Losing the plot (or at least untangling it a bit)

Over the last month or so, I haven't done as much writing on my actual manuscript as I would have liked thanks to assignment marking deadlines, but I have been making some significant changes to the novel outline. One issue I had originally was that there were parts of the outline where I didn't really have a good idea of what I wanted to happen. As a result, these sections were either rushed and lacked adequate detail, or had 'placeholder' events that were there just to get the story from point A to point B regardless of whether those events made sense. In a similar vein - as I've complained about before - there were multiple instances of thing happening Because The Author Needs Them To rather than because they were logical things the characters would do.

After a lot of staring vacantly at my computer screen and a lot of scribbling on post-it notes, I moved some things around and had to add another chapter to try to fix those problems, only to discover that something else that was important doesn't really fit anymore. It was a bit like playing Jenga, with the whole thing constantly threatening to come crashing down around my ears, but eventually I managed to remove most of those rushed or illogical events from the story. For the events I previously didn't really have a logical explanation for or the explanation was ridiculous (for example, the event happening being technically possible but the level of chance/luck required for it to happen was astronomical), I was able to reconsider some of the characters' motivations and behaviour and how other characters would respond to that, which meant I could then say "Here is why Character A might do X, which means that now Y happening has gone from statistically implausible to reasonably likely".

There are still a few remaining elements where I haven't come up with a good explanation for them yet. Mostly surrounding the backstory of the antagonist, a powerful supernatural being who is both a ruler of her realm and a prisoner of it. The reader and/or the main characters may not ever learn the full reasons behind why something is happening in the story, and that's okay, but as the author, *I* still need to know why it's happening, so that I can make the bits the readers and characters do learn at least sound plausible.

All of this restructuring has resulted in some bits I previously liked being significantly reduced or cut out entirely, but other sections have been expanded, and I think the story overall is stronger for it. I certainly think it flows much better than it did previously. The manuscript is over 30,000 words now, and my estimate from eyeballing the word counts for the existing chapters is that the final product will end up at around 75,000 words, so it's looking less like a novella and more like an actual novel.

On the Australian government's social media ban for under 16s, and why it will be as useful as a fart in a spacesuit.

As many of you will be aware, the Australian government is trying to ban children under the age of 16 from using social media.

Banning children from social media is like banning them from going in the water. We'd be far better off teaching them to "swim"; educate them on the dangers of social media and how to be safe and protect their privacy online so they have the skills they need to navigate the water/online world.

Young queer and trans kids and other marginalised people (for example, people of colour and people with disabilities) need support and information, which is often difficult or outright dangerous for them to get from people in their lives but which is available from communities online. Cutting them off from that will put them at risk of further isolation and harm (which, sadly, is likely the main point of these laws being introduced).

And this won't just affect teenagers. It's not like social media companies can only ask teenagers to provide proof of age, they'd have to ask EVERYONE to do it. Which means facial recognition and/or uploading formal identification. This obviously has colossal privacy/safety implications. In this day and age it's not a matter of if our data will be stolen but when, so all adults are in danger of harm from these laws, but vulnerable populations (gay, trans, folks with medical issues, people who have/had an abusive partner/family member etc) are even more at risk. Not just because they're more likely to be targeted in the first place, but they're also more likely to be harmed if their private details are made public. So their only options are to either risk being doxxed or just cut themselves off from their online support groups/mechanisms (which again may be the only support they have).

As a writer and artist, I'd also be remiss in not mentioning the impact this is likely to have on creative people. Unlike for a lot of other occupations, we almost have to use social media to advertise our work. Whether it's photography, writing, art, music or anything else, it's incredibly difficult to get eyes on our work because (leaving aside the very few big/famous names in the industry), we can't get other people to advertise for us. If we want our stuff marketed, we have to do it ourselves, and even if we have a dedicated website, that doesn't mean much if people don't know to look for it. For a lot of writers and artists, social media is THE main way they get the word out about their books or their new art for sale, and often one of the most practical way for them to solicit commissions that help them put food on the table. If Australian creatives are forced to upload their identification in order to access these sites, will they do it? Sure, some will... but as above, many will justifiably decide it isn't worth the risk, and they will just stop using social media. As a result, writing or art will stop being financially viable for those people and there's a good chance they'll either revert to only doing it as an occasional hobby, or they'll be forced to take on more 9-5-esque jobs that leave little time and energy for creativity at all. This sucks for the individual artists, but also sucks for Australia's creative industry.

