We all arrive at our assignments desk with the tools we’ve got at the time. The assignment desk editor during my journalism days always posed suggestions and questions. There’s a baked-in curiosity to the nonfiction practice. Curiosity is a great catalyst for telling memorable stories.
More than 40 years later, curiosity is still paying dividends for the stories from me, plus the authors who I serve. We concoct, using questions as our launchpad. I can interview a writer about what a character is feeling and might decide. Journalism suits up for the work of stories without conclusions in hand. We do the same thing as readers, consuming and enjoying because we want to learn. And to experience, if the writing is potent enough, through fiction or creative nonfiction.
AI offers are everywhere. It’s a choice, to use a chat. You’re either Not-Bot, or Got-Bot. You might even be Not-Yet-Bot, and if that’s you, I’m glad I have your attention.
Brainstorming is an act that the AI dealers are promoting. “You simply won’t be able to think up all the possibilities that AI will think up for you,” one dealer says. As if that’s not enough, we’re being told, “We actually have to use AI if we want to write the best possibile version of our book.”
Feeding the Curiosity
Better not tell the hundreds of thousands of writers who’ve won prizes, sold a lot, or seen their books made into movies without using AI. In that order of success, I rank the outcomes by degree of difficulty. There are tons of prizes out there, you compete against every other book ever written to sell yours — and there’s nothing more expensive to make than a movie. When you book becomes a movie, at the least the producers have invested in your story. Maybe not you, unless you got a good contract.
Back to the journalism curiosity. When you book an hour with a coach, you will come to the meeting with me and learn what you already suspect about your characters. What do they fear, what must they leave behind, what makes them yearn? The talk, and it’s transcribed for us, is laced with words that present options.
Perhaps
Consider
Maybe
Collaboration is our mantra in a coaching call. You want to size up the possibilities and seize the ones that make you want to write. There’s not a lot to gain by learning from a bot that a few of the choices it can recall are successful. Not if they just don’t spark your muse engine.
You don’t have to do this through a coach, and you certainly don’t have to do it with a bot. You can have a writing partner who wants to suggest the way. Coach or partner, we find and create stories together that haven’t been expressed in that particular way. Together, you and your coach or partner recall things that are similar to things you’ve read, or listened to, or watched.
Keeping pace
A system of software simply cannot keep pace with an inventive and associative mind. You either believe that, tipping your hat nonetheless to the researching, nonfiction powers of AI, or you deny it. The fervent wish is that machines can help us do things and make things. To some extent that’s true — and it’s up to us as artists to decide the extent of that help.
In 1967, Richard Brautigan was hired by Caltech to be an artist in residence. The computers and software surrounding the science work there, well, they were Stone Age implements. Software could hardly be written by humans on drives in those days. It certainly didn’t write itself, like today.
Brautigan, a poet and novelist, cooked up a lovely phrase about the computer science all around him. Machines of loving grace, he called the future of intelligence. The prospects he could see didn’t extend to emotion or drama. Everybody just wanted to get the calculations correct — because at that time, slide rules were running NASA.
We call it brainstorming because the phrase conjures an act of a god. Weather is unpredictable, glorious, terrifying and boring. A storm is a tool of change, though, for tragedy or benefit, water for the crops to save them, or rains to kill innocents. We brainstorm because we want to toy with the god-like in ourselves.
AI will brainstorm with us. Whenever you can afford the time and the modest expense to storm with a human, I can be there after a little scheduling. You can also do this with a partner who likes to ask questions with you to imagine the worst, the most absurd, or the finest outcomes.
If you have enough time, and $400, a company will show you how to write your personal AI bot to help you write. You might want to spend that on a human, or buy a nice dinner for the two of you to brainstorm your book. It’s worked for hundreds of years up to now.
“I’m stuck” is one of the most common things a writer says while expose their imagination. There might be a day when a machine will reply with loving grace. In the meantime, you have books to write. Your coach or partner is ready to help.
