Categories
dungeons & dragons writing advice

How AI is Making Dungeon Mastering Easier Than Ever

I run a Dungeon & Dragons campaign for four students that meets for two hours a day, two days a week. Our campaign takes place in my home-brew world, Migia.

I don’t have the time or the skills to map a logical geography for a whole world, so I used the open-source Fantasy Map Generator created by GitHub user Azgaar, a JavaScript wizard from Richmond, Virginia, to generate and tweak a world map for Migia. 

The generator allows you to customize place names, stylize the design, focus the map on political borders, biomes, cultural zones, religions, etc., and render it as a flat map, a 3D scene, or a globe.

From there, the Internet offers a plethora of D&D-focused generators to help me bring Migia to life. There’s the city map generator, the dungeon generator and cave generator, the random encounter generator, the side quest generator, the backstory generator, the NPC generator, the fantasy name generator, and a whole list of auto-roll tables that will generate everything from a “breakfast at a traveler’s inn” to “resurrection consequences.” On days I prefer rolling dice to pressing buttons, I head over to the D100 tables on DNDSPEAK.com for inspiration.

Tables from the Dungeon Master’s Guide

Generators have been around as long as D&D has. Computers may make them easier and faster to use by combining a slew of tables into one button push, but at bottom, most generators are just the lists of tables Dungeon Masters find in the official rule books or create on their own.

In other words, generators are not artificial intelligence but glorified spreadsheets.

Midjourney Bot To Create Images For A Campaign 

In September, one of my D&D buddies added the Midjourney Bot to our Discord chat server. You enter a few words in the chat, and the bot will create an original image based on your prompt using artificial intelligence and machine learning. 

I started using it to create images of non-player characters in the campaign.

Take the image of the harengon, for example (a harengon is a kind of rabbit-like creature). I prompted the bot to create “a ferocious rabbit standing on the edge of a cliff with a sword in her hand.” After about a minute, Midjourney Bot provided me with four drafts based on the prompt.

Four options for my harengon

From there, I selected the draft in the bottom right and told the bot to “upscale” it. A minute later, I had the final image of my harengon. The upscale added brush strokes and more detail across the entire canvas. I could have continued to tweak, but the image served my needs, so boom…two minutes after having the idea for a ferocious rabbit sword fighter, I had a picture I could base the doe on.

The results of my various prompts were interesting and captured the vibes I intended (e.g., “a female elf with long white hair and dark skin standing in the center of a cloud made from daggers”), but they lacked the details that I need to really dig into their characters.

Then I realized that I could use the word “portrait” in my prompts to force the bot to create more realistic images of my NPCs.

For the last few months, whenever I’ve needed an NPC for the campaign, I type a few words into Midjourney Bot that summarize the kind of character I’m looking for and add the word “portrait.” A couple of minutes and a few drafts later, I’ve got an image I can show my players to help them imagine the individuals they encountered during the campaign.

From Characters To Scenes

A few weeks after I started using Midjourney, I decided I could use it to create illustrations of the previous D&D session’s scenes.

Most D&D campaigns last weeks, months, years, and sometimes decades. When you sit down with your friends (or students) for a session, there’s usually a few minutes of recap (“Last time on Dungeons & Dragons…”) to remind everyone where we left off.

How much cooler would those recaps be if I could throw in an illustration or two of where they were or the monsters they were still facing?

Thanks to the Midjourney artificial intelligence image creator, my D&D campaigns became much more visual.

Craft Assistant (GPT-3) To Write Original Histories & Backstories

I use Craft to manage all the information I need for Migia. Craft is like a note-taking app on steroids. I discovered it a few months back (long after Apple named it the “2021 Mac App of the Year”), and it’s the first app in a long time that I loved using. I immediately converted 90% of my document-creating/managing tasks to Craft; months later, I haven’t looked back (I really should write a blog post about it; it’s so good).

A couple of weeks ago, the folks behind Craft added GPT-3 to the app, calling the feature the “Craft AI Assistant.” As Craft wrote in their announcement, “We believe that GPT-3, one of the most impressive AI systems ever built, which applies machine learning to understand questions and generate human-like text, has now reached the point where it’s more than just a novelty.”

