Category Archives: Writing

Control and the Storytelling Tradeoff in Video Games

Stories can be great, and video games can be great, but video games are not the greatest medium for stories. This realization came to me after seeing the television adaptation of The Last of Us. I played the post-apocalyptic video game around the time it first came out in 2013, when it was hailed as one of “the best video games ever.” While I had some fun playing the game, I thought it was overrated and undeserving of its massive hype. The gameplay itself didn’t feel all that fun or inventive. Instead, what was so critically acclaimed was not the gameplay but the story

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Writers Must Read

I often hear published writers say they don’t have time to read anymore. It is often in interviews while promoting their own work, when they are asked what books they have read lately. Some writers say they don’t have time to read at all, others not as much as they would like to. Those who do read often only read ARCs (advanced reader copies) of new books they have been asked to write a blurb for, or nonfiction books as research for their fiction. They are too busy writing books to be reading books for leisure, or so they say. But this is not an excuse—it is cope. All writers need to always be reading. (ABR)

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Future Movies Will Be Shorter

Most movies are ninety minutes to two hours. Some are longer, veering toward three hours, but those tend to be more epic in scope, from established filmmakers and/or blockbuster franchises. However, for screenwriters trying to break into the industry, it is strongly recommended—if not required—to write spec screenplays between 90 and 120 pages (with one page of screenplay roughly equating to one minute of screen time). 

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Plan Your Creative Career Like Evolution

Planning your life can be difficult because there are so many possibilities. It may be best to take a lesson from nature and choose your career path like evolution. DNA evolves by reproduction with random mutations. Many variations are created, not knowing which will succeed. When one trait does succeed, it replicates and builds upon that mutation. This system of evolution clearly works—it produced us, humans, from a single cell of bacteria.

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Think Like an Artist to Create Better AI Art

One of the great upsides of AI art is the ability for artistically unskilled people to create their own artwork. Instead of spending years learning the craft of how to paint or draw, you can instantly generate a skilled painting or drawing. The most artistic part of the process in AI art becomes choosing which image to create. For that image to be artistically meaningful, prompters must learn how to think like an artist. 

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To Plan or To Pants? Writing Advice on Plotting vs Pantsing

There are essentially two types of writers: plotters and pantsers. Those who outline their plot beforehand, and those who write from the seat of their pants (AKA go in blind and make everything up as they go along). I said in the past that I was an outliner, but I now outline less than I used to. 

Outlines make it easier to know where you have to go in the plot. But one benefit of writing from the seat of your pants is that you are motivated to write more often and faster because you want to know what happens next. If the full story is thoroughly outlined, writing can become more of a tedious transcription-like process with little surprise for the writer. Less planning can create more fun, though I don’t know if I would recommend that approach to someone who doesn’t have sufficient writing experience

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Best Nonfiction Books I Read in 2023

1. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1997) by David Foster Wallace

I have yet to read Infinite Jest (it is on my bucket list), but I enjoyed this collection of DFW’s long nonfiction essays, maybe even more than his short fiction. They are absolutely genius—not just in their content but in the craftsmanship of the prose on a sentence level. I read a couple of these essays several years ago but struggled with Wallace’s complicated syntax. Between the page-long sentences, invented words and acronyms, and multi-paged footnotes, you practically need a map to read a David Foster Wallace book. With my reading comprehension having expanded since then, I can now better understand and appreciate the complexity of his prose. Few writers could string words together better than DFW (RIP). The essays in this collection include: 

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Incubate Stories Subconsciously Before Writing

When I get a new idea for a fiction story I become obsessed. I am flooded with inspiration, developing the story in my mind while researching online, and rapidly taking notes for a potential plot and characters. I can see a flash of the entire story in my mind like a movie, and I feel the urge to follow this burst of obsessive inspiration to write the story ASAP. Sometimes I do write it right away, while other times I set the notes aside to finish whatever else I was working on at the time (because I am always working on something else). I have found the latter to be more productive for my creative process. It is better to wait and incubate the story for some time rather than rush in prematurely.

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Algorithmic Fiction is Not For Me

Welcome to the age of algorithmic fiction. Thanks to tools like GPT-4, a human writer with a library of previously written books can simply write a one-page outline for a new novel, and AI can write an entire novel in their style. In many cases the book will be good enough to pass as if it was written by the human authors themselves, allowing writers to publish more frequently. However, GPT fiction will only work with formulaic writers whose books are all similar. In other words, those writers who were already writing algorithmic fiction before the aid of AI.

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