Author Archives: natechen

AI and the Digital Frame

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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

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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

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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.

Indie Fiction Round-Up For Winter 2023

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I’ve been involved in critiquing and reviewing a number of independently published novels in the past year and I thought I’d bring you my thoughts on three of the best I’ve read so far.

Jiseidai – by Daniel P. Riley

This is a series with two installments so far, focusing on rogue assassin Gabriel on the run from the dystopian megacorp that raised him, trained him and gave him superpowers. Gabriel stumbles upon Hana, a young, abused girl and agrees to save her. He winds up fleeing into the ruins of old Tokyo with Hana, doing his best to avoid pursuit and come to grips with what his role in life is going to be now that he’s left everything he’s known.

There’s plenty of dystopian cyberpunk stories out there and plenty of stories about hardened killers turning over a new leaf. The general direction of these two genres is contradictory so Riley has a hard row to hew here. However so far he’s done a pretty good job of balancing the fun, scifi concepts of near future scientific progress run amok with a much more straight forward narrative of grace and redemption. While I do feel that classifying Jiseidai as true cyberpunk is a bit of a misnomer otherwise it hits what it aims at.

In particular the description of Gabriel’s fighting techniques is quite good. I don’t know if Riley studied budo or kenjutsu in a dojo but he clearly has a decent grasp on the basic concepts and manages to make them halfway believable in the technologically enhanced world Gabriel and Hana live in. Another common concept in Eastern development that runs through Jiseidai is cultivation. In most martial arts stories cultivating refers to the process of isolating and enhancing your internal energies, a foundational concept to the mystic elements of those tales. In Jiseidai what we get instead is a cultivation of relationships. Human connections, human empathy and human morality are central to the growth of our protagonists and seeing them spending as much time refining those instincts and potential is very gratifying. Far more so than the sterile, medicinal processes of cultivation in more run of the mill wuxia fair, although there is a cybernetic flavor of that too.

The Curse of the Star Wraiths – by The Lord Otter

This is a tale of two brothers who must set right the wrongs they have endured. The Curse of the Star Wraiths is a very sword and sandal, Conan the Barbarian style story of vengeance and triumph. Normally this kind of thing is not my cup of tea. However it also involves airships, ancient civilizations and floating ruins and that, my friends, is 100% my caffeinated beverage of choice, so I was willing to deal with the rest.

Don’t get me wrong. Otter has written a story with a lot of elements tailor made to get my attention but the story is by no means perfect. His prose is a little rough at points and his transitions between some scenes or between points of view are often a little jarring. His dialog can feel a bit stilted, although I believe part of that is a purposeful attempt to make it feel archaic and in that it succeeds. It won’t work for everyone, though. All in all, the rough prose is not a big issue. It is his first work and there’s plenty of room to allow for improvement there and I think most people can enjoy the narrative in spite of that. On the other hand, the core of the story is something he handles very well so far.

Steel and Stormbright, his protagonists, have a wholesome, brotherly relationship. It sounds odd to say that but seeing such simple, straight forward and wholesome male friendship its rare and precious these days and I’m very glad the effort has been put into it. Likewise, the target of their vengeance, General Caerst, manages to feel worth of their ire without lapsing into caricature. While Caerst’s goddess does come off as a bit cartoonish… she is a pagan deity. Subtlety is not their forte.

In short, if you want a crazy story about two brothers looking to save their father from slavery and avenge themselves on the civilization that enslaved them, The Curse of the Star Wraiths will bring you the first installment in just such a story with the promise of more to come from an author with a creative mind and promising skill. It’s my hope that sticking with it will let us see the brothers grow into something truly special.

The Waking Nightmares – by M.D. Boncher

If you’ve ever wanted a Flash Gordon style serial about a powerful, almost godlike invader destroying Earth and leaving a handful of people to pick up the wreckage, the Tales from the Dream Nebula series might be just what you wanted. The Waking Nightmares is the third installment in that series. In it, interplanetary truckers Winston and Bubby find themselves crashing with their new patrons, the Junkers, while their damaged ship is repaired.