I tried it out — “Generate a list of blog post ideas” — but didn’t really see a way to integrate it into my daily habits, so I moved on with my life.

But on Wednesday this week, I found myself behind the 8-ball for this week’s D&D session with my students. The adventurers were on a ship on their way to a pirate haven named Maroon Cave, about 200 miles off the coast. I knew a giant shark was about to attack them (I’d ended the last session by playing the theme to JAWS), but if they made it past the shark, I didn’t know what they’d find at the pirate haven.

With less than an hour to prep, I opened Craft, brought up the Assistant, and asked it to “write a 400 word history of a pirate haven named Maroon Cave.”

Craft AI Assistant writes a history of a pirate haven for me.

Within seconds, the Craft AI Assistant had written an entire history, explaining why it was named Maroon Cave (from the French word for “fugitive”) and why pirates were safe there. It also attached famous pirates such as Blackbeard to the history, provided details on two specific events that occurred there, and summarized what the cave is used for today (“a popular tourist attraction”).

I couldn’t use all of that in my campaign, but after a few tweaks (French became Elvish, for example, and Blackbeard became a goblin pirate queen; plus, I deleted the section on it becoming a tourist spot), it was perfect.

Next, I needed a popular location at the pirate haven, a tavern where the adventurers could go to find the information that brought them to the island in the first place.

After a quick stop at the tavern name generator, tweaked with the help of some students who were in the room with me, I asked the Craft AI Assistant to “write a biography of a dwarven woman who runs a tavern named the Tipsy Turtle on an island that serves as a pirate haven.”

The Assistant created a story that begins, “Lydia, or ‘Lyd’, is a dwarf who runs a tavern, the Tipsy Turtle, on Maroon Cave. The cave is ruled by the law of the sea – piracy. Lyd, however, brings a touch of stability to this dangerous place.”

First, note how it recognized I wanted the tavern to be on Maroon Cave. I didn’t tell it that. It picked up the information from the other notes in my app.

It continued the story, “She arrived at the cave roughly 15 years ago as the young lover of the infamous pirate queen, Captain Aurora. After Aurora’s disappearance, Lyda decided to stay on the island. Seeing the need and the potential for profit, Lyd decided to build a tavern, and it quickly became a popular gathering place for the locals, as well as for pirates who passed through.”

It wasn’t perfect. I had to edit, tweak, and create D&D-specific details for Lyd. I gave her a dwarven last name (Trueboots), determined her alignment, gifted her a few stats unique stats (+5 to Charisma checks), and figured out her personality traits. Still, by starting with the story created by the Craft AI Assistant, I turned what could easily take 30 minutes into a five-minute task.

From there, I popped into Discord, submitted a similar prompt to the Midjourney Bot that I gave to GPT-3 (“a dwarven woman who runs a tavern on a pirate haven”), and two minutes later, I had a portrait of Lyd to help my students bring her to life.

Lyda, the owner of the Tipsy Turtle

There’s a lot of controversy around these AI assistants. Artists and illustrators are rightly crying foul because the images the bots come up with have, at their origin, unique works of art that can be found on the Internet. They also work at a high enough quality now to replace the need for human illustrators and artists, and like the Luddites of yore, the skilled workers feel undervalued and dismissed.

Meanwhile, the word-generating AI bots will make teaching students how to write essays incredibly problematic. It’s too easy for an unscrupulous teenager to generate an original report on whatever topic their teacher asks for. These things can create titles (see the one that accompanies this post) or analyze the theme of The Scarlett Letter:

The theme of The Scarlet Letter is that of the consequences of sin and guilt. The novel examines how individuals respond to these consequences, and how societal norms dictate how we process guilt and the importance of justice. In the novel, Hester Prynne wears the scarlet A (for adultery) as a badge of her shame and is ostracized by her Puritan community for her actions. The novel examines themes of confession, repentance, and how the truth is often obscured by the judgment and prejudice of others. It also speaks to the power of secrecy and the importance of owning up to one’s mistakes in the face of public scrutiny. Ultimately, it reminds us that everyone is capable of sin, and that it is important to be forgiving and understanding instead of harsh and judgmental. 

– Craft AI Assistant

There are real consequences to these technological advancements, ones that will not always be helpful to humanity.

I get that.