From a practical standpoint, banning YouTube means also banning Google... which is used in a huge number of schools for student collaboration and accessing learning resources, so... RIP that too, I guess? Hope all those teachers are going to be paid overtime for having to rewrite lessons and curriculums because the kids won't be able to access those educational videos anymore... (lol, like they even get paid enough in the first place)

Also, like with a lot of other "prohibitions", those who want to get around the ban will probably find a way anyway (at the risk of further punishment), so not only does the ban have the potential to harm young people, it's also unlikely to actually protect them.

On a similar note, kids are going to keep bullying each other regardless of whether they have social media or not. Without Facebook or whatever, the bullies will just continue with good old-fashioned name-calling and schoolyard assault they were already doing in addition to the online bullying, because teachers won't do anything to stop it either way (partially because they're under-resourced but also because, let's be honest, a lot of them just don't give a fuck). On top of that, students who are ostracised in school may have built up friend networks online, so taking that away from them will do even more harm.

So not only will this ban introduce a whole heap of new problems, it won't even solve the ones it's supposed to. But this is what happens laws around technology are made by people who probably think a floppy disk is cutting edge and that "all the cool people" are using MySpace.

[this post was constructed from rants I have made previously on various social media sites]

Writing for a willing audience

Several months ago in an online chat server for my teacher friends, someone asked what everyone was up to that day, and I mentioned that I was "staring at my novel manuscript and trying to make myself write but knowing I will just stare at it for a few hours and then go back to dicking around on the internet". A couple of friends expressed interest in the story, so after re-reading the prologue and first chapter manuscripts which I had finished in the early 2010s (to make sure there were no egregious issues), I posted them in the chat. Those who read it responded favourably, and with that little dopamine hit, I went about my day.

But as I continued to shitpost on social media or whatever I was doing, I kept mulling over the chapters I'd submitted. I didn't make a conscious decision to do it, but every now and then I'd think, "This bit would be better if that character did this instead of that" or "I could reword this section slightly and then cut out a big chunk in a later section". I started off occasionally opening my novel manuscript to make those changes before closing it and going back to time-wasting, but gradually I found myself focusing only on my writing and completely ignoring everything else.

At first, the revisions I was making were fairly minor, mostly consisting of copy editing and sentence restructuring. As time went on, the revisions became more substantial. In addition to improving some of the existing work, I was able to add about another thousand words to my total, which hadn't really budged for the better part of a decade.

Then I received the Examiners' Reports for my thesis and had to focus my attention on that for about a month, during which time I injured my right wrist. In addition to being painful, this made everything take three times as long as it normally would. Between thesis revisions, assignment marking and novel writing, something had to give, and as frustrating as it was to stop writing when I was starting to get so many new ideas, I had to shelve my novel. Even once I submitted my thesis revisions and finished marking that batch of assignments, I had to spend a few weeks resting my wrist.

As of about a week ago, I was able to start writing again, and it was like a switch had been flipped. Gaps I'd left in my chapters in progress because I couldn't think how to bridge them when I originally wrote them were finally filled. As mentioned in an earlier post, I had numerous instances in my outline of things happening because I needed it to happen for the story rather than because it was a plausible or logical thing to happen, or things which I needed to happen in a later chapter but which couldn't happen because of something I'd written in an early chapter. For many of these, I suddenly had ideas to overcome these plotholes and come up with realistic explanations for why these things were happening. There were even some passages that I had originally thought were okay, but when I looked at them more recently with the benefit of more maturity, knowledge and experience, realised they were problematic and was able to rewrite them to remove the cliches and stereotypes and make the story stronger. In the last week, I've added another 4,000 words to my manuscript, and I still feel like I have plenty of momentum.