While there, the two get shown around the estate and reach the mail room just as a suspicious package is delivered. The package turns out to be a colony of terrifying, flesh eating monsters. Hooray! From there our heroes have to fight a desperate, running battle with creatures they barely understand in an attempt to save their hides and hopefully keep their new patron alive as well. There’s a lot of inventive thinking and well paced action in the story.

The stories we’re looking at today have ideas that appeal strongly to me, personally, and in The Waking Nightmares it’s the tricky task of monster slaying. Winston, Bubby and the others have to keep their wits about them to beat the creatures and I find that a lot of fun. The action is also clear and easy to follow, in spite of how chaotic it is. That’s a real achievement in this kinds of fast paced, action adventure stories and is another part of what I really liked about book.

Also impressive is how well I felt I knew Winston after the tale was done. There are several parts of the story where previous events in his life were referenced and each time they came up I had a pretty good idea how those events shaped him, even if I didn’t know what the events themselves were. That’s slick work right there. On one occasion I felt like having a little more context about what those events actually were would have helped me understand a moment better but, outside of that, I feel like Boncher hit a really good balance point in hinting at the past and pushing his story forward. If you want a swashbuckling scifi story to sink your teeth into, this might be just what the doctor ordered.

Now it bears pointing out that these are books published independently and perhaps they are not quite as slick and finished as something you might get from a mainstream publisher. However they are good, fun reads written with a great amount of heart. If you can bear with a few rough edges and you’re looking for rousing adventure of a kind you don’t see from big publishers that often anymore they’re worth checking out.

With this we’ve reached the end of my publications for the year. I’ll be taking next week off for the holidays and we’ll return to our regularly scheduled blogging in 2024. As always I’m grateful to all of you who turn up to read the words I painstakingly put together and I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as I enjoy writing them. May your time with family be a blessing and the Lord give you joy this season.

The House of Love and Death

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Andrew Klavan’s The House of Love and Death is the third book in the Cameron Winter series which follows its protagonist, a covert government agent turned college English professor, as he works to solve murders that catch his attention. I’ve mentioned this series in fiction reviews before. While I’ve enjoyed it so far this is really the moment where I felt the series made sense as something other than just a tale about a reformed assassin trying to make good on his previous misdeeds.

So far Cameron Winter stories have had interesting things to say about what it means to be a man and what the modern world taking shape around us might mean for those trying to live good lives. However there were a lot of pieces that didn’t quite add up yet. Many good things in storytelling come in threes so when a third book in the series was announced I was optimistic that we’d get a more complete picture of where his tale was leading. The opening scene convinced me that was the case.

The House of Love and Death opens on firefighters rushing into a burning house where they find four dead bodies, all shot to death with a rifle. The only survivor of the massacre is a boy hiding in the woods out back. The rest of his family and his nanny are dead, claimed by the specter of death that looms over the house, and he has little of use to say as, when asked how many people were in the house, all he can tell the firefighters, “Everyone.”

Cameron catches wind of this strange event and his so-called strange habit of mind kicks in. He inserts himself into the case and contends with disgruntled security guards, hostile police, the wealthy and the working class. Outside of the case his life isn’t easy either. The Dean of Students has received complaints about him and is now looking into his past, which draws the wrong kind of attention. His own guilt at his life as an assassin hasn’t entirely passed. At a glance the story looks like it will be very complicated. However from the moment it was clear that the murdered family employed a nanny I knew the payoffs I was waiting for were coming.

Let me explain.

In When Christmas Comes we learned a lot about Cameron’s terrible childhood and how his primary source of moral teaching and emotional warmth was his own nanny. Unfortunately that relationship ended in disappointment. It couldn’t be a coincidence that, three installments in, we see another young boy who’s life is literally saved by a nanny in a case he is investigating. Klavan is a very deliberate author and he wouldn’t include that kind of detail without reason.