But I’m also a busy and stressed Dungeon Master, and if these things can make that role more manageable and fun, then I’m ready to roll.

Categories
reviews writing advice

Show & Tell

The prime directive given to creative writers — “Show, don’t tell” — is a shorthand way of saying that good writing reveals through action and dialogue, and not through exposition. It is based on the idea that readers want to interpret a text with minimal interference from the author. For example, instead of being told that a young child is precocious, readers prefer to see how the child acts and talks and then decide for themselves whether there is evidence of precociousness. This prime directive can serve as the boundary between good and not-good writing: good writing shows; not-good writing tells.

While there are instances when a writer will decide it is necessary to tell the reader something, even then, good writers will still use the prime directive to guide how they’re going to tell it. Take, for example, the following passage by Phillip Roth’s Plot Against America:

On a Saturday a couple of weeks earlier I’d gone into the cellar with my mother and helped her empty the cartons full of Alvin’s belongings… Everything washable, my mother scrubbed on the washboard in the divided cellar tub, soaping in one sink, rinsing in the other, and then feeding a piece at a time into the ringer while I cranked the handle to force out the water. … One evening a few days before Alvin’s scheduled return [from a veteran’s hospital, where he was recovering from losing a leg in battle] I shined his pair of brown shoes and his pair of black shoes, ignoring as best I could any uncertainty I had as to whether shining all four of them was still necessary. To make those shoes gleam, to get his good clothes clean, to neatly pile the dresser drawer with his freshly washed things—and all of it simply a prayer, an improvised prayer imploring the household gods to protect our humble five rooms and all they contained from the vengeful fury of the missing leg.

Phillip Roth, The Plot Against America, pp. 131-133

The key element in this passage is the “prayer imploring the household gods to protect” the narrator’s home “from the vengeful fury of the missing leg.” The prayer takes place in the form of the family’s act of cleaning and preparing the clothes of the returning soldier.

To say this is the key element is to say it motivates the entire passage; it is to assert the prayer as the reason the passage exists. As proof, note how Roth tells his reader how the cleaning must be understood: He refuses to leave the significance of the cleaning to the reader’s interpretation. At the end of the passage, if the reader doesn’t understand that the cleaning is prayer, then the passage isn’t worth anything; the prayer is not something that can be left out the picture.

But even when Roth chooses to ignore the prime directive and tells his reader that the cleaning is a metaphorical form of prayer, he also follows the prime directive and shows them, choosing words with strong illustrative power: “all of it simply a prayer, an improvised prayer imploring the household gods to protect our humble five rooms and all they contained from the vengeful fury of the missing leg” (emphasis added, 133). Imagine this passage without such power: “all of it simply a prayer, a prayer asking for protection from the missing leg.” Not only is the writing flat, but it loses its connection to the story, and in the processes, loses the story’s grip on the reader.

This passage comes in the middle of a novel that imagines what the early 1940s might have been like if, instead of re-electing Franklin Roosevelt as the President of the United States, the American public elected isolationist (and Nazi sympathizer) Charles Lindbergh. When President Lindbergh keeps the United States out of World War II by recognizing Germany’s dominion over Europe, a number of angry Americans (and American Jews—Alvin included) go to Canada to enlist in the fight against the Nazis. After Alvin loses his leg in battle, he returns to the narrator’s family, angry at the world. He resigns himself to a life of crime and disappears for much of the novel. When he returns years later, he gets in an explosive (and climactic) fight with the narrator’s father, a fight that demolishes the entire house.

[ Despite all the family’s worst fears about the increase in brazen anti-Semitism in President Lindbergh’s America, this fight between Alvin and his uncle is the only violence that infiltrates the narrator’s household: one Jew fights another Jew over the ardor of the other’s Jewishness, as if Roth is suggesting that the only anti-Semitism a Jew must truly fear is the anti-Semitism of the Jews.

[Of course, Roth knows the truth isn’t as simple as this, which is why an exiled Jewish neighbor and an exiled Jewish family member suffer at the hands of Gentiles, as if Roth is qualifying himself by saying an individual Jew is most likely to be hurt by other Jews, though no one (in their right mind) can deny the agony inflicted upon the Jewish race by the non-Jewish world.]

