woc 2: more miscellany

November 2024

The Obdurate Stillness of Happiness

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," begins Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, a decidedly unhappy story. It is a brilliant opening, in part, because the statement moves your imagination from general happiness and promises to tell you of a specific unhappiness. But it also reinforces a literary axiom, one that is not particularly true for life, but is critical for good storytelling: Happiness is banal. Unhappiness is interesting.

Why this is so requires a socio-psychological analysis beyond my abilities, but who is interested in a story in which all is good and pleasant, and the characters suffer no challenges? Admittedly, those challenges need not be traumatic—and depending on your perspective—might even be considered happy in and of themselves—that is challenges of fortune. For instance, a student who is challenged to do well at an ivy league medical school, or a writer (an extraordinary privilege) who struggles to publish his first book. Given the state of most of our eight billion relatives who cope with poverty, disease, war, climate devastation, and political oppression, challenges of fortune are indeed happy ones.

You, no doubt, are aware of the many real-world problems and are supporting some effort to alleviate them, so I can turn your focus to frivolous literary concerns. Stories from all over the world and all over time have at their center some kind of unhappiness or trouble. This trouble, or challenge, or conflict is the fuel which drives the narrative. It is the grindstone that burnishes the characters, that causes characters to become more complicated—perhaps better revealed to the reader—and the resolution of the conflict, for good or ill, emotionally satisfies the reader who has vicariously ridden the tension through its course. Likely this satisfaction has more to do with brain chemistry than with intellect, but we readers feel rewarded for our investment in the characters’ problems. As our grandmaster of fiction technique Janet Burroway famously wrote, “In literature, only trouble is interesting.”

In Western criticism, we look back to Aristotle’s arc or Freytag’s pyramid as archetypical descriptions of narrative structure. Contemporary structures vary depending on whether we are engaged with short fiction, long fiction, playwriting or movies—but at their cores, as with Aristotle and Freytag, a character struggles in some way. Carol Bly reminds us in The Passionate, Accurate Story that we need not use a belletristic metaphor–story as war, for example—to describe the conflict. Such metaphors as evolution, tension, transition—may serve just as well.

This brings me back to the idea of happy families. Can there ever be stories in which we describe happiness without banality—stories in which spouses are always tender and caring of one another, and children and pets are well behaved, and neighbors are generous and cooperative? In other words, can we create interesting stories about paradise or does paradise always have to have a snake?

To create the happy, paradisal story may require revamping our narrative model and its metaphors. There are, of course, alternatives to the triangular models based on Aristotle’s arc—such as the circular model of the hero’s journey or the linear episodic model of classical myth—but wait! Within the circles of these journeys, there are many conflict arcs, both external and internal. In my mind it is difficult to get away from the arcs, but there have been some notable and important attempts.

Another pre-Soviet Russian comes to mind—Anton Chekhov, a friend and protégé of the great Count Tolstoy. Recent and contemporary short-story writing owes a tremendous debt to Chekhov for his emphasis on interiority, compression, and objectivity. He is also known for what is often called “slice-of-life,” the story which seems to describe a moment in the lives of the characters, often a moment that is seemingly without significant tensions or tensions that are left open-ended.

As a devout reader of my column, you know that I often reference the genius of short story writer and critical guru David Jauss. Here, I point you to his essay “Returning Characters to Life: Chekhov's Subversive Endings” in which he analyzes the structures of many of Chekhov’s stories, and presents twelve techniques used by the good doctor (Chekhov was a physician). A fun exercise is to draft stories that utilized some of these methods. Of the ending types, Jauss identifies variations on epilogues, echo endings and climaxes. Of interest for our happy, paradisial story is what Jauss calls the “external climax.” He gives the example of Chekhov’s story called “Fortune,” which he says is “such a study of stasis that it is virtually a verbal still life.” The story is about two shepherds who talk while they watch their sheep. Nothing happens until late in the night when the sheep suddenly and apparently for no reason stampede. The shepherds are so wrapped up in their own thoughts that they dismiss the jitteriness of the animals. Nothing happens in the story except the talk and thoughts of the characters and the inexplicable bolt of the flock.

