One of the strangest platitudes bandied about in creative circles is the notion that art exists to push boundaries. Most people will say this, or some variant of it, and never once stop to think critically about it because they have heard it all their lives. That’s unfortunate because it’s a sentiment that falls apart under the slightest scrutiny.
The most common art form I have heard it about is comedy. Common wisdom is that the betrayal of expectations is a major part of what makes things funny forces the comic to constantly dabble in subjects considered taboo or morally repugnant, pushing the boundaries of society and forcing us to reexamine our cultural norms to see if they still hold true. They have to do this, we are told, because surprise is essential to comedy. How can we laugh if we already know the punchline of the joke?
My response to this is to ask a very simple question: Must we subvert expectations in order to tell a joke?
In general I believe the answer is no. There are plenty of very funny jokes, stories and pratfalls that have gotten me to laugh more than once. If some kind of manipulation of expectations is inherent to comedy then that should not be the case, as knowing the punchline to a joke makes it impossible for said punchline to take me by surprise. My expectations cannot be subverted. Yet i still laugh when watching Duck Soup.
There are many reasons we laugh at a joke. We can find the skill it is delivered with delightful, as we do when watching the physical comedy of Buster Keaton or Red Skelton. We can laugh at the absurdity of a situation, as we might when watching the pratfalls in Home Alone. There is an entire genre of comedy that finds humor in the awkwardness of life, embodied in shows like The Office. We can, indeed, laugh because a joke surprises us. However none of these things are funny because they push boundaries alone. As we would say in college, they are funny because they are true.
When we laugh at skillful physical comedy we laugh because we see something we would have thought impossible carried out in reality. Yet when props, special effects or even animation, as in Looney Toons, push things beyond what is real we still laugh because of the absurdity. The contrast with reality becomes the joke.
You can string together a series of non sequiturs and no one will laugh. Surprise is only funny if the twist has some kind of truth beneath it. The way the twist comes together is important, of course, and it is the skill with which the twist is created and delivered that is the difficult part of comedy. So it’s not surprising that this skill aspect of comedy gets so much emphasis.
Now we could say that a comedian pushes boundaries by pushing their skills. I don’t disagree with that idea. However I don’t honestly believe that anyone who says comedy is about pushing boundaries means that. They are referring to some nebulous idea about bringing new concepts into the cultural discussion. It’s a very psychological, Jordan Peterson-esque idea. That’s not surprising given the laugh-a-minute natures of psychology and Jordan Peterson.
Now the above, my friends, could be construed as a joke. Since it was not a great one I will take a moment and do that thing comics are not supposed to do and explain the joke. It functions by contrasting the very serious, deliberately unemotional affect of psychologists in general and Jordan Peterson in particular with the idea of laugh-a-minute comedy. The contrast is stark and surprising and thus funny, if not particularly so.
This joke is more than just a piece of humor. It also says something about our culture and how we look at the field of psychology, both in general and one psychologist in particular. It is this power, the ability to entertain while also commenting on and, via the observer effect, shaping the way our culture functions that makes comedy so powerful.
All artforms have this power to some extent. This function is what pushes boundaries on those occasions where art comes up against some kind of social boundary. It’s not surprising that this is what grabs people’s attention when talking about the power of art. However to confuse it with the purpose of art is to make a dangerous mistake. It is to make the assumption that the purpose of all things is power.
The purpose of art is to immortalize what is true and lasting, to put the audience in touch with an experience beyond the confines of their normal life in one way or another. That is why a story like A Christmas Carol remains almost universally beloved even though it permeates or culture to an equally universal extent. It doesn’t have to seek out boundaries to push. In many ways it is a boundary in itself, a standard for stories about how those set in their ways can change for the better. It can do this because it is art that fulfills it’s purpose, rather than seeking to exert its power. Whether you are a comic or otherwise, that is an idea worth keeping in mind.
Category Archives: On Writing
The Sidereal Saga – Afterwords
Every time I finish a piece of fiction I feel like I’ve finished a new, bizarre struggle. Taking an abstract idea and putting a series of events and recognizable characters on top of it is difficult every time but trying to incorporate new ideas and lessons learned from previous work puts a new spin on it every time. When I sat down to write the Sidereal Saga I hoped to put together a short, fast moving story told in a series of vignettes that I could move in and out of freely.
What resulted was something quite different.
The Sidereal Saga is the longest single project I’ve written, so right away I fell short of a central goal. Furthermore, in the course of writing I discovered I had a harder time multitasking between it and other projects. Perhaps this was a side effect of the space opera genre. Up until this point I have never tried to write something with such a large cast of characters spread across so many venues with so many variables to keep track of. The complexities of the story made pivoting away from it much harder.
While that complication is intuitive, it did make structuring Lloyd’s story as a series of vignettes with other stories scattered through it much more difficult as I could not find the time to set aside for writing them. So I ultimately failed in that goal as well. When taken as a whole the lesson learned was a significant one – don’t bite of more than you can chew. I always knew space opera was a complicated and difficult genre. Seeking to write one while juggling other projects was a wildly optimistic goal and one which was clearly out of my reach.
With all that said, I feel I did fairly well in writing the story itself and that is always an important threshold to reach when working on any project. While I had some ideas for character beats and payoffs that did not quite come to pass as I had a solid outline that is only slightly different from what ultimately came together. (At some point I will do a post summarizing my outline and the resulting story. I’ve done this before but I think the result this time is passive p particularly interesting.) So I also feel like much of my prep work paid off well.
As per my usual structure, I will be taking some time to publish some essays on the state of writing, my own and others, before jumping into my next project. There will not be a many this time around, I think. Less to say that I haven’t already and I am very eager to get started on the next thing. There may also be a special Halloween story this year. We will see.
However, first and foremost there will be a short break. As is usual, now that I have finished a story I will take a week off. I am so grateful to ask those who tube in on a regular basis. You can’t imagine how encouraging it is to see another name sign up for updates of how many visits on Saturdays to read the new chapter. Thank you so much, and I will see you in two weeks!
Happy Labor Day!
Hey folks,
Due to a number of looming deadlines I’ve gotten a little behind and this week’s chapter needs a polishing pass that I haven’t gotten to yet. Plus, it’s Labor Day! Seems like a good time for a short break to hopefully get a little ahead. Hope to see you next week!
Nate
Writing Vlog – 06-12-2024
Back to vlogging today. Is it interesting? Maybe. Find out now!
Writing Vlog – 04-24-2024
I’m getting back into the groove, albeit slowly. Here all about it in today’s writing vlog:
Writing Vlog – 03-13-2024
Short update of the week – turning a grid outline to a linear outline! And other things.
Writing Vlog – 03-06-2024
Brief update this week. Gotta get back to the grind.
Writing Vlog – 02-21-2024
A very short update with a very neat cover to show off!
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.
Nate Chen Publications 