The passage of the housecleaning prayer foreshadows the climactic fight wherein Alvin’s “vengeful fury” is unleashed and the “five humble rooms and all that they contained” are destroyed. Though Roth chooses to ignore the prime directive when telling his readers the housecleaning is a metaphor for prayer, he tells them using words that show—even if only faintly—the climax of his entire story. His powerful word choices throughout the passage illustrate its deep connection to the narrative and maintains the interest — and more importantly, the imagination — of his reader.

That Phillip Roth is a good writer, few people need telling. But it never hurts to show them why.

Categories
education writing advice

Text-Based Teaching

I’ve been teaching writing in virtually of its forms for over a decade. My resume includes working with a diverse range of students at every post-elementary level, including college and including students with mild and severe learning disorders.

My primary teaching style is Socratic. I ask lots of questions and challenge lots of answers. But I try to do so in as affable a way as possible, hoping the conversation leads us to whatever wisdom is possible that day.

But the confrontational tone of my personality sometimes gets in the way.

I am the product of a male-dominated childhood where I learned to fight with words rather than fists and where fighting was often done for fun. I try to overcome the evolutionary forces that cause me to nip and bark, but after 41 years, I’m finding it’s difficult to teach an old dog new tricks.

It might be time for a new strategy, one where the my confrontational tone doesn’t harm the learning opportunities of my students.

I can be a good teacher. I’m definitely not for everyone, but I’ve helped some students, and perhaps even many, become better writers than they were.

But now, in the absence of my job at the soon-to-be-defunct Green Mountain College, I need a better way to find those many.

Should I Go Freelance?

I recently visited one of those online freelancer-marketplaces to research what it might cost to hire a voice actor to record an audio version of my novel, but while I was there, I considered the idea of going freelance for a moment, and I asked myself what I’d be willing to do.

A couple of days ago, one of my best friends asked me to mentor his college-age son with a creative writing project, and of course, I agreed. Because they live on the West Coast, the mentorship would have to take place online.

I asked for his son’s number, sent the son a text, and off we went.

But here’s the thing. Because it’s just texting, I can work with him while also doing basically anything else. When I get a few minutes and I have something to say or a question to ask, I pull out my phone, send him a text, and move on with my day.

I don’t expect him to get back to me immediately. He could be doing anything else in the world, so why should he stop and respond to me? When he’s available and interested, he can text me back and I’ll get back him when I can.

As I browsed some of the writing gigs on the freelance marketplace, I started to wonder if that might be something many people would like: text-based access to a highly-qualified writing teacher.

This isn’t an original idea. It’s basically freelancing as a writing coach.

But that’s not all I started wondering about.

Don’t Quit Your Day Job

I teach at a school with students whose faces I know, but I often see those faces focused on their screens rather than on the people around them (including me), and I’m wondering if I shouldn’t also offer something like this at my school.

Imagine a school where teenagers come to pursue whatever projects they want. The projects don’t have to be related to anything or compared against anything or checked for excellence in any way, but during those projects (and after school hours), teachers text with the student, supporting them and challenging them in different ways, sometimes academically, sometimes emotionally, but always openly and honestly.

The teachers at this school spend part of their day working one-on-one with students, or offering group discussions or group collaborations, or working independently on their own projects, keeping an eye on student behavior while also engaging several of them through texts whenever the moment inspires or allows.

Such a school wouldn’t be much different than one I work in now, where most (if not all) of our teachers sometimes (and often) connect with students through texts.

But I’m wondering if we (or at least, I) could be more intentional about how we (I) use texts. Teachers know the importance of developing relationships with their students, but how many of us strategize the way we engage in the text-to-text aspects of that relationship, an aspect that might even be more important than the face-to-face one thanks to this generation’s connection to its devices?

Leave Me Alone, Kid (or) Go Fuck Yourself, Sir

Why would teachers not want to develop a text-based relationship with their students?

The obvious issue is privacy. Teachers deserve the opportunity to turn themselves off — not just go into sleep mode, but turn themselves off.

Giving students text-based access invites them to disturb their teacher’s most private hours, and every teacher has taught at least one student who was not yet skilled in the art of respecting privacy.

But the issue goes both ways.

Students don’t want to hear from their teachers when they’re busy with their friends or when they’re getting ready to Netflix & chill.