Jauss suggests that the story imparts an external climax, a realization or epiphany in the reader that is brought on by the analogy of the people to the sheep. Perhaps so. I expand the observation: In every successful story, regardless of its conflict structure, the reader has some realization or connection to the events or nonevents of the story. Otherwise, the story is soon forgotten, no matter how entertaining it was in the moment.

More to the point, despite their alterations of the Aristotelian arc, Chekhov’s structures still observe the impression of the arc, whether the climaxes come internally or externally or not at all.

But let’s follow my nerdiness for a minute or two more (those interested in traditional fiction are excused at this point). What about Allain’s Robbe-Grillet’s “In the Corridors of the Underground: The Escalator?” It is an eight-paragraph description—can it even be called a story? — of a man riding up an escalator, relayed in language that is memetic of the rhythm of the mechanical stairs. Nothing happens outside of the movement of the man and a few fellow passengers from one level of the underground to the next. When the man gets to the top, he looks behind him to see another man stepping onto the machine. So, we get a wonderful analog for the mechanization of contemporary urban life. Does the lack of conflict within the story, nonetheless, raise tensions—or at least questions—within the reader? In other words, does the banality of the story’s action emphasize some trouble in the real world and so provides the reader with an external conflict?

Here, I will add, that this “actionless” story is terrifically interesting—though I admit many of my students were bored silly by it. It is interesting because of language, imagery—and intellect. But if we are looking for conflict, characterization, or the arousal of emotion—it is flat—banal. This story can be found in Philip Stevick’s hallucination-inducing anthology called Anti-Story.

Another example, this one taken from the conclusion of Stephen Crane’s Maggie, Girl of the Streets, is the series of impressionistic images that show Maggie, a prostitute, working in streets, each closer and closer to the East River, each more squalid, until she is found floating in the river. Yet another example comes from Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie in which once wealthy, now destitute, George Hurstwood visits, in a series, soup lines and vagrant camps—one of the most poignant depictions of American homelessness in literature.

Like Robbe-Grillet, these sequences are driven by progression, movement from one place or state to another. Is this movement, as Bly suggests, enough to qualify as conflict? If our happy family is already happy, would getting even happier represent movement, change or evolution? (Note that the latter two examples, easily arouse our emotions as they come at the end of novels in which we have had thorough and traditional introductions to characters.)

The Robbe-Grillet’s “story” may be looked upon as a sequence of descriptions, a kind of montage. Montage is the juxtaposition of images that may or may not be related and may or may not be temporally sequenced to convey a narrative idea. The term comes from movie making and was made famous by the very Soviet Sergei Eisenstein in his movie Battleship Potemkin, but as with all movie techniques, it was first explored in literature in strategies like parallelism and cento. Such a juxtaposition of descriptions, of images or of scenes might convey a montage of happy instances for our proposed story about the happy family. This is often achieved in the lyricism of poetry—but is it possible to create interesting narrative by such techniques and if we did, two questions remain: One, does the montage naturally create an external climax? Two, is it interesting to a reader that it does or doesn’t? Something for us students of writing to ponder and experiment with. Hey?

I conclude with this idea that has been bugging me. Love stories are not always unhappy, but they always present a challenge—boy meets girl, etc. But these are not truly love stories—they are “falling in love stories” or “courtship” stories—and as such are fraught with dramatic tension. A true love story (idiosyncratic definition, I know) is the story of the routine and repetitive goings-about of the long married—a routine that is happy—but only becomes interesting to readers when it is disrupted by discoveries that challenge its very happiness.

This essay originally appeared at the Georgia Writers Association website.

September 2024

Every Good Tree

My mentor, novelist Susan Shreve, told me this story: She was in a Kroger when she saw and began a chat with a novelist she was newly acquainted with. The acquaintance complained that at book signings readers would commiserate with her about her divorce. She wasn’t divorced. She wasn’t even married! She had only written about characters who were getting a divorce. The acquaintance chuckled, pleased with her beguilement. Then, in a moment of sudden awareness, she squeezed Susan’s hand. “I’m so sorry,” she said, her face mellowing with sympathy, “to hear about your own divorce.” Now, Susan chuckled. “But I am not getting a divorce. Like you, I only made one up.”

