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:
Matt Benson, a lefty, hit the massive Mexican, Juan Cortez, in the jaw with a hard right jab. Cortez’s eyelids fluttered and he took a few long steps backward on the hay-covered floor.
There are many ways to write a novel. That much has been made quite clear on TKZ and in the comments thereto.
George Horace Lorimer was the legendary editor of The Saturday Evening Post from 1899 to 1936. He brought the circulation up from a few thousand to over a million, and made it a place known for quality fiction.
“If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass. If it persists, you probably ought to write a novel.” — Lawrence Block.