Category: Quotations

Craft in a paragraph (nine)

I like to mess around with my stories. I’d rather tinker with a story after writing it, and then tinker some more, changing this, changing that, than have to write the story in the first place. That initial writing just seems to me the hard place I have to get to in order to go on and have fun with the story. Rewriting for me is not a chore–it’s something I like to do. I think by nature I’m more deliberate and careful than I am spontaneous, and maybe that explains something. . . . Maybe I revise because it gradually takes me into the heart of what the story is about. I have to keep trying to see if I can find that out.

–Raymond Carver

Craft in a metaphor (eight)

Here is a quotation collage from Peter Ho Davies’s The Art of Revision:

[I]t might help to modify our terms and to consider our initial sense of a story as a hypothesis, and what we know about it as provisional—theory, in essence…. [A] draft might be seen as an experiment designed to test that hypothesis…. Fiction indeed might be understood as a kind of thought experiment. What is a lie in search of the truth, after all–Picasso’s definition of art—if not a form of provisional knowledge?… New hypotheses can be tested with each draft—what if I cut this? what if I expand that? what if I shifted the time frame? or the point of view?… Without a flawed hypothesis, we can’t find our way to a true one.

Interesting language 8

Nothing could be done about the fact that he was only a homeschooled kid, no matter what he said, and she was a recently graduated senior taking on the cross of womanhood before her time. . . . Speaking in a calm and sensible manner, he completely failed to persuade his mother that he knew what he was doing.

From The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich, these are two excellent examples of sentence-level tension.

Current events

Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.

If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making. There are various ways it can do this. One is to take an average of the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet; that average is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible, which is why A.I.-generated text is often really bland. Another is to instruct the program to engage in style mimicry, emulating the choices made by a specific writer, which produces a highly derivative story. In neither case is it creating interesting art.

As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

from Ted Chiang’s Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art