This story was told to me and my workshop classmates as an illustration of the power of good characterization. The first-person narrators of the respective novels were so convincing that readers thought the authors were getting divorces. We readers are willing suckers. If the details are convincing and the interest high, we think of characters as flesh-bearing people full of complicated motivations and morals. While knowing on one level that the characters are merely abstractions—made of words and sentences—on another level, we consider them as human beings and in our book clubs and college essays, we bestow them with a humanity that is brought about by both the writer’s skill and the readers’ own imaginations and emotional engagements.

Any number of critics can give you information about character-building techniques, though most of these are mechanical and superficial and alone cannot develop that je ne sais quoi that turns an abstraction into an imagined human. Nonetheless, these character-building approaches are useful for the novice writer to think about.

Before I suggest a couple, let me digress. Often, I have heard that characterization is the most important aspect of storytelling. It is not. Point-of-view (POV) is, for without POV there could be no rendition of character. Character, though—at least for contemporary realistic fiction—is the most obvious of fictional elements. Readers talk about Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Morrison’s Sethe and their mindsets foremost—and if at all, they talk about how those characters are presented through POV secondarily. An analysis of POV often requires getting into the critical weeds, a place where the ordinary reader need not go. Even voices as showy as Morrison’s narrator fall into the background, for a well done POV is a structural support, a stalk that nourishes and allows the characters to bloom.

In my teaching, I often assigned Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft because it lays down a good theoretical foundation for fiction writing. It draws heavily on Aristotelian philosophy, and the advice has always been serviceable for the teacher if not for the students. She introduces direct methods of characterization such as appearance and speech; and indirect methods such as authorial interpretation and action. The first approach depends largely on descriptive details and the second on exposition given by the POV and, importantly, on the readers interpretations of the actions and interactions of the characters. Both approaches are important in creating the illusion of a character as a human being.

Burroway’s approach depends on accumulating details and traits about the character. Often practitioners of this approach make lists of traits which they somehow incorporate into the descriptions of the characters. But Burroway emphasizes that the details should be “telling” or “significant” details. Unnecessary or obvious details detract from rather than build characterization. Likewise, David Jauss, Burroway’s arch-depreciator, advocates supplying only “essential” details. In his lively and thoughtful essay, “Homo Sapiens vs. Homo Fictus,” in which he discusses the differences between characters and real people, he promotes providing only a few details. A preponderance of details obscures rather than reveals character. This is especially true, I think, when it comes to physical details—though I admit that the maximalist in me sometimes revels in a lengthy, lyrical description of a person or setting—but such descriptions serve language more than characterization. Still, as William Gass claims in his philosophical essay, “The Concept of Character in Fiction,” “Characters in fiction are mostly empty canvas. I have known many who have passed through their stories without noses, or heads to hold them.”

Again, physical details are not the primary driver of characterization. Jauss, summarizes the differences between characters and people this way, “Homo Fictus, then, consists in large part of the presence of something that can't be observed in real people—the inner life—and the relative absence of things that can be observed—the outer life. Paradoxically, these two patently unrealistic qualities of Homo Fictus are largely responsible for creating the impression that a character is ‘real.’”

In other words, it is not the outward appearance or even the biography of the character that is crucial, but rather access to the interiority of the character—what Wayne C. Booth, who influenced Jauss, calls “privilege.” Again, I am speaking of realistic characters. Popular characters—say James Bond—are realized for their exteriority, and though memorable, are thought of as humans only by the emotionally jejune.

This brings us to the “tree” mentioned in this essay’s title. I am drawing on Matthew 7:17-20: “Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.…Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” That is to say that characters, as well as people, are to be judged by what they do and say. But, of course, it is even more complicated than that in both life and in fiction, for we must ask what motivates the actions. In life, motivations may be difficult if not sometimes impossible to understand, but fiction, through various techniques which make the characters’ interiors transparent, gives readers a chance to peer into minds and souls. With its roots in Aristotle’s The Poetics, understanding motivation is a pervasive idea in fiction writing. Jauss, ever the contrarian, notes that this is but one way to establish life-like characters. Other approaches might recognize changeable or confused motivations—or perhaps as in the case of Shakespeare’s’ Iago, an unclear or ambiguous one.

Importantly, characters come to life because the reader is allowed to see into their interiors and those interiors reflect or at least remind the reader of that one human interior he, she or they can see into, his, her or their very own.