I'm sure I'll hit another wall soon enough, but until then I'm enjoying the process of getting the story out and watching the word count go up. Even though I haven't and probably won't show the later chapters to anyone for a while, it seems that having a few people express interest in the story was enough to show me that it does have potential and kickstart me into working on it again.

And now that I am finally a Doctor as of yesterday, there's one less thing to get in the way of me working on my creative projects.

DASW Word Count: 27,021

Managing ideas that turn up unannounced

I don't know about other artists and writers, but I find that I'm most likely to get ideas for my creative projects when I'm least able to act on them. You say to yourself, "I'll write it down later" but more often that not, you'll either forget about it completely or have that frustrating feeling of knowing you had a good idea but now it's gone.

One of the most common times for me to get ideas is at around 2 or 3 in the morning, when I'm in that foggy area between sleeping and waking. I do try to keep some sticky notes and a pen next to my bed for when I have these midnight ideas, or failing that, I can write something in the notes app on my phone. This doesn't always help, though; my sleepy brain is not good at communicating with my awake brain, and more often than not, the incoherent ravings I leave for myself are beyond my ability to decipher. Below is an example of an actual "idea" I found one morning when I woke up (and no, I still don't know what it means several months later). That being said, I have ended up with some truly bizarre notes that I was actually able to figure out the meaning of, so it's still worth a try.

So, there's probably not a lot I can do about the midnight ideas, but I also often get ideas during the day when I'm doing academic work, like marking assignments or revising my thesis (which I should be doing right now SHUT UP DON'T JUDGE ME), or even sometimes when I'm working on a different creative project. For those random ideas, I carry a pocket-sized notepad when I'm away from my computer, and for when I am at my desk, I have a Word document set up for getting the ideas down as fast as possible. It's important to note that these documents are not designed for ideas that are eloquently written or painstakingly crafted into intelligent prose. No, they are for a quick and ugly dump of whatever ideas are rattling around in my brain so I can get them out of my head and move on with whatever I'm supposed to be doing. One of my friends in my writing course many years ago coined the term "brain poo" to describe this process of essentially crapping out ideas at speed, and I liked it so much I still use it today.

The benefit of this process is that you don't have to worry about if the ideas is good or not, or try to figure out how to express it. That's Future You's problem. Once you get the bones of the idea down on paper (or on a blank Word doc), that niggling fear of "what if I forget the idea?" is gone. Later on when you have time, you can open that document and see if the idea is workable (whether it be for a new project or for something you're currently working on). If it is, you can sit down and start expanding on it. If it's not, you can just bin it.

Unfortunately it doesn't help with that itch to just write the story, but it does at least ensure you have some fuel to work with next time you do have the chance to sit down in front of your WIP.

NaNoWriM-Oh no

At the start of September, NaNoWriMo made clear their position on the use of AI in writing, and though it seems they've edited the wording slightly since the furore around their statement began, they still seem oblivious to why people are so opposed to their views.

Before I launch into my own anti-NaNoWriMo rant, allow me to provide some background information:

I am an academic, and a teacher at a university. I teach a variety of units, but there is one unit in particular that I have taught for more than a decade, both as a tutor and as a lecturer (I have also developed and run an online version of the unit for my university's online-only course branch). So I think it's fair to say I have the experience to recognise trends and patterns in the student cohorts in terms of their achievements.

Based on what I have seen, I firmly believe that the introduction of AI tools such as ChatGPT will set back humanity's development and advancement by a decade or two. When we set a task in class for students, instead of engaging with one another and discussing the concepts, they open up ChatGPT and paste the tutorial instructions into it, and when we ask them to share the answers, they just regurgitate the slush ChatGPT spat out. The problem is that while ChatGPT is very good at producing content that sounds reasonable, it is not good at nuanced thinking or self-reflection or considering scenarios that might fall outside the norm. No matter how many times we pull students up on their incomplete or in many cases incorrect or inappropriate answers that they got from ChatGPT, they would still rather rely on a flawed system than try to apply the content or principles. In other words, they seem to have lost the ability to think for themselves. This isn't just a problem in education but has wider implications for society as a whole.

