You Gotta Have Heart

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Apropos of our discussion on Artificial Intelligence last week—and the horrifying prospect of millions of books being produced (not written) every year (one indie “writer” has declared he is going to produce ten books a month)—I thought I’d say a word on behalf of humanity. Goodness knows we need it.

I decided to corner the machine with a question. I asked ChatGPT itself if there was any room left for flesh-and-blood scribblers. It answered, in part,

AI can generate text based on patterns and data it has been trained on, but true creativity and originality often stem from human imagination, emotions, and experiences. Human writers bring a unique perspective and the ability to create innovative narratives that AI may struggle to replicate.

Fiction writing often involves exploring complex emotions and human experiences. While AI can analyze and mimic emotions to some extent, it may not fully comprehend the depth and nuances of human emotions in the same way as a human writer does. Emotional intelligence and empathy are vital components of storytelling that are challenging for AI to replicate convincingly.

Emotional intelligence and empathy. In other words, heart.

We gotta have it. It’s the thing that distinguishes us from the machines. And if we want to keep selling fiction, we need to get heart onto the page.

That’s because discoverability is a challenge with a “tsunami” of competent fiction deluging the Amazon shores. Some of that challenge is overstated. We’ve had 15 years of competent and mediocre ebooks, and it’s not volume that sells over time, or gives an algorithmic boost to a backlist. Reader reviews do much of the curation and the best books rise to the top (not always, as we know, but the odds are better with superb book after superb book).

Now, of course, the tsunami is exponentially bigger and more terrifying.

Or maybe it’s more like Sharknado!

What is the answer? Simply this: we have to put into our books what the machines cannot replicate. And the most important thing they cannot replicate is you. Your heart, your soul, your vision, pressed through the craft you diligently study and apply.

Robert Frost famously said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” Meaning you’ve got to feel before you write.

You’ve got to write like you’re in love. Later, you can edit like you’re in charge.

Love, say the poets, is a kind of ecstasy that overwhelms. Even elementary school kids have ideas about love. Some time ago a teacher asked her class to define love. A few of the answers:

“Love is like a little old woman and a little old man who are still friends even after they get to know each other.”

“When somebody loves you, the way they say your name is different.”

“Love makes you smile when you’re tired.”

“You really shouldn’t say ‘I love you’ unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot.”

Tommy, age 6, nailed it: “Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving lotion and they smell each other.”

So, to love your book, smell it! By that I mean, don’t forget the sense of smell, as Steve recently discussed. But not just the obvious smell. Find something unique. Unique is what the machines don’t find. Yet.

Want to see what I mean? Look no further than the great Raymond Chandler in The Little Sister:

She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.

No machine’s going to come up with that! Because it’s not rational, and it’s not meant to be. It’s meant to be felt.

Same with emotions. The machine will give you the obvious choices. Say your character is in a dark alley and hears footsteps. What emotion? Fear pops immediately to mind.

But that’s predictable. Instead, human, go deeper. In his book The Emotional Craft of Fiction, Donald Maass says to pursue “third-level” emotions. What this means is, you think of the obvious emotion the character would feel in a situation. But then ask, What else would the character feel? And ask once more, What else? That’s the third level, the one that is surprising, which a reader experiences as delight.

An exercise I love is the page-long sentence. I choose a moment in my story where the character is feeling deeply. I stop and open up a fresh doc and write a sentence of 200-300 words, no stopping, in the character’s voice, talking about all the permutations of the feeling, going on tangents, coming up with metaphors, not pausing to edit. Once you get going, your Boys in the Basemet will send up things you didn’t know were there, and you’ll get at least one gem to polish and put in your text.

Your heart is doing an end run around your conscious and cliché-steeped mind.

So let the machines churn their mediocre-if-competent product. Make yours unforgettable. The secret ingredient is heart.

Speaking of which, I put a lot of my heart into a crazy book called Some People Are Dead: Part Essay, Part Memoir, Parts Unknown. These are short riffs on subjects—including my own life story—that arose randomly as I considered the obituaries of famous and not-so-famous people. These can be read as five-minute escapes from the world whenever such is needed (like, every day). The Kindle version is free for five days. Enjoy!