Gass writes that “Great literature is great because its characters are great, and characters are great when they are memorable.”

What then makes a memorable character? Who knows for sure and likely my memorable characters are not yours. I think though that great characters wrestle with great problems. These are not the superhero problems of saving the universe from destruction by Thanos, but the human challenges of living with other people and one’s self. We humanize Huck Finn because he wrestles with his relationship with Jim—“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”— and Sethe because of what she does to Beloved – “She had to be safe and I put her where she would be.” We know them by their fruits.

Gass William H. "The Concept of Character in Fiction," Fiction and the Figures of Life, Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1971.

Jauss, David. "Homo Sapiens vs. Homo Fictus, Or Why a Lot of Knowledge Can Be a Dangerous Thing Too," The Writer's Chronicle (March/April 2013).

Image: Oleomile.com

April 2024

This essay originally appeared at the Georgia Writers Association website.

April 2024

Seeing and Being

Ernest Hemingway, known for bluster, wrote that the experience of war was a great advantage to a writer and that writers who had not been to war and who belittled the subject of war were “always very jealous” for not having had “something quite irreplaceable that they had missed.” The passage is found in The Green Hills of Africa and is little more than a passing comment on the work of Tolstoy. It has always raised a distasteful envy in me, as I was one who escaped the Vietnam War draft by just a year or two and joined in with the Peaceniks, but felt—because of Hemingway’s passage—that some crucial honing of my writing had been missed. To be sure, I have never belittled the subject of war, and even as one who has never seen it, I portray it in several of my works, published (and unpublished).

Hemingway saw more than a fair share of war, but never as a soldier. Famously, he was wounded while handing out candy bars on the front lines near the Piave River in Italy as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. A mortar shell exploded near him, riddling him with hundreds of shards. “I died, then,” he would later say. “I felt my soul or something coming right out of my body, like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner.” As a correspondent, he reported from the front lines of the Spanish Civil War and World War II. He even took his yacht out on patrols to look for German subs off of the Florida coast.

I suspect, though, it was his skill as an empathetic observer more than his experiences, per se, that gave him the “something quite irreplaceable” that allowed him to write convincingly about men and women at war, and the healing they sought after the war.

Many extraordinary war novels have been written by those who experienced it directly: Erich Maria Remarque, Kurt Vonnegut, Tim O’Brien—just to name three. But convincing war novels have also been written by authors who have had no direct experience with war: Stephen Crane, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Aleksander Hemon for example. These writers have not observed battle, though Adichie’s and Hemon’s families were gravely affected by war.

Experience and observation are important for writers, but these alone are not enough to write convincingly. The crucial “something quite irreplaceable” for writers of any subject is a sensitive and sensible use of the imagination. “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” Albert Einstein is quoted as saying in a 1929 The Saturday Evening Post article. The full quote is even more inspiring, for the great scientist connects science and art: “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination encircles the world.”

Though he may have been wrong about quantum entanglement, calling it “spooky action at a distance,” Einstein is right in emphasizing the use of imagination in the creation of anything— scientific, literary, social or personal. But even here I insist on subtitles. The use of the imagination by itself, without the tempering complements of knowledge and empathy, is what leads to conspiracy theories, demagogueries, inequities and other insanities. Experience, observation, imagination and empathy are all critical skills for writers. And now I bluster: No significant art or science is made without the complement of all of these, and to paraphrase First Corinthians, the greatest of these is empathy.

Among the easiest skills for writers to learn are the technical and critical ones. These are usually taught in workshops and are developed through practice. Like physique building or sports training, the practice must be continual. Life-long. Observation, to some degree, is a teachable skill, but imagination and empathy are more difficult to teach. Yet they can be learned. They are learned from the inside out—and they are honed by technical, critical and observation skills. As the elements of good writing are interrelated and synergetic, so are the skills of a good writer; and like the hard skills of technique, the soft sills of observation, imagination and empathy must be practiced.