There are also rotten apples among us who would take advantage of their age and authority to manipulate students into doing something they may not want to do (or realize they shouldn’t do).

Still, even with those caveats, there’s definitely something here to think about; something that may be worth getting right.

Categories
reviews writing advice

Seventeen minutes

Seventeen minutes. That’s what it takes to write something good. The something can always be made better, and it’ll take as much time as a writer is willing to give it, but it takes seventeen minutes at least.

This is not a lot of time. It’s less than the length of one episode of comedic television.

Seventeen minutes is keyboard time though. It’s sitting at the keyboard and typing rather furiously for seventeen minutes. But it’s not seventeen minutes of blathering onto the screen; it’s seventeen minutes of hyperintensity, where your body is almost completely still except for its unconscious twitches and shakes and your mind’s eye is so far inward it’s almost up your asshole, and then, almost like when a fish tries to dart back into the dark waters and you reach out to snatch it by its tail, you discover the phrase, and depending on how fast you are, its yours to catch or release.

It’s the buildup to the keyboard time that can get you. It takes a lot of energy to sit down and write. It’s a lazy man’s game, I know, but there isn’t any laziness to it. Not when it’s done right.

It’s like exercise. You just have to do it. Maybe someday you’ll feel like you’re a real part of “the game,” but for now, it’s just exercise.

I have friends that run in marathons; some are even Ironmen and women. I don’t think one of them has entered a race expecting they would win it. They expect zero accolades for their performance. They wouldn’t mind if they received some, but accolades aren’t for a moment a reason for them to run, or to swim, or to bike.

Before race day, they prepare — some more than others, but all of them prepare.

In writing, though, there is no race day. There is no single day that it’s all leading up to. It’s never “the day.”

When I see my friends at the starting line of their races (which isn’t very often), they often seem serious. Those who can laugh, laugh, but not all of them; some take the time to focus. Sometimes they bounce on their legs to get the energy flowing, or they sway back and forth, trying to stay loose.

There is that in writing too. Some writers are able to roll right out of bed and get going, but I think most of us have to psyche ourselves up a little bit. Some even pop performance enhancing drugs like marijuana or alcohol (Hunter S. Thompson popped a pharmacy). But then, clean or not, feeling the moment, we sit down, place our fingers on the keys, put them in their rested but ready position, and wait, wait…wait…and bang, the phrase hits, and we’re off.

Most people don’t run marathons though. You know what they do? They run 5Ks. A lot of them, sometimes more than once a day.

How long do you think that takes, a 5K?

I don’t know. I’m not a runner. But I think to run a pretty good 5K, seventeen minutes sounds about right to me.

I shit you not. I started this post a little more than twenty minutes ago. I’m sorry it’s taken this long. I’m still a little off my game.

And for the record (just because I finished watching it about twenty minutes ago) tonight’s “Spoils of War” episode has to be in the running not just as the best episode of Game of Thrones, but as possibly the best episode of television ever. It demonstrated the narrative moment that comes just before the apotheosis as well as I’ve ever seen it done. I can’t wait to read George R.R. Martin’s version of it.

And also for the record, it’s taking Mr. Martin longer than seventeen minutes to write A Song of Ice & Fire; in fact, it’s taking him longer than seventeen years.

Name one project you’ve worked on for longer than seventeen years (children don’t count).

Give Mr. Martin a break. He’s creating a true masterpiece.

And for those of you going after David Benioff and D.B. White for their desire to wrangle whatever stories they can out of the notion that the South won the Civil War and slavery still exists the way capitalism still exists, as a bona-fide economic theory — how dare you try to censor an artist before he or she can begin her work?

Game of Thrones has to be ranked as one of the best series of television ever. You can argue the point all you like, but no one would denounce you as crazy for suggesting it at least deserves some kind of honorable mention in the discussion.

The world makes a lot of television. To do it as well as Beniof and White have done it for as long as they’ve done it, and to do it at such a massive scale, with millions of person hours dedicated to its creation, production, and distribution, and done in what seems to be a genuine manner, allowing the dirtiness of Martin’s novels to titillate and shock the viewer while also striving to touch their hearts… Beniof and White have been as successful on screen as Martin has been on the page — differently successful, but successful nonetheless.