This is particularly evident when it comes time for me (and my colleagues) to mark assignments. Because many of the students did not actually complete the activities in class, they didn't learn the skills required to complete the assignment tasks properly, which means that instead of meaningful deliverables and insightful analysis of what they have done, we end up with pages and pages of word vomit that use a lot of big and fancy words (if I took a shot every time I saw the word "meticulous" in an assignment that was very clearly not done meticulously, I would have liver damage) but don't actually say anything of any substance or value. It's been a few semesters since ChatGPT became widely accessible and when I say that the average student marks have dropped by a full grade since that point, I am not exaggerating.

So when I saw that NaNoWriMo had come out in support of people using AI in their 'writing', I wasn't particularly surprised because of how problematic they've been in recent years (and I'd already decided I wasn't going to participate again because of the appalling way they handled those incidents), but I was disgusted.

I've linked to their statement at the top of this post, but I want to focus on three sections in particular that stood out to me.

"NaNoWriMo does not explicitly support any specific approach to writing, nor does it explicitly condemn any approach, including the use of AI... We fulfill our mission by supporting the humans doing the writing."

Aside from how pathetic and wishy-washy this comment is, it's contradictory and also demonstrates a lack of understanding about what AI actually is, and how it works. Content generated by ChatGPT and similar AI tools doesn't just magically come from nowhere. It is built on stolen work. Actual artists and writers created this original content, and ChatGPT just chews it up and spits it out without providing any acknowledgement or compensation to the human beings without whose work it couldn't exist. You can't claim to "support the humans doing the writing" when you allow or encourage the use of a tool that does the exact opposite of supporting actual human creators.

On a side note: Writers who complain on social media about your writing being fed into AI but then include AI-generated 'art' in your social media posts? You are part of the problem. You cannot claim to be upset about your work being stolen when you are turning around and doing the exact same thing to other creatives.

"We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege."

This bit actually made me snort. Implying that disabled or poor people can't write without AI to help them is far more condescending and ableist/classist than criticising the use of Artificial Idiocy ever could be. In fact, the poor or disabled people NaNoWriMo claims to want to support in their ridiculous statement are also among the most likely to be disadvantaged by the existence of these AI 'tools', because they're far less likely to have the resources (time, energy, money) to fight back when their work is stolen and passed off as the magnum opus of some pretentious wanker who thinks they're going to be the next Hemingway just because they mashed a few buttons in ChatGPT. Frankly, if you can't write stories without using a machine to steal bits of other people's stories for you, that's not a case of "ableism" or "classism". That just means you're not fit to be a writer.

"It's healthy for writers to be curious about what's new and forthcoming, and what might impact their career space or their pursuit of the craft."

At this point, writers who genuinely care about the craft have a pretty solid understanding of how AI might impact their career space. Spoiler: It's not good. I follow many artists and writers on various social media sites, and I have not seen a single positive comment about AI from any of them. It's not just that AI steals the content from the original creators without paying them. As with my students, many people would apparently rather have something crap but fast and easy than put in time and effort or pay for something that is actually worthwhile. AI 'art' is the fast food equivalent of creativity: Sure, you can have it quickly, but it has no value and you'd regret consuming it if you actually thought about it for more than a minute or two. The increase in people turning to AI to pretend to make things for them means the people who actually make the art or write the stories you love aren't getting paid, and if they're not getting paid, the industry is no longer sustainable for them, so they will just stop creating; that means less new content for fans.

And it's not just the financial impact on the creators. True creativity is what differentiates us from machines. The need to make something that evokes feelings and provokes reflection is something that only humans have. The desire to grow and improve and become good at something is what lays out the pathway for a kid scribbling away in their notebook to practice and learn and eventually make something that only they could have made, because it has come from their experiences and their thoughts and their emotions and is, in some way, a window into their soul. If we take the soul out of art, what's the point?