One of my favorite writing texts is not about writing at all, but travel. It is The Art of Travel by the philosopher Alain de Botton. Among the chapters about anticipation, exoticism, and curiosity as they relate to travel, are discussions on observation, beauty and the use of imagination. In particular, De Botton introduces a satirical travelogue called A Journey around My Room written by the Eighteenth century aristocrat Xavier de Maistre. De Button proposes the exercise of "traveling” around one’s bedroom as an experiment designed to revitalize observation. “Home…finds us more settled in our expectations,” De Botton reminds us. Travel on the other hand, is receptive. “We approach new places with humility. We carry with us no rigid ideas about what is or is not interesting.” Carrying this receptive mind-set into a familiar setting, then, defamiliarizes the setting and allows refreshed engagement with the details of the setting and the emotions that come with them. De Botton recounts that de Maistre rediscovered the qualities of his sofa, and “remembers the pleasant hours he spent cradled in its cushions, dreaming of love.”

I enjoy this exercise because it practices the use of imagination while sharpening the powers of observation. I often uncover details in the room—typically not my bedroom—that I wouldn’t have noticed in my daily bustle. The guise of the traveler allows me to imagine things of my ordinary experience as exotic, the way I might see the green cross of a European pharmacy, or hear the sing-song of a French ambulance. Sometimes, I take on an alien persona, pretending I am an ET exploring Earth culture, or perhaps I am a historical figure—I like Ben Franklin—suddenly transported to the future.

Whatever the persona, the exercise is to observe, to look closely and to discover. Such observation is done with all the senses—smell, taste, sound—are as important as touch and sight. Also try a synesthetic approach—imagine the color of the sound of the air conditioner, or a taste for the softness of a pillow. Have fun.

Crucial to this exercise is that sixth sense—that is emotion. Consider how you feel about the details you encounter. Likely the feelings are associated with memories, as de Maistre remembered the dreams of love he had on the couch. For the sensitive writer, observation is always entangled with emotion. Whether or not the emotion makes it to the page depends on the purpose and focus of the writing. Good editing is paramount.

As de Botton discovered, he needed more space than just his bedroom. Without seeming too crazy, you might take this exercise to the street, imagining that you are seeing your town as a visitor. You might also extend the exercise to one of empathy, and imagine how the people you pass as you stroll along might see you. Imagine how their day might be going, whether they slept well or are well fed.

The selective rendering of details and its emotional coloring enriches the setting. Believe me, a little goes a long way. I have just read a novel set in the streets near my house. It simply name drops the streets without details or coloring. In this novel Decatur Street in Atlanta, could also be Decatur Street in New Orleans, or Brooklyn. In effect, the “something quite irreplaceable” is missing because there is no engagement with a rendering of imagination through observed detail and emotional coloring.

This essay originally appeared at the Georgia Writers Association website.

March 2024

A Glitch in the Glitch in the Matrix

A YouTube video of the October 2023 annular solar eclipse shows a small square opening up on the surface of the moon, and for a millisecond, sunlight streams through as if the moon had been punctured. True believers theorize that this is proof that reality is a simulation and that we are living in a matrix. The hole in the moon, they say, is a glitch in an otherwise mostly seamless deception generated by nefarious technology. For most of us, this purported deception isn’t too awful—we have clean water, good food and warm homes—and if the believers are right, on the other side of the illusion is a planet destroyed by nuclear war, cast into perpetual darkness and ruled by tentacle-dangling robots. I’ll take the blue pill, Morpheus, thank you very much.

On this side of the Matrix, we already have enough trouble with machines—mostly of the damn-thing-isn’t-working variety—than to have to worry about a war-of-the-worlds with dictatorial robots. Among our troubles are rising concerns about artificial intelligence or AI, computer systems which are designed to carry out functions that typically require the perception and decision making of a person. The worry, it seems, is a kind of replacement conspiracy theory, in which people fear that we will be replaced by machines. Machine replacement of people has been going on since the advent of the cotton gin, and like the cotton gin, sometimes has profound implications for human societies. In these cases, it is often not so much the machines we worry about, but the people who control them.

As I understand it, AI works by recognizing patterns in very large data sets, which then allows it to make predictions about any new pattern it encounters. For example, a computer program, or neural network, which has studied millions of faces may then be used to identify your face as you rush to get on your plane at the airport. But AI is only as smart as the information it is trained on, and already we have seen that its learning reflects limitations of the data given to it and the biases of its programmers. I do not belittle concerns about the way AI is used to make decisions, for example, in our criminal justice system or in our hospitals. I applaud recent efforts by the Biden administration of set up guidelines for the use of AI; however, it is not artificial intelligence, per se, that is my worry, but human ignorance.