I wasn’t expecting quite the outcome he had in mind, however. In his first outing Cameron is dealing with foundational issues, a simple crime with a reasonably straight forward solution. In the second installment, A Strange Habit of Mind, things get more complicated. Social media and its trends intrude on the narrative and the battle for justice unfolds alongside the question of how much we can shape our world through intelligence and willpower. The scope of the story was expanding. In The House of Love and Death the largest possible forces have taken a hand. Love and death themselves are playing out their roles in the medium of human wants and desires and we have to be prepared to accept that these are more than abstractions if we hope to solve the mystery the house presents us.

Cameron is familiar with Death, having been a messenger of it for years. Love, on the other hand, has always kept its distance from him and its absence has left his understanding of the world skewed. It will take the work of a handful of warm, diligent and yes, loving women to help him work that part of it out. The question of what is true and what is a fancy we’re caught up in is also a theme in this work. The mystery itself feels almost like these abstract questions have donned human flesh and manifested their work in any number of ways across the small Midwestern town where the murders happened.

By the end of The House of Love and Death it truly feels like Cameron has come to grips with Love. He just has to manifest it in his life. It’s really a landmark in the series and it feels deeply impactful. In many of the previous stories Klavan has written it really felt like he was struggling to find a way to handle these themes in a way that felt organic. Many of these efforts, such as his Another Kingdom trilogy, were done in good faith but were lacking something. Now, once again working in his favorite genre, it seems like he’s really hit his stride.

In short, The House of Love and Death is a gripping thriller, a murder mystery not afraid to look at the darkest parts of human nature and a sweeping battle between good and evil as its hero seeks to find his place as a man in the modern world. It’s a remarkable achievement by Andrew Klavan. If you are not afraid of a story that deals with the dark side of human nature I cannot recommend the Cameron Winter series enough.

Writing Vlog – 12-13-2023

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Today we edit. Yesterday we also edited. Tomorrow we will also edit. There is a lot of editing going on, all told. For a change of pace, I vlogged about editing.

Process – Editing and Feedback

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Like many crafts, writing is actually a number of different skills all wrapped up in the process of creating something. Like all craftsmen, writers are better or worse at various aspects of the process. In the case of editing things are particularly polarizing. Authors seem to either enjoy the process of editing, and indeed claim to do their best work in this stage of the craft, or they hate editing and just have to slog through it. I must confess that I fall firmly into the second category.

Let me be clear. Editing is a very necessary part of the process and there’s nothing I’ve ever written that didn’t benefit from having a good editing pass to make it clearer and more consistent. However it’s not something I enjoy doing and as a result this is the part of the process where my advice will probably be the weakest. So, what’s the purpose of editing?

Well, as I already mentioned, making it clearer and more consistent is a good starting point. Watching for consistency is pretty simple. Check your set ups for important pay offs and make sure the set up actually leads into the payoff you are aiming for. When I discussed outlines I mentioned I didn’t tweak my outline to reflect revisions I made as I planned scenes but I probably should. Why did I say I should? Because scanning the most current outline I have is the fastest way to remind myself what payoffs my setups should be pointing to. (Again, I keep coming back to the outline as the fastest way to keep your story straight. This is why I stress its usefulness as a writing tool.)

Clarity is harder to gauge. It’s best to set a piece of writing aside for a while before editing it, although it’s best to acknowledge that the time available to the writer is a factor into how practical that is. When you come back you’ll hopefully be able to read what you wrote without your intentions clouding your mind. That will make it easier to gauge whether you actually said what you intended to say. Developing the proper perspective when doing this is also important. You’re not reading and asking whether you said something other than what you intended, that’s not the way unclear prose works its way into what you write. What happens is you write gibberish instead of something understandable.

I should also note that, in my case, how long I must leave something sitting before I can effective edit it is dependent on how many times I’ve edited it. Often a week or two of down time is enough for the first editing pass. This is part of why I try to give myself a couple of weeks of material in padding for the stories I am writing. I can edit them the day before they are posted and have a pretty clear eye for what I’m reading. However it can take a month or two before I can make a second editing pass with any clarity and even longer before a third is effective.