Anyway, it's disappointing that an organisation that used to be a fun and engaging way for writers to communicate with one another has turned into *gestures vaguely at the festering corpse of NaNoWriMo's integrity* whatever this is, but I think it is also now pretty clear that NaNoWriMo is no longer worth your time or money.

I just deleted my NaNoWriMo account (which I should have done years ago but just never got around to it), and I suggest you do as well.

EDIT: Some arguments I frequently see from people trying to justify the use of ChatGPT etc are:

• AI is going to take people's jobs so they should just accept it and work out how to co-exist with AI instead of being in denial and fear.
• People already repurpose other people's work and call it inspiration.

My response to these arguments is:

The thing about people taking other people's work as inspiration is that even that reimagining of an idea is still based on that person's own experiences and history, and things that resonate with them. Whereas AI just takes everything. It's like making a soup out of every single ingredient in your cupboard instead of just choosing the few ingredients that actually work well together.

And as far as taking jobs, why are we automating creative jobs when there are multitudes of people willing and able to create good art/stories etc instead of automating the boring and tedious parts of jobs (or life in general) that no one wants to do (which would actually give people more time to enjoy life and do the things that matter)? The people coming up with this AI tech think they're entitled to other people's creative output and that it's okay to just take it because they don't see it as having any value, which I guess is why they consider the generic crap it spits out as "good enough".

While AI might theoretically improve to the point it becomes good at doing things, the fact it's not there yet but people are using it anyway is why I feel it's not a good thing for advancement. AI doesn't seem picky about what it uses, so the more crap AI puts out, the more crap AI will consume when it's trying to generate new content. Too many people seem happy to just accept the junk ChatGPT spits out so they're just going to start becoming reliant on it instead of actually thinking critically about things and figuring things out for themselves and actually finding creative solutions for things, which is basically how humanity got to where we are now.

On a side note, even if AI somehow did magically become useful, is the cost actually worth it?

Unbreaking my brain

Academic writing is often quite dry, with some forms (eg. journal articles and textbooks) having the potential to be really long winded. I suspect most academics have the desire to write in a clear and concise manner, but at some point, many of us have fallen into the habit of waffling to make a certain word count or to make the passage we're writing sounds more intellectual. I have absolutely been guilty of this myself. My PhD thesis came in at just over 80,000 words, and a good portion of that was when I was trying to bulk out my literature review in the early days of my candidature. I did go back and cut some out in the lead up to submission, but I'm sure there would be at least another few thousand words I could cut if I set my mind to it. Hell, this whole blog is basically me waffling to procrastinate from whatever I should be doing. But while crapping on to meet a word count was (sometimes) a useful strategy in academia, that's not the case in creative writing. Problem is, I'm having trouble switching from academic mode to novelist mode.

In fiction-writing, quality is far more important than quantity. Prose can make or break the book just like plot and characters, though the extent to which is more critical may depend on reader preferences. ie. some people I know will happily read what they consider to be beautiful prose even if the story doesn't actively hold their interest, while others (like me) can tolerate mediocre writing if the stories and characters are interesting. The one time I made an exception to this rule was for a book where aside from one or two of the side characters, I just didn't like or care for anyone in the story, and there were a number of plot holes which had obvious resolutions (at least to me) so it didn't make sense how the characters couldn't have found their way around them. Normally I'd have bailed out after a few chapters, but the writing style was so captivating and evocative I kept reading, hoping the story would get better, but it didn't; after I finished it I couldn't help but feel like I'd wasted my time. The book was met with almost overwhelmingly positive reviews when it was released, and while some of those reviewers did enjoy the story itself, a lot of the praise seemed to be targeted more at the writing style (though funnily enough, a lot of reviewers also criticised the writing for being overwrought and flowery; I suppose this highlights how everyone likes different things, and what one person loves about a book may be something that another person hates). So while there has to be a balance and you have to have compelling a compelling story and characters, having an engaging 'voice' as a writer is also important.