Educators and writers, too, have had special worries about how AI is used. Teachers fear that students will turn to AI programs to write their term papers. This shouldn’t be a surprise, since students have been buying term papers in one way or another since the days of Aristotle. Teachers can devise ways to circumvent this cheating. Writing teachers have long implemented teaching methods like multiple drafting and in-class writing that circumvent the cheating. It is shameful that school administrators and legislators have not fully supported such methods, as they push to increase class sizes, pay poverty-level wages to adjunct faculty, and in other ways devalue humanities professionals.

Creative writers, too, have expressed worries about the use of AI. This year, at least three different groups of authors, including the likes of John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and Steven King, have sued OpenAI, the research company, over its use of their books for the training of ChatGPT and other generative AI systems. The authors assert that OpenAI used their materials as a source of AI training data without regard to copyright protections. The case is not as straightforward as it may seem, since the question impinges on fair use—How is AI training different from a writing class in which students study an author’s style? Is a story generated in the style of an author plagiarism, or fair use akin to fan fiction? Perhaps the answer to these questions lie in the extent to which AI companies and their programs are considered to have the same rights as people. Since the 19th Century, the U. S. Supreme Court has well-established a trend toward supporting cooperate personhood. Most recently in the Citizens United and Burwell cases, it established that corporations have free speech and religious rights. It could be that AI will be seen to have the same fair use rights as you or I.

“It is imperative that we stop this theft in its tracks or we will destroy our incredible literary culture, which feeds many other creative industries in the U.S.,” Authors Guild Chief Executive Mary Rasenberger, who joined the authors in one of the lawsuits, said in a Los Angeles Times article. “Great books are generally written by those who spend their careers and, indeed, their lives, learning and perfecting their crafts. To preserve our literature, authors must have the ability to control if and how their works are used by generative AI.”

On the surface, Rasenberger’s statement should be a rallying cry for writers, and it rankles me to think that AI could destroy literary culture. But another view argues that culture is far too complex to be “controlled” by authors and it is mimicry and alteration that revitalizes culture and generates new ideas. For me, the current copyright law finds a balance—giving author’s limited control over our works, but eventually releasing them to public domain.

The goal of the lawsuits, however, might not be so lofty as to save literary culture from our robot overlords, as Esquire magazine writer Josh Rosenburg pointed out about the Authors Guild case: “As you read about the case, however, it feels like less of a plan to slay AI for good—and more of a fight to make sure writers just get their money. ChatGPT is crossing a lot of bridges on its path without paying any tolls, and writers simply want their due.”

And yes! Since apparently there is money to be made, why shouldn’t we authors have our due?

AI, though, is only a tool, and the real danger of theft comes not from programmers but from corporate publishers who may use AI as a cheap way to produce blockbusters without authors. I do not believe AI is quite this good yet, but take note that Amazon has already changed its policy to restrict the proliferation of AI generated books on its Kindle Direct platform.

No matter what the Supreme Court rules, a corporation is not a person, and no matter how engaging an AI book is, it is not written by a person—and so ultimately does not embody the expression and originality of a person. No matter how predictive AI is, it is simply recognizing patterns—it is predicting how readers will engage with those patterns—it has none of the ingenuity of a human soul and therefore can only provide a mimicry of humanness to the reader. It might look like the real thing, but it will never satisfy the sensitive reader.

Still, it might be good enough for most readers, and that would be a worry for many writers, especially writers of popular stories which depend heavily on formula. In an interview in The New York Times Magazine, literary agent Andrew Wylie, known as “the Jackal” for his business savvy, declared that the literary writers he represented—a who-is-who among prominent writers like Martin Amis, Raymond Carver and Salmon Rushie—were in no danger of being replicated by AI. “But take the best-seller list. That’s a little susceptible to artificial intelligence because the books on it are written without any particular gift in the nature of their expression. Stephen King is susceptible to artificial intelligence. Danielle Steel is even more susceptible to artificial intelligence. The worse the writing, the more susceptible it is to artificial intelligence.”

The assessment of King and Steel is Wylie’s, not mine. It is fair to say that the more a style or genre adheres to a predictable literary pattern, the more AI will find examples of those patterns, learn and mimic them. The more original an author’s style or subject matter, the fewer the examples of the pattern and the less it is likely to be learned by the machine.