Haven’t they shown themselves to be twenty-first century artists of the first stripe, capable of manipulating the capitalist system in such a way as to dedicate millions upon millions of dollars to the creation of quality works of art? You think the Vatican doesn’t benefit from housing such high quality artwork behind its doors?

Yes, there’s money to be made in art. Ask Shakespeare and Michelangelo.

I’m not trying to go out on a limb here. In their official announcement about the series, Benioff and White used the language of art to frame what they’re trying to do, saying, “Our experience on Thrones has convinced us that no one provides a bigger, better storytelling canvas than HBO.” Given any urge to create art, what artist worth her salt would turn down the biggest canvas she could find?

The announced concept behind “Confederacy” is problematic, true, and I applaud those who want to ensure that the artists understand the problems before they try to tackle them, but how dare anyone forbid their attempt of it?

With tonight’s episode of Game of Thrones, which, by the way, they wrote before George R.R. Martin was able to write it, they proved themselves due for so much respect as artists that I’m willing to support whatever endeavor they choose next.

Yes, critique their idea. Yes, call into question the real political and cultural issues that arise from their idea, but for the love of all that is sacred in art, don’t denounce their right to attempt it.

Okay. That was about twenty more minutes. Sorry, but that was a great episode of television and I just needed to say all that.

Forty-five minutes of writing. Thirteen minutes of editing. That’s almost an hour-long drama. That’s not much at all.

Categories
writing advice

What’s the Significance?

You’ll often read that observation is a skill you need to become a good writer. I don’t have strong observation skills. Like the stereotypical husband that I can be, I am the world’s worst looker for things, and I often can’t tell you what outfit my wife puts on each morning, even after she’s only just left the room.

But I’ve learned that observation doesn’t just mean observing objects in a room or the precise details of a woman’s dress. It also means observing yourself and your relationship with others, and observing others and their relationship with those around them. It means trying to read verbal, physical, and social cues to understand the underlying dynamic of a given situation, and to then empathize with all of the elements affecting or being affected by that dynamic.

Observation is not *looking*. It’s *probing* and *pursuing*.

The action of looking is too passive. To be a good writer, you need to ask questions and follow wherever those questions lead, at every point asking yourself, “What is the significance of this? Why does it matter?”

It sounds like journalism, and to some extent it is — good journalism being, at bottom, good writing — but good writing posits those questions not only to bodies of power, but also to even the most basic of facts, such as the details of a woman’s dress.

This applies to blogging as well.

After all, what is the significance of this post? Why does it matter?

Blogging is a timely art form. Its impact is limited to the moment. While a blogger could post an article whose value lasts for weeks or months or years, the value of most blog posts are ephemeral, relevant only for a day or two beyond their time stamps.

The art of being a blogger, then, is to seek significance in everyday existence, to probe your entire day until you find something that matters, something that deserves to be talked about beyond its temporal confines.

This week, I had several experiences that could qualify, some of which I’ve already shared, others of which are still in the drafting stage, and still others of which I’ve yet to attempt to memorialize.

Like the fact that my college roommate and his wife are visiting us this weekend. Within that fact lies an entire treatise on the meaning of friendship.

Or the fact that I might have traumatized my daughter this week by letting her watch *Coraline* at way too young of an age, the result of which was a four-year-old girl who was afraid to go to sleep in her bed. I could connect that story with another where she was genuinely curious about what happens to the skin when a bug bites it: why does it get itchy and why is there a bump? I could then extend the investigation to her recurring fascination with — and existential dread about — the fact that, sometime in the future, the sun will explode. By the time I wrapped it up, it could be a blog post about the challenge of raising a child who is curious about the things that scare her, and the wisdom of that idea.

Or I could write a blog post about two different experiences I had at school this week, and both on the same day, the first of which involved getting an angry and belligerent teenager to stop being angry and literally smell the flowers, the result of which was an outpouring of creative energy whose like I’d yet to experience with this student; and the second of which involved letting an 11-year-old boy smack me in the face for 40 minutes straight because that was the only way I could get him to look me in the eye and talk to me about his life, each smack allowing him to punctuate his sadness and loneliness with peels of tension-releasing laughter.

