In this week’s vlog I spend most of my time talking about stuff I’m not ready to talk about yet. Very pro move, me.
Monthly Archives: January 2024
Writing Vlog – 01-24-2024
I’m preparing for a new kind of story so I made a new kind of outline! I talk about it in today’s video.
How to End the World
In the haunting opening of Andrew Klavan’s The House of Love and Death a team of firefighters burst into a burning building and discover four murdered people. Staggered by the tragedy, they drag the corpses out of the house. It’s only then that they spot a young boy, not yet ten, standing on the edge of the woods watching the chaos unfold. They dash over to ask him if he lived in the house. When he indicates he did they ask him who was inside, doubtless wondering if they’d found everyone who should be inside. The boy answers, “Everyone.”
I was on vacation when I started writing this current series of essays. It was fun to jot down a few ideas on subjects to tackle and I already had most of the notes I needed to write my series on process so I felt I was in a pretty good place. I just had one issue to tackle. As a former journalism student I try to pull lessons on writing from the headlines of the day, since I find a lot of interesting ideas swirling in current events which we often overlook because events are much more pressing that fiction or history. Problem was, I didn’t see a whole lot of interesting things in the news to riff on.
However the world is a big place. As I packed my bags and got on a plane to head home I figured I’d find something to write about in the headlines sooner or later. Things just keep happening, after all. So I left my phone on airplane mode and read The House of Love and Death until the last leg of my flight touched down. I didn’t really pay much attention to the wider world until late that afternoon, when I was settled in and had groceries in my fridge again.
That was on the 7th of October, 2023. I didn’t know it at the time but the latest round of interesting news was writing itself in Israel and Gaza.
In the days since, the opening of Klavan’s latest novel and the brutal images of war in Israel have become inextricably linked in my mind. My initial instinct was to avoid writing on the topic. With the fog of war and the fierce propaganda swirling it felt like anything I could say would lack factual foundation and probably be irrelevant in a week’s time. Beyond that, I’m inclined to meet these kind of events as Job decided to. Put my hand over my mouth and avoid speaking too soon, because the meaning of these kinds of tragedies is best left in the hands of He who is higher than I.
And I really didn’t need to stare at that kind of thing all day.
Yet there’s people everywhere who meet this kind of event with a need to scream and shout about the evils that must have brought these tragedies about. How we have to stop the violence somehow, else the world will end. How can we allow these things to spiral up and out of control when we have a duty, even an obligation to extract ourselves from the situation before we make everything worse? The patience of Job is a sin in the face of such duties, is it not?
This busybody hand wringing is what initially brought Job to my mind. It reminds me of his friends, who came to him as he mourned his family, and tried to browbeat him into repenting for imagined sins. I understand why. This is an aspect of human nature that’s universal, a desire to seize control of a bad situation and rectify the failures that lead to the disaster before it brings about the end of the world. However, that is hubris of the highest form.
It was Klavan that made me realize that. You see, when those firefighters found that boy in the opening of The House of Love and Death they found someone who’s entire life was destroyed. The house he was raised in was gone. His family, while far from perfect, still provided some measure of stability and he had a nanny who showed genuine care for him. These people were all that mattered to him. Thus, when asked who was in his house, he answers, “Everyone.”
Outside of those walls who was there that mattered to him? No one. No one at all. For him, the world was already ended.
I have seen many pictures of that kind of devastation in the weeks since October 7th, each and every one of them as devastating to someone as that opening in Klavan’s novel. It’s one of the powers of art to help illuminate these kinds of experiences. That’s why I now struggle to separate those pictures from that scene. It also showed me the very simple lesson for storytelling that I’d ignored.
People are very small and very limited. Although we rail against that and try to seize control of situations that stretch far beyond our grasp the fact is that this is more for our own comfort than out of any serious designs on changing these devastating circumstances. Like that boy discovered, the end of the world is far closer than we think. It’s very easy to slip into panicked clutching at control or total despair when we feel that end closing in. Yet, at the same time, most of us will be surprised at the form that end takes.
These twin lessons are what I’ve taken away from the news this time – how easy it is to end the world, and how futile the boasting of those who claim they can avert it. I look back in some shame on some stories I’ve written along these lines in the past. I’ve always tried to address loss and death with a balanced and realistic view but the more I see these things play out around me the less satisfaction I take from my own efforts to depict them. I’ve yet to manage something equal to the heavy emotional hit I found in The House of Love and Death. That’s alright, though, there will be plenty of opportunities to try again. Even if I don’t get it right the next time around, it’s not the end of the world.
With this we reach the end of my meditations on writing for this outing. As per usual, there will be a week off followed by the introduction to a new series that we’ll be following for at least a few months. So I’ll see you in February for the beginning of the Sidereal Saga. See you then!
AI and the Digital Frame
The use of Artificial Intelligence in creative endeavors is a topic of growing debate, with people who are strongly for it and strongly against it. Personally, I don’t think AI is as big a “threat” to creativity as some pretend. I also don’t think it’s a huge boon to creativity that many of its biggest boosters imagine it will be, although I certainly think it will have uses very soon. Let me explain what things look like from my very casual understanding of AI and my much deeper understanding of the art of storytelling.
First of all, let’s address the term Artificial Intelligence. This is a marketing term. There are a number of assumptions baked into the term which I don’t entirely agree with, although I will be using the term AI for the bulk of this post. What the programs we call AI do is they use mathematical algorithms to predict categories and outcomes. Pattern recognition and prediction is a function of intelligence. However, AI does not organize the information that it uses to make predictions by itself, it relies extensively on user input to create connections between data points then uses very advanced math to predict further connections or to anticipate what connections people would make between new data points.
A more honest term would be algorithmic prediction. However predictions are much riskier things than intelligence so the decision has been made to brand these programs as AI. There’s a lot of tricky things baked into this idea, not the least of which is that prediction is intelligence. That could be a whole essay in itself but I’ll leave it be for now. Let’s move on to the second important part of the discussion for the purposes of my area of expertise, the large language model.
AI that takes gives output via text or voice synthesizer choose their own words based on a large language model (LLM). These models analyze truly titanic quantities of text to build an idea of how the human language is used. Typically they are trained on some portion of the available text on the Internet. Risky? Undoubtedly. Most of the Internet is used by people who use its anonymity as an excuse to prolong their adolescence and write accordingly. As a result many of the “chat” AI out there, like ChatGPT, come off as shallow and immature. Personally I don’t think that’s a shortcoming of the technology but rather a shortcoming of how it’s been trained to make predictions. But I digress.
Once a LLM is trained you prompt it with a few words and concepts and the AI sees how those words are connected in its data sets, clubs them into the most common format out in the wild and regurgitates it all for you to read. Of course, it adjusts the format according to certain rules in its coding. AI tends to write with excellent spelling, grammar and punctuation, for example, even though much of the Internet has none of those things. So, with this information about LLMs in mind let’s talk about using AI in storytelling.
The art of telling a story involves very deliberately taking events and arranging them into a narrative to create character development and provoke an emotional response from the audience. The nature of a LLM makes it a very poor tool for this undertaking. Remember, the way AI works is by using it’s LLM to predict the most likely way words and concepts are connected. So if you use AI to build a story concept you will get what is statistically most common for that kind of story. I cannot think of any less creative way to tell a story. It may be mathematically deliberate but math doesn’t define character development or emotional response. Emotion, in particular, is blunted when the same emotional stimulus comes in over and over, which is exactly what you will get when statistics drive your outcomes. You might argue it’s the entire point.
If you’ve ever read any fiction on the Internet you’re probably aware that a huge amount of it is very derivative. Repetitive, predictable characters, plots and settings. There’s nothing wrong with writing something a lot like something you’ve read, in fact it’s one of the most important exercises for developing writers in my book. But when you’re building a LLM all that repetition weights the model towards those overemphasized story components. The AI is going to give you more of that than anything else. In short, your story will be confined by the whims of whatever is popular on the Internet, making it even more predictable and derivative.
In time, it may be possible to dig into the structure of your LLM and tweak what elements are weighted and how but even then, it will still be in service to an AI. It’s still a predictive – and predictable – algorithm.
The second problem with AI as a creative tool is the ability of the programmer to build frames into how it delivers output. I mentioned this already. AI chatbots can be programmed to regurgitate text with proper grammar, punctuation and spelling and that’s not something that’s well reflected on the Internet, after all. Those are guidelines programmed into the AI by their creators.
There is no guarantee that these will be the only preprogrammed tools put in place to bound the output of the AI. In point of fact there’s plenty of evidence other such tools already exist. People who have tinkered with ChatGPT have found it has very strict ideological blinders placed on it and many of the variants of AI image generators will reject prompts with certain key words like “fiery” in them. Yes, the word fiery is banned. No, it’s not clear why. Right now these constraints are very obvious.
However, like all computer software, AI is getting more seamless in how you interface with it and more opaque in how its internal logic works. I doubt the creators of these tools will have them simply reject prompts they dislike for much longer. Soon they’ll just replace these undesirable prompts with more palatable ones. The end user probably won’t even be able to detect the change.
This second problem is the part of AI that really disturbs me about the technology, that audiences and creators will have their creativity bounded by the constraints of programmers without even realizing the straight jacket being put on them. It’s why I currently view the technology with great suspicion. And its why I have no plans to use it in any of my endeavors at the moment, no matter how great the time savings from doing so potentially are.