Ultimately editing on your own will only take you so far. It is also wise to seek out the input of people who are willing to give fair and even handed critique of your work. Ideally that would be a professional editor. The problem with going that route is that such people will rightly charge you a fair amount of money for their services and if you are not yet a major publishing phenomenon you may not be able to afford it. I understand this problem as I also suffer from it.

That said, there’s really something to be said for having one person who handles all your basic feedback. An editor who knows you, your style and your priorities is going to give very personalized input. You also won’t have to constantly go back and fill in important context and thematic through lines as you discuss your story. If I could afford that kind of consistent input from someone I would definitely pay for it. Sadly, I can’t afford it and I suspect, if you’re reading this, you can’t either.

So what’s the alternative?

There are plenty of forums, websites, Discord servers and the like where you can find like-minded, struggling authors and exchange feedback with them. While you won’t get the same level of personalized input from them as you would an editor, any feedback is good. It’s not impossible, of course. Sometimes a collaborator will be able to work with you for months or longer on multiple projects but it’s not a guarantee and you shouldn’t count on it.

Managing feedback is a whole ‘nother thing. Hopefully you’ll be able to engage in a lot of dialog with them and not just get an email outlining a few thoughts on the story. Ask as many questions as you can. Again, clarity and consistency is a major thing you want to ask questions about. Did they understand characters and decisions? If not, how can you make them clearer?

Beyond those two basic issues dealing with feedback is a lot harder. Readers will offer thoughts on your characters, the tone of your story, your prose, your genre of choice and many other things you won’t think of until people bring them up. All of that feedback is good and useful but you should be careful. Don’t chase any one particular kind of response from your audience. People have many and diverse opinions on these many facets of your story and you cannot control them. The ultimate question is did they see what you were trying to do with your story or not? Don’t concern yourself as much with whether they liked what you were trying to do.

Ultimately, whether you are editing yourself or asking someone else to do it you are not trying to make people like your story. That’s not something you can do. What other people think of your story is their business. You are the creator of your story and you need to focus on whether the vision you had for that narrative is getting through to your audience. If you didn’t have enough confidence in that vision to stick with in the face of criticism you shouldn’t have written it. This part of the process is about making your vision as clear to others as possible. If you can do that, you’ve fulfilled your role as storyteller. With that, your role in the process is done and thus, so is this series.

Writing Vlog – 12-06-2023

Posted by natechen on

Very brief update as we roll into the holidays. It’s probably gonna be a slower month.

Process – Dialog and Subtext

Posted by natechen on

Writing a scene is more than just working out the people and how they would carry out their goals. It’s also how they interact with each other while trying to convince others of their positions or dismiss their objections. It’s how they interact with their environment. Ultimately it’s what these words and actions say and don’t say about what they want and what they value.

So, once I have the basics of a scene blocked out I ask myself how direct they would be in talking about what they want. A Candle in the Wind is our case study for this series and it has a couple of examples of this. The best is probably the meeting between Sheriff Avery Warwick and the Fairchild siblings. The sheriff suspects the Fairchilds are working with Harper, who he’s just sent out of town so he won’t cause any problems. Which they are. Brandon and Cassie are trying to figure out what’s happening in Riker’s Cove while also not getting kicked out by the sheriff and, in Brandon’s case, upholding the first tenant of Avaloni chivalry – to seek the truth. In other words, Brandon doesn’t want to lie directly to Avery. Both characters are pursuing goals they cannot state explicitly to the other – but they still need the other to do something for them.

Much of the dialog in these scenes is constructed so that the two men serve these goals without ever explicitly bringing them up. Most people will describe this as showing the characters are intelligent. There is certainly an element of that to writing characters with subtext, as intelligence is an important factor in recognizing subtext and both characters do pick up on some of what the other is trying to do. Likewise, less intelligent actors tend to have less subtext. But adding subtext is more than just a reflection of intelligence; it is a way to give insight.

