Competition always makes me more productive. I've written my best stories when they were for contests among friends. I knew if I didn't turn in something good, I wouldn't live it down, so I'd meet the deadline no matter what. By writing enemy I mean someone you want to be better than, someone you want …
Real life
I'm having trouble concentrating on the fictional worlds I create, when the real one I live in is in such turmoil. It's hard not to think 'what's the point?' Who care's what happens to a pretend person I made up when there are real people in trouble everywhere? But we can't all do everything. That's …
Several short sentences about writing, by Verlyn Klinkenborg
I got this as a gift last year, and am finally finishing it now after a long hiatus of distraction. This is unequivocally the best book on writing I've ever read. Each page--each sentence--is a useful insight that most 'how to write' books would stretch out into an entire chapter. It is a joy to …
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Replay, by Ken Grimwood
The worries I wrote about in my previous posts on this did not come to be, and the book ended up being less infuriating than Harry August, but also less interesting. Jeff Winston is living twenty-five years of his life over and over again. Each time he dies of a heart attack at exactly the …
Will AI ever write fiction?
With all the advances in AI showing seemingly creative potential, I wonder if in some distant future, AIs will be able to scan the whole of human writing, and determine what makes for the perfect story--and start churning them out. I've always been a proponent of AI, and see it as more helpful than harmful …
Jonas David 