Over the years, I've picked up a few books on writing. King's On Writing was interesting, but as it was a couple of chapters of writing advice squished between two large slabs of memoir, it's not something I'm likely to re-read. Though The Tough Guide to Fantasyland isn't a guide to writing, exactly, it is still a fun exploration of all the tropes and clichés used in fantasy novels (though after you read it, you won't be able to stop picking apart every fantasy novel you try to read). I like it because it makes me think about which conventions of the genre to lean into and which conventions to avoid. 

By far the most useful writing book I had come across was Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. It focuses heavily on grammar and sentence structure, but also on conciseness and clarity. Reading it again recently has been useful for reminding me of the need for cutting out unnecessary fluff, and even a few rules of grammar I admit I'd forgotten.

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon a Reddit post asking for recommendations of books about writing. Some I'd already read after borrowing them from teachers or friends in my writing course, and hadn't found particularly useful, but there were a few that sounded promising. I decided to order Ursula K Le Guin's Steering the Craft as it was one of the most common recommendations, and it arrived yesterday.

I haven't had time to read it thoroughly yet, but from flicking through it, I can see that it looks like a useful companion book to The Elements of Style. While it also focuses on rules of language and grammar, it also provides example passages from existing literature that show these rules being applied (or in some cases, how the writing can be effective even if these rules are broken). Le Guin also provides several writing exercises or challenges throughout the book, which are useful at pushing you out of your comfort zone. I had a go at doing one of the exercises - where you have to explore two characters through dialogue alone, as if you were writing a film script, with no description or explanation - with a scene from my WIP. What came out isn't going to win any prizes, but it was useful in making me think more specifically about how to differentiate the characters' voices and avoid having everyone sound the same in their dialogue. If nothing else, it has helped me start to break down the wall between thinking about writing and actually writing.

When a loss is a win

While procrastinating the other day, I was messing around on the internet and stumbled across a thread on Reddit where a user was saying they had lost 20 pages worth of their book they were writing because of a Microsoft OneDrive problem, and that as a result they were giving up on writing because they'd "never be able to rewrite it as good as the original".

My initial reaction was to once again feel validated because of the large number of backups I make of my files. In addition to backing up to multiple cloud storage services, I also have backups on several physical storage media devices (USBs and external hard drives). While some folks might think I'm being anally retentive by having so many copies of my files, I've never lost more than about half a day's work, even with various file corruptions and hardware failures over the years.

Still, once I got over my moment of smugness, I remembered a 'data loss' incident I had during high school, though this was of the pen and paper variety. Back then, I did all my writing by hand, as I didn't have a computer. I would write rough drafts of my chapters on cheap notepad paper, and then once I revised them and was happy with them, I'd write the final version into an exercise book, which would then get passed around at school for my friends to read.

When I was about 10 or 11 chapters into that story, I lost the notepad drafts of my next chapter. After searching everywhere for several days, I became despondent, convinced that even if I rewrote it, it would be to a lower standard than the original. Eventually I realised that if I was going to finish the story, I had to rewrite that chapter, so I sat down and wrote out as much as I could from memory and then filled in the gaps with whatever I thought up at the time.

A few days after I finished the rewrite, I accidentally dropped the TV remote between our two armchairs, and when I fished it out, I also found the lost original draft of the chapter. At first I was elated that I hadn't lost my 'masterpiece', and I considered throwing away the new version I'd written, but then I decided to put them side by side and compare them.

Instead of being a pale imitation of the first draft, as I had expected, the second draft was significantly better than the original.

I suppose that after I'd written the first draft, the story and the ideas kept rattling around in my brain, so I was subconsciously still thinking about it and revising it. When I rewrote it, what came out was a more refined version. While I never ended up finishing that story, I do still sometimes find it useful, when a chapter or passage of what I'm writing isn't working, to put it away somewhere out of sight for a few days an then rewrite it from scratch. Often my subconscious seems to work on the problem while I'm doing other stuff, and by the time I rewrite it, many (if not all) of the issues I was struggling with end up being resolved in the second draft.

That being said, it's much less stressful to rewrite something from scratch because you chose to rather than because you lost the original, so I guess what I'm trying to say is...

Back up your shit.