In his final duel with Heinrich von Nighburg, Roy baffles his opponent with his resistance to the other’s mental push towards anger. In his dialog he points out that his anger comes from showing up late and short on silver. This reveals that Roy’s real emotional vulnerability isn’t anger, it’s guilt. He becomes angry with himself when he feels he had a responsibility to help others that he couldn’t fulfill and that anger leaks out. Nighburg would have done better to push him towards guilt rather than bait him into anger but his understanding of Roy was too superficial to understand that.

I could have written this in plain language. However, Roy Harper isn’t a character who is comfortable with strangers, especially those who are out to kill him, so it’s not something it would be in character for him to state plainly. Furthermore, it’s more interesting for the audience to work it out from the subtext than see it so stated.

It’s important to have moments of subtext woven into your scenes. It doesn’t have to come from dialog, although these are the most obvious examples, but can come from interacting with objects as well. Say you have a protagonist who was given a keepsake by a parent who hated violence. Having the character holding that keepsake or even fiddling with it while debating the ethics of using lethal force creates a subtext to all the character’s arguments, for or against, without need any explicit dialog or exposition.

In a visual medium subtext can also be established by character expressions. Smiling while saying you’re sorry is a fairly blunt way to create subtext, a character looking at the door while promising to stay is another. This kind of visual subtext can be used in prose but it’s often very on point. I prefer to use it when a character is realizing another character’s subtext rather than as a way to signal subtext to the audience.

How you integrate subtext into your narrative is up to you. There’s a lot of different ways to do it but I’d recommend picking one or two and really honing them before trying another one. You don’t need a huge amount of subtext in a scene. Keep adding it and eventually it’s just the text of the scene so it’s better to be good at delivering it than having a bunch of different ways to work it in.

I put dialog and subtext together because I like to try and write dialog that introduces subtext. (Whether I succeed or not is not my place to say.) However there are also other techniques I try to keep in mind while writing dialog and, while not a process per se, these rules of thumb are things I find helpful when trying to put one word after another.

Characters should have preferred kinds of metaphors. Roy speaks in terms of fighting and army life most of the time but sometimes lapses into the language of his religion, the Mated Pair. This reflects his general outlook on life and his background. I’ve written a character who grew up as a grove tender and for whom I deliberately wrote down a series of tree based similes that I looked for every chance to use.

Analogies and metaphors grounded in real-world history and culture can be used in some cases. Obviously if your story is set in the present day feel free. Otherwise, depending on how deep you want immersion in your setting to be, you might sprinkle a few in or chose to invent “parallel” idioms based on the history and cultures of your world. If you do chose to avoid “real” colloquialisms in your dialog be careful. There’s a lot of things that don’t immediately look like they’re directly rooted in Earth history or culture that turn out to be if you look closer. For example, “zounds” is an abbreviation of “Christ’s wounds,” a potentially sacrilegious exclamation common in medieval England.

Characters should also have a rhythm of speaking. Some might prefer short words or sentences, others are prone to stringing thoughts together. Any kind of verbal tic can be present in character dialog, although I recommend not writing any dialog in a way that is difficult to understand. Spelling out heavy regional accents, for example. I try to describe these in narration rather than write them out as someone not familiar with the accent might find it incomprehensible.

It is possible to give characters difficult or even impossible to understand dialog. Giving the incomprehensible speaker a translator can create comedy, subtext and intrigue in equal measure. The dialog might not be important, either. But in general, if you’re going to write it out on the page I recommend making it understandable. Having strings of gibberish written out on the page typically just frustrates me and I skim past it. Your mileage may vary.

How your characters communicate with each other, persuade one another or conceal their goals is a difficult thing to manage and probably one of the most important things for you, as an author, to work out. As such I don’t have as fixed a process for it as some other things. I do have a lot of rules of thumb, however, and I’ve gathered them together in large part by reading blogs like this one or books on the art of writing and, of course, reading lots of good stories myself. Hopefully something you find here will help you create compelling scenes as well.

Writing Vlog – 11-29-2023

Posted by natechen on

This week the scope of my latest series of writing essays comes into focus and I talk a bit about future things. Find it all in today’s writing vlog: