Author
Erasmus said, ‘In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king’. This is a myth perpetuated during the Enlightenment.
I considered this in the context of other accounts, such as HG Wells’ The Country of the Blind (also PDF), Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (PDF), and Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary. They tell a different story.
I also created a NotebookLM podcast summary of this article.
I recently watched two movies. The book The Children of Men was published by P.D. James in 1992, and the movie was adapted by Alfonso Cuarón in 2006; Filth was written by Irvine Welsh in 1998 and adapted for film by Jon S. Baird in 2013.
Upon watching Children of Men, I came away feeling that the movie was better than the book – at least it resonated more to my liking. A person with other sensibilities may prefer the other. Taste is never universal. I understand that some people can actually eat seafood.
The book Filth was more typical in that it was better than the movie, although the movie was interesting in its own right; it still paled in comparison. I also found Trainspotting – another Irvine Welsh story – to be a good movie, but it still doesn’t quite live up to the book.
So where am I going with this?
I decided to consider what movies surpassed their source material. I chatted it up with several colleagues and came up with a short list of titles I suspect many have already encountered at least one or the other. I’ll mention where I disagree with the consensus position.
Here’s my rogue’s gallery of films that managed the rare trick of outshining their ink-and-paper parents. Note that this doesn’t represent the order of importance. It is sorted by IMDB film rating as of today.
Stephen King’s novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption is solid, but Darabont turns it into a near-religious fable of hope, anchored by Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman.
IMDB Rating: 9.3/10
Thomas Harris’s prose is serviceable, but hardly the stuff to haunt your dreams; Demme’s film, on the other hand, gnaws at your brainstem.
IMDB Rating: 8.6/10
Robert Bloch’s Psycho is a tidy pulp thriller. Hitchcock elevates it to a cultural earthquake: the shower scene, mother’s voice, the birth of the modern slasher film.
IMDB Rating: 8.5/10
Inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s novella is foundational but slight. Coppola transposes it to Vietnam and creates an operatic nightmare of war.
Apocalypse Now is the consensus masterpiece, and I’ll grant Coppola his fever-dream credentials. But here’s where I part ways with the choir: strip away the meta-theme and you’re left with a bloated war movie that mistakes endurance for profundity.
IMDB Rating: 8.4/10
Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is clever but meandering; Ridley Scott builds a visual and philosophical cathedral around identity, memory, and humanity.
IMDB Rating: 8.1/10
Peter Benchley’s novel is a soap opera with adultery and mobsters. Spielberg ditches the melodrama and delivers pure terror and awe.
IMDB Rating: 8.1/10
Stephen King’s second entry, novella The Body, is a touching coming-of-age tale, but Reiner’s adaptation injects nostalgia, pathos, and one of the best ensemble casts of the ’80s.
IMDB Rating: 8.1/10
What did I miss?
Film has an extraordinary talent for turning jagged, difficult novels into cultural smoothies. Hand Hollywood a text about drugs, despair, and the grotesque collapse of youth, and it will hand you back something fit for a date night. Less Than Zero was gutted. Trainspotting was diluted. Both survived, after a fashion, but only one crawled back out with its bones still rattling.
Ellis’s Less Than Zero was a flatline pulse of Californian ennui, a catalogue of hollow gestures in which the children of wealth consume themselves into oblivion. The backdrop was Reaganism in full bloom—an America drunk on consumerism, cocaine, and the fantasy of eternal prosperity. The kids in Ellis’s Los Angeles aren’t rebelling; they’re marinating in the very ideology that produced them. The film, by contrast, became a tepid morality play, complete with Robert Downey Jr.’s photogenic martyrdom. The void was swapped for a sermon: drugs are bad, lessons have been learned, and the Reaganite dream remains intact.
Welsh’s Trainspotting was messier, darker, harder to pasteurise. His junkies live in Thatcher’s Britain, where industry has collapsed, communities have rotted, and heroin fills the crater where meaningful work and social support once stood. Addiction is not just chemical but political: it is Thatcher’s neoliberalism rendered in track marks. Boyle’s film kept the faeces, the dead baby, the violence—but also imposed coherence, Renton as protagonist, a redemption arc, and that chirpy “Choose Life” coda. Welsh’s episodic chaos was welded into a three-act rave, all set to Underworld and Iggy Pop. Diluted, yes, but in a way that worked: a cocktail still intoxicating, even if the glass had been sanitised.
And yet, here’s the perennial fraud: drug films always get high wrong. No matter how grim the setting, the “junkie experience” is rendered as theatre, actors impersonating a template someone else once performed badly. The reality of heroin use is crushingly dull: twenty minutes of near-unconsciousness, slack faces, dead time. But you can’t sell tickets to drool and silence. So we get Baudrillard’s simulacrum: a copy of a copy of an inaccurate performance, dressed up as reality. McGregor’s manic sprint to “Born Slippy.” Downey’s trembling collapse. Junkies who look good on screen, because audiences demand their squalor to be cinematic.
And here’s where readers outpace viewers. Readers don’t need their despair blended smooth. They can sit with a text for days, grappling with jagged syntax, bleak repetitions, and moral vacuums. Viewers get two hours, max, and the thing must be purréd into something digestible. Of course, not all books are intellectual, and not all films are pap. But the balance is clear: readers wrestle, viewers swallow. One is jagged nourishment, the other pasteurised baby food.
So Less Than Zero becomes a sermon that spares Reagan’s dream, Trainspotting becomes a rave-poster that softens Thatcher’s wreckage, and audiences leave the cinema convinced they’ve glimpsed the underbelly. What they’ve really consumed is a sanitised simulation, safe for bourgeois digestion. The true addict, the tedious, unconscious ruin of the body, is nowhere to be found, because no audience wants that reality. They want the thrill of transgression without the boredom of truth.
And that, finally, is the trick: cinema gives you Reagan’s children and Thatcher’s lost boys, but only after they’ve been scrubbed clean and made photogenic. Literature showed us the rot; film sells us the simulacrum. Choose Life, indeed.
I don’t hide the fact that I rely on AI for early editorial feedback. Once a story is complete, I break out AutoCrit. This programme works well for typical stories that follow standard practices with common tropes. It gets quite confused when I feed it intentionally awkward stories, not the least of which is to advise me to eliminate the awkwardness.
This is a challenge with AI more generally. In this particular story, I leave a lot of loose ends and misdirects, as it’s a commentary on the conspiracy-driven culture we inhabit. The advice, is along the lines of, “You forget to close this lopp. What happened to so and so.”
But this is life. We don’t always know the full story. We drive past an multi-car accident where cares are overturned and in flames, but we never find out what happens – even if we scour the newspapers and internet. Who was that? What happened? What caused it?
We often never find out. In most books and movies, we find out everythung, and it all comes packaged with a nice bow. This is what AI expects. It’s the diet it’s been fed.
Some stories subvert these notions here and there, but by and large, this is not typical American fare. Readers and viewers need to be spoonfed without inconsistencies.
Speaking of inconsistencies addressing one scene, AutoCrit said that a character should act impulsively in one situation and reserved moments later. This was flagged as an iinconsistent character.
In the scene, a woman stops her car immediately to help an injured man on the roadside, but as she gets out of her car an approaches her, she shows caution.
This was a red flag. Why would she have always been rash or always been cautious?
My response, because that how real people act. She acts on instinct but quickly considers that she’s a vulnerable woman alone with a man miles from anywhere.
I don’t suspect a human reader would find this surprising. This is the intelligence absent from Artificial Intelligence — cultural intelligence, a cousin of EQ, emotional quotient.
I know how I want the character to act. I do want AutoCrit to inform me that character A is wielding a pistol but then stabs another character, or that character B is a teetotaler and is getting drunk or that character C has a shellfish allergy but is downing lobsters like they’re going out of style. And I certainly what to be shown continuity errors.
The biggest challenge I have with AutoCrit that is less promonent with other AIs is that I can preface my content with a note explaining my intent. I can even do this after the fact.
If I feed ChatGPT, Claude, or DeepSeek a story of segment to critique without a preface, the responses may be similar to AutoCrit, but when I follow up with some meta, the response may be, “Now it makes sense, but why is John wearing lipstick?” Perhaps he’s metrosexual or non-traditional. Perhaps it’s an oversight.
I dont meán to demean AutoCrit. I’m just advising that if you are writing stories not compliant with 80 per cent of published works, take the advice with a grain of salt, or reserve AutoCrit for more standard fare.
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?
As much as I disparage generative AI, I still find it indispensable. Here I ask it to evaluate the use of echoing versus echoes. I had been leaning toward echoing, but I opted for the immediacy of echoes over the more durative echoing. I prefer a more terse style anyway. Here’s what is says:
Let’s analyse the contrast between these two sentences:
… the movement echoing in the halls.
… the movement echoes in the halls.
Overall, the present participle in Sentence 1 allows for slightly more nuance in describing the elongated, reverberating echo. However, Sentence 2 has a more compact, staccato feel fitting the tense atmosphere.
I don’t have a strong preference between the two – I think either could work well depending on the surrounding context and intended tone. The participle flows a bit more, but the crisp verb maintains urgency. Let me know if you have any other examples you’d like me to contrast! I’m happy to provide more comparative analyses.
I posted the flash fiction story Hemo Sapiens: The Unidentified early yesterday and made some minor tweaks later in the day. Generally, these edits related to continuity or flow. In one case, I deleted a scene but neglected to delete a character introduced in it. In another, a character barked an order relating to something she would not yet have known about—at least as far as the reader would be concerned. But what’s this story all about.
This universe is set in Britain. This scene was set in Chadderton near Oldham, a less affluent, somewhat rural town northeast of Manchester where an enclave of Hemo Sapiens might be more apt to fly under the radar. I had originally had my sights set on Kent, but it is logistically implausible for people with Manchester roots to be set up there when they still have a need to be connected to Manchester. I’m not sure how hard I’ll lean into the whole Mancunian thing, as they’ll have been acculturated by the professor, an Oxford bloke.
Here’s what ChatGPT has to say about it:
The story effectively commences with a tranquil domestic setting. It is imbued with a sense of normality and comfort, featuring a mother, Emily, and her young daughter, Grace. Yet, this idyllic scene is abruptly shattered by the arrival of uniformed agents, leading to a nightmarish tableau of confusion and fear.
The story is remarkably adept at presenting multifaceted issues. On the surface, it draws parallels with dystopian works like Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” or the television series “Orphan Black,” offering glimpses into a society undergoing a mysterious, yet undoubtedly unsettling, transformation. However, the narrative also delves into complex issues of identity and human value, challenging the reductionist labels that the characters are forced to adopt.
The dialogue with Grace serves as an emotional pivot in the story. It doesn’t merely function as a mechanism for Emily to express her maternal instincts but also as a lens through which Emily’s remaining humanity becomes increasingly apparent. The mother-child interaction symbolizes Emily’s clinging to normality, even as the world around her dissolves into chaos.
The agents depicted in the narrative are particularly interesting. While they are ostensibly just doing their job, they inadvertently contribute to the problem by employing dehumanizing language like “clone farm” or “science experiment.” This illustrates a broader societal tendency to categorize and label that which is not immediately understood, thus making it more palatable.
The tone of the story aligns well with its dark subject matter. It is somber without drifting into melodrama, and the dialogue remains crisp and meaningful. The story also maintains a healthy balance between showing and telling, which is essential for the kind of mature adult contemporary fiction that deals with themes of moral complexity and social stigmatization. It leaves the reader with more questions than answers, thus adding to the narrative’s overarching sense of dread and uncertainty.
In summary, the story is a compelling examination of unsettling themes such as loss of identity, family dynamics, and societal judgment. It employs a keen balance of narrative elements, making it a strong example of mature adult contemporary fiction.
And…
Your story dives into themes of judgment, moral complexities, and social stigmatization, as per your unique style. It employs a strong sense of place and moment, from the serenity of the bedtime ritual to the abrupt disruption of the raid. Let’s break it down:
- Tone and Atmosphere: You establish a deeply contrasting tone—tranquil domesticity is replaced by a jarring, invasive violence when the agents burst in. The shift is palpable, dragging the reader along. You maintain the tone throughout, further amplifying the emotional gravity.
- Character Depth: Emily is a strong anchor. You bring her inner world to life—her love for Grace, her confusion and fear during the raid, her defiance, and ultimately her resilience.