Over to you now. How do you get your heart into your pages?

We might as well end with the hit song from the musical Damn Yankees. In the song, heart is about grit, something else writers need in abundance, now more than ever:

26 thoughts on “You Gotta Have Heart

  1. I have a long list of prompts I fill out before I start writing a scene, and one subset is a list of emotions. As I go through the prep, as the pov character, I ask where I might feel anger, or joy in the scene, and answer in writing. Then when I set out the beats for the scene, I ask myself which of the emotions – as expressed by what you called the ‘Boys in the Basement’ – go where, and list them for that beat. Along with setting, character traits, goals, time and place, everything gets loaded into a beat.

    I review the contents of a beat – and write it. It seems mechanical, but it gives each prompt the time to pull out of my subconscious whatever might be planned for a scene – so it doesn’t get added later. I don’t do whole-book drafts – I can’t – so it’s important that each scene be complete, a short story in a long list of linked stories.

    Anything spontaneous as I write doesn’t necessarily get blocked – but having the basics listed makes for an assembly job with few missing pieces. Over the years I’ve added to my list of prompts – just a few things stolen from books on craft – but I can focus when writing on the language and telling a story from a character’s pov, and it works for me. Then excesses get pruned, the whole thing goes through many round of listening, editing, tweaking – and that scene is finished. I don’t go back.

    • I like your systematic approach, Alicia. I want to know my three Os before I write a scene. Objective, obstacles, outcome. Then I write and let the characters do some improvising.

      • I improvise – a lot – but I must have fifty prompts to fill in before I have all lined up what the scene needs to include.

        Some of those pieces have several ways of wording that I’ve written in bits over years, including an occasional one from the very first draft. Before I start the scene, I can reconcile some of those, dump others.

        It’s like those cooking shows: each ingredient is in its own little white dish, the chef having done all the work, or someone else to their exacting requirements – if it’s going to have onions, they will be chopped SO fine, caramelized or not…

        Then it is easy to put a fabulous dish together because the pre-decisions are not in the way.

        When I put my jigsaw together, the border is complete, and there are no missing or extra pieces (to exaggerate a bit).

        I CAN’T make all those decisions on the fly, as I write – damaged brain. But I CAN make little decisions one by one, and have them ready.

        Since I also have your three Os, what gets to go in front of the camera has a logic to it, an inevitability – except for the actual words, and I can handle them at this stage.

        Shrug.

        Works for me – and takes forever, but that’s me, too. I don’t have other choices, but I really like the results of my system?

  2. Great question today, Jim.

    When I’m in the zone, I splay open a vein so emotions pour out of me. Most work, some don’t. For the ones that don’t, I’ll catch them later when I load the manuscript to my Kindle to read as a reader, not a writer. The change in medium strangleholds me, and I fall helplessly into the story, where rawer emotions bubble to the surface. If I’m not emotionally drained by The End, I feel like I haven’t dug deep enough. 😉

    • That’s a good gauge, Sue. Remember the opening of Romancing the Stone, where Kathleen Turner has just finished writing her romance novel and is weeping uncontrollably?

  3. Once again, a blog post I’m keeping in my JSB file. My son is a digital artist. The thought of AI art taking over the internet greatly disturbs him, but as I pointed out to him, AI art has no heart – nothing of the artist comes through.

    Thanks for the idea of writing a page long sentence about the emotion a character is facing, It might help me where I’m stuck in my novel.

    I never thought I would buy a book about obituaries, but you’ve intrigued me, so I picked up a copy because you wrote it.

  4. Great post, Jim. Thanks for the mention.

    Heart and Soul. Our soul is what makes us alive. It also gives us our conscience. No machine can be truly alive or have a real conscience. It is only what it was programmed to be.

    How do I get my heart into my pages? I try to live in my characters as I write them, experiencing what they are experiencing, feeling the tug of war between their emotions and their conscience. And then, the hard part, trying to get it onto the page.

    • Steve, I wonder if that’s why sometimes writers struggle with really letting their characters experience conflict? As writers, we’re trying to live in them as we write them, so selfishly, it may be tempting to not let bad things happen to them. We have to be careful to put our characters through the proverbial ringer, but still let the heart of those characters come out by living it through them.