Now I’m not a total pessimist. I think there are a ton of very useful applications for AI in creativity coming down the pipe. So far none of the basic structural issues of algorithmic prediction or LLMs have been overcome so AI still pushes towards homogeneity but that’s not insurmountable. If deployed carefully and judiciously, to handle small tasks, that can be balanced out. The digital framing problem is more complex. I doubt the danger it poses can be entirely removed ever, since it’s an effect of the human nature of AI creators rather than a result of some shortcoming of the technology. In that matter you’ll just have to find programmers who you think you can trust and pay as much attention as possible to what happens when you prompt it. That’s still years away, though.
In the mean time, continue to watch the technology develop with a wary eye. When the conditions are right for widespread use of AI the creative landscape will begin to change incredibly fast. If you’re ready for it that will be a once in a lifetime opportunity to get your stories out. I am waiting for it with great interest.
Consistency is Key
Consistency is the foundation of good work. This is true in creative pursuits as much as any other kind of undertaking. A painter that creates a Rembrandt one day and cubism the next doesn’t look like much of an artist as they don’t look like they have a grasp on their style and technique. They cannot consistently show the audience something. An author who never finishes a story but has great prose isn’t much fun to read. One reason I’ve never jelled with American comics is the constantly changing creative teams. The wild swings in tone, art and writing really grates on me and reduces my investment in the characters and stories.
At the same time, as a creator myself, I understand how draining it can be to focus on a single set of characters and developing new story lines for them while maintaining consistency. Audiences also have a maximum tolerance for kinds of stories. They don’t want to consume the same thing over and over again, they do want to see some variation on themes and new characters to add intrigue and new perspectives. On the other hand, they don’t want things to depart too far from what they know and love. It’s a delicate balancing act. However in my experience proving consistency and baseline competence is the foundation on which variation and personal flair is built. This is true in building your narratives and your rapport with the audience.
There’s lots of talk about how to build consistency in narrative. For good reason. That’s the foundation of storytelling after all. However if you cannot find a sizable enough rapport with your audience then the consistency of your story isn’t that important as no one is listening to it. So today I wanted to examine the question of how to build that rapport with your audience. We’re going to do that through the lens of some comic companies I’ve been following for a few months or years but before diving into what these up and comers are doing we need a little context.
While I’m not an expert on the American comic book industry – as noted above there are aspects to the major company’s approaches to storytelling I don’t like – I have noticed it seems to run on a cycle. Every twenty to thirty years, call it once a generation, it collapses and a handful of companies carry on the legacy. Both Marvel and DC Comics are amalgams of characters and stories acquired from other, failed companies over the years. These companies have come and gone since comics first came around but the two major powerhouses have done the hard work of preserving and sustaining the best pieces of those competitors for future generations.
Unfortunately, these Frankenstein patchworks aren’t very consistent. DC manages things through a series of reboots that are intended to reset characters and make it easier to get into the swing of things but rarely succeed in that goal. Marvel just retcons details. Tony Stark, for example, became Iron Man when he was kidnapped by opposing forces in an overseas war. Over time that war has been Korea, Vietnam and a handful of places in the Middle East, although the organization known as the Ten Rings was always involved in some way. Regardless, keeping the mess straight can be difficult.
The consistency the two big companies does have is a consistency of release. They put out new books every week and ongoing titles (the comic term for a long running series focused on a particular character or group) come out once a month, barring special promotional runs. This means fans do get a consistent story they can look forward to. Or they can about 60% of the time, when the industry is in the middle of one of its periodic contractions most of these titles get canceled without warning and then your favorite title is… less consistent.
Right now the big two are on the verge of one of those periodic contractions, if they aren’t in it already. Many titles get canceled after only a few issues. The stores that make their entire business selling these comics to the public are closing wholesale and predictions are there will be half as many comic stores in 2025 as there were in 2015. That’s not good.
While the future of mainstream comics and the stores that cater to them is bleak there’s plenty of opportunity for outsiders to step in and try to stake out a place for their own work.
One such person is Eric July, who’s Rippaverse publishing imprint has so far released three titles and reports a total intake of about $7 million. Financially that’s an impressive achievement. It’s hard to pin down exactly why July’s comic initiative did so well when most independent comics haven’t. The obvious possibility is that July had a huge following interested in comics already. He cut his teeth doing a daily podcast on comics and pop culture. As of this writing his YouTube channel, YoungRippa59, has 511 thousand subscribers, a considerable audience already interested in the kind of product he would eventually market to them. I have no doubt that was an initial portion of what attracted his audience. However, on his first outing he drew three and a half million of the seven million dollars his company boasts, much more than well established comic creators with equally sizable social media audiences. Clearly the existing audience doesn’t explain all of it. What I suspect has just as much to do with it is the Rippaverse Code, a series of promises from July to his audience. Among these promises is a pledge to avoid reboots and multiverses. In the eyes of the general comic audience, and Eric July in particular, these are two of the major sources of the inconsistencies and breakdowns in narrative that plague mainstream comics. On top of that, it promises not to pass superhero mantels from one character to the next. At first glance that looks like a silly pledge to make but this constant transferring of a superhero identity to different people is a bit like the painter who switches from ultra realism to cubism. It makes the characters very inconsistent.
I think it’s this pledge, targeted at the things many fans feel ruin the consistency of their stories, that drove a lot of the interest in July’s story. Since then the Rippaverse has had some growing pains. The interest in the company’s first outing far outstripped their infrastructure and an oversight in checking trademarks has embroiled the company in some potentially costly litigation. Still, the company is largely back on track with roughly quarterly releases. July continues to serve as the face of the company, which gives the audience a reliable touchstone although does create some PR liabilities.
For example, I didn’t know much about July before checking out his comic. I find his personality as presented to the public fairly abrasive and I wouldn’t go out of my way to spend a lot of time around him. Also, his marketing relies heavily on flash and doesn’t say much about the stories themselves. On the other hand, this would be fine if the stories were good and the marketing just needed to perk enough interest in them to draw you in. Unfortunately, while July is a musician he isn’t a well trained storyteller. His stories so far haven’t been very clear, well paced or engaging.
There’s telling signs that the inconsistency between story quality and marketing is taking its toll. His audience is shrinking in terms of both how much money they invest in the product and in terms of absolute numbers. It’s not just a case of people buying fewer shirts and collectibles with their comic order. Fewer people overall are buying comics. Again, based on my understanding of the industry, this is pretty common in startup comic companies. If July follows the general pattern of a company like Image Comics, his imprint will probably shrink to about half its starting size over the next two years and then begin slowly growing year over year from there. Assuming it survives, which is not a guarantee in any industry.
Still, the surprising outpouring of interest and money that first greeted the Rippaverse bears some testimony to the effect of promising consistency. Again, there were other factors that also played a role in July’s outstanding initial success. But those factors existed in many other cases and only July managed to find the level of response he did so I believe the added factor of consistency, or a pledge thereof, is important.
Another sign of the importance of consistency is the Kamen America franchise, written by Mark Pellegrini and illustrated by Timothy Lim. This franchise is distributed by the company Iconic Comics, a company that focuses on warehousing and fulfilling orders for a select group of independent comic makers. While the Iconic creators are comfortable collaborating they are ultimately in charge of their own brands. There are yearly crossover events but they do no hijack the plot of ongoing titles. The entire scope of Iconic Comics is hard to compress into this summary, nor is it particularly important, so I’m going to leave the summary at that. Right now I want to emphasize the approach Lim and Pellegrini have taken.
This creative team puts out one book every quarter, much like Eric July. However, the Kamen team has been at it for a good four years and boasts a much more extensive backlog. While the artistic direction is a little more cartoony than that in July’s titles and the genre is closer to Power Rangers than Superman, Lim and Pellegrini have pushed out a huge number of titles that their audience enjoys. The continuity is consistent and the character work is charming.
What’s most impressive is that the Kamen audience has grown, rather than shrunk. It’s hard to get comprehensive numbers as the title is available through three different platforms, two crowdfunding sites and the Iconic Comics web store. Unfortunately there are no sales figures for the Iconic store but we do have the crowdfunding stats. There may be some customer overlap between the two platforms but they’re fairly consistent over time.
Kamen America Volume One netted approximately 2,600 sales on initial offering and the most recent release, Volume Eight, netted about 3,300 sales. (For those wondering, the seven other titles Lim and Pellegrini released in the past four years were crossovers or part of another franchise. The numbers are generally lower than the Kamen franchise. The growth in sales of Black Hops, the other franchise, and crossovers is roughly proportionate to Kamen America, just lower in absolute value.)
There was a bit of a drop in the beginning, as Lim and Pellegrini tried various things, but they’ve shown slow but constant growth over time. Only steady, consistent work has made that growth possible. While we don’t know the full scope of that work, as the Iconic store is quite opaque, I have seen personal accounts of people who discovered the series through the Iconic store. Lim and Pellegrini haven’t made a big pledge like July did but they now have enough of a track record to assure us they’re going to do their best to turn out satisfying, dependable work that will entertain and delight readers. They tend to keep a fairly low profile now but they did have some high profile feuds early on. Consistent work eventually drowned that out, which may be some comfort to July.
Either way, consistent work clearly pays big dividends to creators who promise it and put in the work to bring it to fruition. Not huge returns in a short period of time. But enough to be worthwhile to those who can make that promise to their audience. That’s something I’ve tried my best to bring to the table on this blog and I’ve seen those small returns over the years. As July, Lim and Pellegrini prove, I’m not alone in that and hopefully you won’t be, either.
Year in Review Video
Year in review video is out, I talk about how I did on goals last year and set some new ones for the year to come.
Nate Chen Publications 