advice – Ridley Park

Hemingway App

January 17, 2024January 17, 2024Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book, Generative AI, Hemo Sapiens, Hemo Sapiens: Origins, Origins, WritingTagged advice, ai, editing, Generative AI, hemo sapiens, novel, WritingLeave a comment

I watched a YouTube video that referenced Hemingway App as an authors’ tool. Here, I pasted some sample content from Hemo Sapiens: Origins to see what it might suggest.

It’s a short passage, but the only things it found were trivial nits.

Highlighted, the complaint is that the top sentence (in yellow) is too complex, so I should break it up as shown in green. The only difference is that it swapped the semicolon with a full stop and capitalised the next letter to begin the next sentence. It also declared the Grade 11 writing sample to be reduced to Grade 6.

Is this really worth more than the free trial or the time and effort?

It highlighted two other related challenges: both adverbs, and neither with remediation advice. In the sceen shot, you can read ‘slightly crispy’. Honestly, I don’t have a more direct way to show this information. I suppose if it was ‘crispy’, I could specify a ‘crunch’ sound. But how is the crispy crunch diminished when it’s just ‘slightly’? Enquiring minds want to know.

The Sinister Side of AI

December 13, 2023Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, Interview, Sci-Fi, Software, Video, Writing, YouTubeTagged advice, ai, Generative AI, Interview, social commentary, Video, WritingLeave a comment

This is a wonderful interview with Science Fiction writer, Cory Doctorow, on the desire by some to replace screenwriters with AI. I recommend rewinding to watch the entire clip, but this is cued to his response on AI and writing.

When you see a Hollywood exec saying, effectively, “We want to fire all the screenwriters and replace them with plausible sentence generators’, that’s because, even if the plausible sentence generators aren’t very good, they have this weird hubristic faith in their ability to, through iteration, replace the screenwriter who wrote good dialogue with their own kind of wild-ass ideas. And you know the screenwriter’s experience of getting notes from an executive is already just AI prompting, right? Like, I need you to write me a version of Indiana Jones but in space—and could you make it a horror movie but make the hero a 10-year-old girl, right? That is, you know, your classic executive-to-writer note. And then the writer makes it, and they go, ‘Can you bring in a lovable animal in act two?’ This is just prompting, right? This is just like me writing instructions for removing a grilled cheese sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible, right? It’s just prompting. And so, you know what you get with automation is not something that’s good but something that doesn’t complain when you try to impose your genius on it. And it’s ever been thus.
— Cory Doctorow

At the beginning of the interview he discusses how he connects with the reader.

Dialogue: Virtual Writing Workshop

September 29, 2023Posted in Book, Character, critique, flash fiction, hemo sapiens, Short Story, WritingTagged advice, characters, critique, dialogue, hemo sapiens, Short Story, WritingLeave a comment

So this happened…

I attended an online writers workshop yesterday evening via Meetup.com. It was a small group, and we reviewed three works, one of which was Hemo Sapiens: The Unidentified. I got some good feedback and amended my story as result of it.

The advice I got was to connect some elements of the story where a connexion between X and Z was missing a Y, leaving the reader disoriented. In one case, the protagonist was inside her home and taken outside before the doors shut on a van. It wasn’t immediately apparent that she was in the van. There were other such breaks.

I was advised to add descriptions and to earn the use of some words. In particular, I used the word nightmare, and a reviewer said that by the description that she didn’t feel it was deserving of the term nightmare; it qualified as best as a bad dream. I opted to change nightmare to bad dream instead of adding description that would have slowed the pace.

I amended some other more trivial aspects, but I drew the line at dialogue. Some advice was to make some dialogue snippets to be more grammatically correct. In the first place, this would slow the pace—and these were not contemplative moments—, and I don’t feel most people speak grammatically as prescribed — certainly not this character.

The other piece of advice I chose to ignore is the dialogue of Grace, the five-year-old that had originally been a three-year-old. The complaint was that she was one-dimensional, but I saw no benefit fleshing her out in a work of flash fiction, and she was more of a foil and not a fully realised character in this context. Also, I don’t think five-year-olds — and especially three-year-olds are really that deep. Until recently, I had a three-year-old, so I speak from experience. Grace’s dialogue is also well advanced of mine. I’d prefer at making the dialogue feel real over well presented.

What are your boundaries in accepting writing advice?