      • Good point, BK. I hadn’t thought about that before, but I believe you’re on to something. Billy Graham’s devotional this morning included this sentence. “Suffering is often the crucible in which our faith is tested.” We need to let our characters suffer, too, in order for them to become what we want them to be.

  5. Such a vital question, Jim, especially now. The answer will only become more important as time goes on.

    How do you get my heart into your pages?

    By writing about what matters, to me. Putting my mindset, my sense of humor, my voice into my writing. Who I am as a human being. Digging deeper, what I’ve experienced in my six plus decades on this year. There are a lot of library mysteries, for instance. With mine, I put the emotional experience of working at the library, with the found family there, front and center. Not to say that there aren’t other library mysteries that do that, but this is my take, and set in the era when I began working at the library.

    It isn’t easy to put this emotion on the page. Well, sometimes it is, especially, when I freewrite, but the long haul of a novel is work. The best kind of the work, the work of the heart.

    Thanks for giving us a much needed post this morning, and a question that is also a call to action.

  6. The heart in the pages is the magic part of writing. Whether you plot or pants, at some stage the subconscious forces you to color the work with true feeling.

    Editorial aside on AI: first, the culture rejected God. Now, ironically, they reject humanity itself.

  7. Thanks for this great way to get the writing day started, Jim. You got right to the “heart” of the matter. 🙂

    Writing in first person is the best way I’ve found to get strong emotion on the page. The intimacy of first person narrative opens so many emotional doors. Of course, it limits the way the story is told, but I’m glad to make the tradeoff. Maybe I’ll return to third person as I mature in my writing, but for now I foresee my next few novels in first.

    Loved the scene from Damn Yankees.

    • You’re right, Kay. First person allows for immediacy. But even when I write in third person, I will let the character riff in first person when I’m looking for those emotional beats. Then I translate that into third.

  8. BTW thanks for the freebie. I’m going to read your book on my phone while puffing my stogie at my cigar lounge (I don’t own it, I’m just a member). Brief commercial for cigars and cigar lounges: my word counts have gone up since toting my laptop to the lounge. It’s my relaxing place and nicotine charges the brain. Ignore the Surgeon General and FDA—they’re the same people who said “two weeks to stop the spread.” 😂

    • My dad was an inveterate cigar smoker. To this day, the smell brings back memories of him.

      Glad to hear I’ll be in there with you at your relaxing spot. Enjoy!

  9. “By writing about what matters, to me.”

    Dale put my feelings into words perfectly.

    In a world where superficial values dominate, I dig below the surface to bedrock. Find the emotions that someone experiences on their deathbed. What they wish they had done, what they regret, what/whom they loved and hated, if their life was a failure or success. If they’re religious, are they going to heaven or hell?

    Thanks for the heart, Jim.

  10. I believe many people are obsessed with manufacturing tonnage and hitting it big like the next Brando Sando, if what youy see on reddit is any indication. Are these people writers or mere mass production drones dressing up like writers?

    It’s pablum for the masses. And that’s where AI makes its mark because AI lends itself to automation, which is, after all, what we’re talking about here.

    I wonder if there’s a comparison between AI generated “content” and what many of the pulp writers of the 30s through the 60s were doing. There are gems in there to be sure but a lot of it is just lousy, formulaic stuff made to earn next month’s rent.

    Or maybe the difference between push button CNC machining from bought out programming and the artistry of the old time tool and die makers. You could program a CNC cell to replicate the Pieta, put a sticker on it that says “Made In China” next to the one that guy puts on that says “QC Passed” and sell them in the parking lot of a gas station in Long Beach, but you’ll never have the artistry and the story behind it.

    A woman asked the Great Satchmo what his jazz music was about and he responded in that wonderful gravelly voice “Lady, if you have to ask, you’ll never know.” That’s my take on it.

    But yes. As one person said ‘write like you’ll die if you don’t do it’. Ity’s the artistry and the humanity.

    I’d rather write one damn good story that’s all mine than manufacture tonnage and flog it on Amazon.

    That’s not what I’m on this trip for.

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