Let this be a warning to writers regardless of genre: It is incumbent on us to be as boldly original as we can imagine. Stretch the boundaries of genre patterns, create new expressions of style, see the world as no one else sees it. A tall order, and I can only offer this advice about how to achieve it. It comes from Dorthea Brande’s 1934 tome, Becoming a Writer, (full text is easily found online) in which she asserts that the only way to be original is to be honest.

Here is another supposition—a hard pill for writers—what if AI is capable of producing engaging literary works—works that readers enjoy? Would that be so bad? Writers will still write—though likely not publish through commercial houses—and readers would enjoy a plethora of stories—perhaps stories produced on their laptops in moments: You are at the beach, and you forgot to bring a book. ”Alexa,” you say, “write me a novel about a lovesick man on a beach,” and moments later, a 400-page beach read appears on your laptop. No author. No publisher. No distributor. No bookstore.

No way! At least not yet—I don’t discount the machine miracles of the future. However, my experiments with generative AI programs suggest that they are not yet capable of producing any creative writing of any level of sophistication. Keep in mind that I’ve only played around with a few free online programs, and I grant there are likely more advanced AIs that might deliver a more satisfying result. I amused myself with my AI concubine, Alexa, asking her to produce a poem. Her poem was a confidently delivered piece of doggerel. When I asked for a sonnet, she replied, “Sorry, I don’t know that one.” Her story about a man who collected shells was better, but never advanced in detail or character development beyond the anecdotal.

I instructed online programs to compose about the themes of some of my favorite poems. (I didn’t ask for stories for this part of the experiment.) For example, I instructed it to write about perseverance using the symbol of a house in a storm. I got several stanzas—too many in fact—AI could use a good editor—that addressed the subject, but in a predicable way in its use of imagery, sound and rhythm.

As thunder roars and lightning streaks the sky,
The house stands tall, determined not to shy,
A testament to perseverance and grace,
Withstanding the storm's relentless chase.

I had in mind Ted Hughes’s “Wind”:

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

The Hughes poem is well observed, and the observations are rendered through human sensibilities—beginning with the denotation of the house—not any house, but “this” house having been out at sea all night—a connotation of isolation. Note also the onomatopoeia, particularly “booming,” which conflates the sound with an image of the hills. At its root, the language is illogical as hills cannot boom, but human sensibility describes the sound of the wind in the dunes, and makes perfect sense to the reader.

Other experiments with AI brought similar results. I prompted it to write a sonnet about the variety and beauty of God's nature. It provided a Shakespearean sonnet that ended surprisingly well considering the vague stanzas that preceded the final couplet:

Oh, God, in all Your wondrous works we see,
The varied beauty of Your vast decree.

But it does not compare in innovation and feeling to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ending for “Pied Beauty”:

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.

Note that Hopkins famously breaks the sonnet form, inventing what he called the “curtal” or “curtailed” sonnet. Hopkins’s break in pattern deepens the emotion of the poem, transitioning from high lyricism to a simple declaration.

Even though AI spoke of the variety of nature’s colors and creatures it never named a color or creature, creating a series of vague images:

A symphony of colors, sights, and sounds,
In every leaf, in every creature made.

These lines are drab compared to Hopkins’s:

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

AI is still very much at the greeting card level of poetry writing. It produces faithfully about the subject but lacks the innovations that come with human experiences and emotions.

Perhaps this is humorous, perhaps not. When I asked the infamous ChatGPT to write a poem about God’s grandeur, it first wrote that my topic was interesting. Then it spilled out “God’s Grandeur” by Hopkins but before it got to the last verse, as if recognizing the plagiarism, the poem vanished and this message came up, “My mistake, I can’t give a response to that right now. Let’s try a different topic.”

I also asked one of the AIs to write a generic poem—a wedding poem—and it produced many sentimental rhymed quatrains about a couple’s future happiness. It occurred to me that it was just the kind of poem my relatives might enjoy—lots of generalities and rhymes, but no specificity or challenge. The next time one of my relatives gets married and asks me for a poem, I won’t sweat it.

This essay originally appeared at the Georgia Writers Association website.