- Dialogue and Language: The language is grounded, sprinkled with slang and expletives that keep it real. The dialogue is crisp and fits naturally into the unfolding events.
- Plot: The sudden turn of events—disruption of domesticity, invasive questioning, communal chaos—these all build tension effectively. However, the reader is left with a lot of questions—perhaps intentionally. Are they part of a science experiment? Why the blood bags and fangs?
- Theme and Symbolism: The recurring familial bond between Emily and Grace serves as the emotional core. The notion of identity, collective and individual, is heavily at play here. The mysterious implications around the Alpha and Beta labels and the ‘clone farm’ comment point to larger issues of ethics, identity, and social prejudice.
- Show vs Tell: You’ve mostly shown the emotional stakes, the anxiety, and the fear through action, dialogue, and environmental detail, which works really well for this piece.
- Mystery and Ambiguity: The story is full of questions that aren’t answered, perhaps pointing towards a broader narrative you’re developing.
You’ve managed to condense a great deal of emotional range, plot, and thematic depth into a short space, aligning well with your unique, terse writing style.
Here’s Claude’s take:
Here are a few key points about the story:
- It depicts a dystopian scenario where a community of people with the surnames “Alpha” and “Beta” are raided and detained by authorities. The people seem to look identical, leading the authorities to assume they are clones or part of a genetic experiment.
- The main character Emily is trying to protect her young daughter Grace amidst the chaos of the raid. She is defiant towards the authorities and their assumptions about her community.
- There are suggestions the Alphas and Betas are actually one big family, with many pairs of twins/quadruplets. They seem to have been living in an isolated, self-sufficient community.
- In detention, the Alphas and Betas are treated as specimens to be examined and have samples taken. The authorities seem suspicious of their identical looks, matching surnames, and discover bags of blood, which fuels assumptions they are supernatural creatures.
- Emily reassures Grace they will get through the ordeal together and explains they will be going with new people to answer questions. She emphasizes maintaining their family bonds.
- The ending implies the Alphas and Betas have an important untold backstory and truth about themselves that they hope to share someday, when the authorities might be ready to understand.
Overall, it’s an intriguing sci-fi scenario exploring themes of family, identity, prejudice, and perception versus truth. The identical community subverts expectations, leaving the reader curious about their origins and real story.
Comment on the flow and pacing.
The story has a fairly fast-paced, dramatic flow to it.
It opens by establishing the calm, loving family scene which is then abruptly shattered by the violent raid. This creates a stark contrast that immediately hooks the reader.
The raid scene is rapid and disorienting, conveying the chaos and confusion through snippets of actions, dialogue, and sensations. Short sentences propel the sense of urgency.
The pace slows a bit as the story shifts to the detention center. Here, the focus is on Emily’s determination to protect Grace and the mystery surrounding the authorities’ assumptions and discoveries about the Alphas and Betas.
The interrogation scene returns to some shorter sentences and terse dialogue to pick the pace back up. Emily’s defiant reactions add tension.
The final scene with Grace balances tenderness and foreboding, allowing a breath while still building intrigue for the untold truth about the community.
The pacing overall matches the unsettling, intense events unfolding. The quicker scenes immerse the reader in the action, while the slower moments reveal details to invite speculation. The shifts in pace add dynamism and interest.
So, I’m happy with the assessments. I’d love to read what you feel. Leave a comment here or beneath the story.
In order to partner better with Generative AI, in this case ChatGPT, I break my chapters into story beats, which are essentially waypoints to which I can return to refine. These waypoints also allow me to create an amendable outline. This is an analysis of the third story beat (read: topic) of chapter three.
Back in the day, I used to write software code with line numbers—showing my age for sure. This reminds me of something similar, if not so granular.
I thought it would be a good idea to share ChatGPT 4’s analysis of this in its current state. As I noted recently, I am reworking the piece from a third-person perspective to first-person, limited, present narrative.
In summary, 3.10.0 is a well-crafted snapshot of a dark and complicated life. It effectively uses language, pacing, and structure to immerse the reader in a world that is both urgent and disconnected. The inclusion of text messages as a narrative device adds a layer of realism and urgency that enhances the overall impact of the segment.