Or I could write a blog post about buying my wife a Roomba for Mother’s Day, and use it to investigate why the gift was both good and not-good at one and the same time, resulting perhaps in a blog post about the intricacies of marital gift giving, with a tangent about the joys and challenges of being married to an incredibly intelligent feminist and the patriarchal irony of giving such a feminist a Roomba for Mother’s Day.

Regardless of what I chose to blog about, the key would be to find within it something of significance, something that matters beyond my need to “journal,” because blogging shouldn’t be about journaling. Journaling is a private affair, and blogging, due to its medium, is very much a public one. A blog shouldn’t be a place to make a confession. It should be a place where the act of reflection (whether on your experiences or on the news of the day) results in something that is worthy enough to share — worthy enough to be read, even if only once.

I don’t care what the books tell you: observation is not the skill you most need to be a writer; more than observation, you need *interrogation* — the ability to probe and pursue every fact and every experience until it reveals its significance within the wider moment. Whether that means interrogating a news item, a mother’s day gift, the arrival of a friend, or the details of a woman’s dress, at all points you must ask, “What is the significance? Why does it matter?”

Only then can you say to yourself, I know what to write.

Categories
writing advice

The Poetic Un-Filter

I’m teaching an Introduction to Creative Writing class at Green Mountain College this semester. We just moved into our unit on poetry, and a couple of days ago, during the opening lecture, I was talking to the students about the difference between prose and poetry. I quoted George Santayana, who wrote, “Poetry breaks up the trite concepts designated by current words into the sensuous qualities out of which those conceptions were originally put together.”

This morning, I was reading an article in The Atlantic about Douglas Hofstadter, a thought-leader in the development of artificial intelligence. Hofstadter argues that the core of human intelligence is to “understand the fluid nature of mental categories.”

“Cognition is recognition,” he likes to say. He describes “seeing as” as the essential cognitive act: you see some lines as “an A,” you see a hunk of wood as “a table”…and a young man’s style as “hipsterish” and on and on ceaselessly throughout your day. That’s what it means to understand…“At every moment,” Hofstadter writes, “we are simultaneously faced with an indefinite number of overlapping and intermingling situations.” It is our job, as organisms that want to live, to make sense of that chaos. We do it by having the right concepts come to mind. This happens automatically, all the time.

Now, the question is, how does Santayana’s quote belong with Hofstadter’s theory of cognition?

Both Santayana and Hofstadter agree that the process of cognition is based on recognition. We look at the explosions of colors and lines that are the given world and our mind pairs those sensations with “the right concepts” — that’s how we know a table is a table and not a rhinoceros.

But Santayana is saying that the poet is gifted with the ability to retain the original sensations, the explosions of colors and lines before “the right concepts” (or as Santayana says, the “trite concepts”) force those sensations into a specific category, into a specific box.

It is the the poet who connects us to the unfiltered sensations of the world and uncategorized emotions of the soul. As poets, it is our job to grab hold of those sensations before they can be boxed up into the prepackaged concepts constructed by our cultures, to save them from the inevitable loss that comes from being stuffed into a box.

Categories
writing advice

I is for Ideal Reader

I don’t know who you are.

I can look at my Google Analytics to get a rough understanding of where you are, where you came from, and how long you stayed on Fluid Imagination, but who you are — your motivation for coming here and the goals you hope to achieve — these I can only imagine.

Ideally, you are a fiction writer, and you’re interested in reading medium-sized chunks of writing advice. Ideally, you’re also a human being, with all the icky bits that come from being human, the same icky bits that make you laugh at poop jokes and cry at funerals and prefer common words over jargon.

As a member of my ideal readership, you’re neither male nor female, black nor white nor yellow nor red nor blue nor indigo or violet. What you are, instead, is someone who gets turned on, turned off, and rubbed both the wrong and right ways.

You enjoy television (good television), movies that make you think and feel, and books that either dare to try something new or succeed in doing the same-old same-old really, really well.

But more than anything, as a member of my ideal readership, you are fiercely curious about the craft of creative writing. You don’t want a magical formula. You want, instead, to work hard and sweat. You want to sit at the keyboard and, as the man said, “open a vein.”

You’re here because you want to write words until you find the phrasing that makes you cry at the truth of it. You want authenticity, earnestness, and syntactic acrobatics.

In short, you’re here on Fluid Imagination because you are my ideal reader. Where else would you be?