportion of novels have multiple protagonists. In the case of the nonreader who decides they want to write a novel, the situation is

No interest until now  —————->  Sorry, you are way, way, way behind the arrow.

And while the young author will probably get there if they keep moving forward and don’t get too distracted by other things in life, I think the nonreader will never get there, even if they take James Scott Bell’s class or something like that. While it’s true anyone can plug words into a story structure, it’s hard to see what they can do to overcome the disadvantage of not having paid any attention to any kind of writing craft for thirty years or more, because I’m pretty sure that —

Intrinsic interest + attentive practice + striving for excellence = talent

In writing novels as in basically a whole lot of other difficult endeavors.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post What is talent? appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Poetry Thursday: Golden Summertime

Contributed by Kim, and thank you, Kim! Perfect for the season —

Wine of Summer

Lord Alfred Douglas

The sun holds all the earth and all the sky 
From the gold throne of this midsummer day. 
In the soft air the shadow of a sigh
Breathes on the leaves and scarcely makes them sway. 
The wood lies silent in the shimmering heat, 
Save where the insects make a lazy drone, 
And ever and anon from some tree near, 
             A dove’s enamoured moan, 
Or distant rook’s faint cawing harsh and sweet, 
Comes dimly floating to my listening ear.

Right in the wood’s deep heart I lay me down, 
And look up at the sky between the leaves, 
Through delicate lace I see her deep blue gown. 
Across a fern a scarlet spider weaves 
From branch to branch a slender silver thread,
And hangs there shining in the white sunbeams, 
A ruby tremulous on a streak of light. 
            And high above my head 
One spray of honeysuckle sweats and dreams, 
With one wild honey-bee for acolyte.

My nest is all untrod and virginal, 
And virginal the path that led me here, 
For all along the grass grew straight and tall, 
And live things rustled in the thicket near:
And briar rose stretched out to sweet briar rose 
Wild slender arms, and barred the way to me 
With many a flowering arch, rose-pink or white,
            As bending carefully. 
Leaving unbroken all their blossoming bows, 
I passed along, a reverent neophyte.

The air is full of soft imaginings,
They float unseen beneath the hot sunbeams,
Like tired moths on heavy velvet wings.
They droop above my drowsy head like dreams.
The hum of bees, the murmuring of doves.
The soft faint whispering of unnumbered trees.
Mingle with unreal things, and low and deep
            From visionary groves, 
Imagined lutes make voiceless harmonies. 
And false flutes sigh before the gates of sleep.

O rare sweet hour! O cup of golden wine! 
The night of these my days is dull and dense, 
And stars are few, be this the anodyne!
Of many woes the perfect recompense.
I thought that I had lost for evermore
The sense of this ethereal drunkenness, 
This fierce desire to live, to breathe, to be;
            But even now, no less 
Than in the merry noon that danced before 
My tedious night, I taste its ecstasy.

Taste, and remember all the summer days 
That lie, like golden reflections in the lake 
Of vanished years, unreal but sweet always; 
Soft luminous shadows that I may not take 
Into my hands again, but still discern 
Drifting like gilded ghosts before my eyes. 
Beneath the waters of forgotten things.
            Sweet with faint memories,

And mellow with old loves that used to burn 
Dead summer days ago, like fierce red kings.
And this hour too must die, even now the sun
Droops to the sea, and with untroubled feet
The quiet evening comes: the day is done.
The air that throbbed beneath the passionate heat
Grows calm and cool and virginal again.
The colour fades and sinks to sombre tones.
As when in youthful cheeks a blush grows dim.
            Hushed are the monotones 
Of doves and bees, and the long flowery lane 
Rustles beneath the wind in playful whim.

Gone are the passion and the pulse that beat 
With fevered strokes, and gone the unseen things 
That clothed the hour with shining raiment meet 
To deck enchantments and imaginings. 
No joy is here but only neutral peace 
And loveless languor and indifference, 
And faint remembrance of lost ecstasy.
            The darkening shades increase. 
My dreams go out like tapers—I must hence. 
Far off I hear Night calling to the sea.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Poetry Thursday: Golden Summertime appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.