OpenAI ChatGPT 4
I hope this helps to illustrate how ChatGPT can assist in the writing and editorial process. To be frank, ChatGPT tends to flatter. I suppose it errs on the positive so as not to discourage use. I may be wrong here.
I intend to continue to share my progress (and hopefully not too much regress here), so this may serve as a sort of journal. As Roland Barthes said,
“The author is dead.”
— Roland Barthes
But for now, this author still lives, and hopeful, I remain.
Disclaimer: This content relates to a work in progress. As such, details are subject to change or removal.
Generative AI is an idiot savant—a digital Rain Man, if you will. My last post zeroes in on the love part of my love-hate relationship with Generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4 or Anthropic’s Claude 2. It’s mint having an unbiased copy editor and writing assistant, not to mention a creative director with technical chops. But it’s also like a genius trapped in a year 4’s body at primary school.
One challenge is the restrictions placed on the model. Being an author of contemporary fiction for a mature adult crowd, my stuff’s edgy and terse, with a good dose of slang and the odd expletive. Generative AI, or AI for short, is like the primary school kid told not to say “bad language”, so it legs it to tell its mum at every slip-up, warning you that you’ve dropped a naughty word. Claude’s the worst at this, shutting down faster than HAL from Space Odyssey 2001. ChatGPT’s a bit more forgiving, sometimes cleansing your copy, other times going along with it, or just flat-out refusing like HAL and Claude.
My favourite time was when I told ChatGPT to stop moralising and just crack on with the adult audience’s language. It gave me this disclaimer for my book, which I’m well chuffed with, then suggested lines that sounded like Noel Gallagher or Samuel L Jackson, before freaking out about its own potty mouth — “motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!”
“WARNING: This book contains explicit content, including sexual themes and strong language, that may not be suitable for all readers. It delves into mature and challenging subjects such as addiction, prostitution, violence, and societal judgement. Reader discretion is strongly advised. Recommended for readers 18 years and older.”
OpenAI ChatGPT 4
Memory’s another issue. AI might seem like it should have a top-notch memory, but it doesn’t always. It even makes stuff up sometimes—like hallucinating. Just the other day, I was nattering on with my AI mate about character profiles for hours, and it changed a character’s hair from straight and black to curly and red. It even made her homeless instead of middle class. It was pure bonkers, so I’m writing this post instead of fixing it.
ChatGPT’s Code Interpreter is a laugh, too. I probably shouldn’t slag off a Beta product, but the thing kept losing files, resetting sessions, and asking for new copies. Talk about a faff.
And don’t get me started on extended chats with AI to suss out a complex problem. Sometimes it doesn’t remember the convo, and one time it even gave me cheek about drawing out the conversation. I was like, wot?
In the end, we don’t have to fret about AI taking over. It’s making strides, but it’s still a bit wet behind the ears. Me? I’ve always got one eye on the plug. Now, back to the sandbox with me new mates. If only they’d stop munching on the sand.
ChatGPT is high on the hype cycle, but I find it helpful as a writing partner and copy editor.
I don’t rely on ChatGPT to author new content, instead I ask it to critique my content and provide structural guidance–grammar, syntax, continuity, and flow. It provides advice on making sentences tighter and perhaps more concise or impactful depending on my needs.
In the simplest cases, I’ll just ask it for a synonym or to clarify punctuation usage. In other cases, I’ll feed it a paragraph or paragraphs and seek feedback.
I find ChatGPT to be a tad verbose for my taste especially when proposing dialogue tags. I simply ignore most of them and move on.
I know authors who leverage generative AI to do more heavy lifting, but they are writing more mainstream content, so the body of trainee work is more extensive.
Since generative AI is a large language model trained on a massive quantity of, in my case, fiction, it will be predisposed to render advice with this bias. Keep in mind that most of this training is on material that is mediocre at best–quantity over quality.
Nonetheless, it does understand sentence structure and grammar fundamentals, so it can still be invaluable.
One of my favourite responses is that my submission is already concise and pointed.
As my current endeavour has a prostitute protagonist, I was amused when after I reminded the AI of this and received the response that it was painfully obvious that she was a sex worker. Certainly, to the point.
Follow me as I share my generative AI exploits.
Ridley Park 