Inkican

I know I’m dating myself, but modern day television is an absolute wasteland compared to the elevated discussion happening on a show like Johnny Carson back in the seventies. Young’uns wouldn’t know this, but there was a time when it was cool to be smart, thoughtful, and fact-based when it comes to science and science fiction. Take this 15-minute clip of Johnny and Carl Sagan, talking about the science of Star Wars and pivoting to the realities of FTL travel:

I love everything about how Sagan breaks down the science of Star Wars without losing focus on the fact that Star Wars is cool. He uses the interest to pivot over to what the discovery of extraterrestrial life might be like, and you can see the basis for his novel ‘Contact’ in some of the ideas he articulates.

No major takeaways from this blog post, only that we can be smart when we want to. My hope is that we will choose to be smart over the next few years, if only for our own sake.

Let’s take a moment to appreciate this drawing of somebody … Indiana Jones. Doesn’t look like much, does it? In fact, it looks like something a bored twelve-year-old would draw in fourth period English class. But the signature proves otherwise, and makes an important point to every creative out there. Steven Spielberg drew this picture in 1980 when he first envisioned who Indiana Jones was supposed to be. This picture proves that you don’t have to be perfect at everything to be good at what you do.

Tons of funny comments erupted on Reddit. ‘Was Spielberg nine when he made Indiana Jones?’ Others discussed the origin of Jones’ look from Charlton Heston in the Secret of the Incas.

None of that really matters. What matters here is that Steven Spielberg, although a brilliant director and storyteller, doesn’t have much in the art department. And that is perfectly okay. By the time he drew this picture, he’d made millions of dollars, redefined filmmaking, redefined culture. Yet, for all that success he’s still a person, just as flawed as anyone else.

If he were less confident in himself, Spielberg could have been sidetracked. Go to art school, get better at drawing. He didn’t do that, he let the artists handle the concept art while he made the film. That’s important. That is critical. Spielberg didn’t let his flaws define him, he stayed focused on what he actually is good at. His success changed the world.

For the rest of us, this serves as an important reminder to be okay with our flaws. There’s nothing that says you have to be perfect at everything, even though social media suggests otherwise. One day, this nonsense will pass and we’ll swing back to the point where authenticity and humanity matter again. We’ve already started in that direction, so we want to be ready when it happens.

So as an author who writes about Scifi and AI, you might be wondering – what do I think of AI-written stories? You see news articles about them from time to time, and for right now they’re more of a vehicle for humor than anything else. What about the future? You’ll be glad to know that authors have nothing to fear from AI fiction.

To understand why this is true, you must answer the question: Why do people make art? What’s art’s purpose in life? From a pure survival standpoint, art means little or nothing at all. You can’t eat it. You can’t spend it. Art’s intrinsic value is subjective, and based ultimately upon whatever collective value the group is willing to put on it. So what is art’s purpose?

‘Art,’ as the saying goes, ‘communicates what words cannot.’ The human exploration of ‘political, spiritual or philosophical ideas, the creation of beauty, the exploration of the nature of perception,’ are all human goals with very little practical value but have a tremendous impact on our minds and hearts.

It’s more than that: The valuation of a particular work of art or creativity cannot be completely quantified on a rational basis. That ability to speak to those unspoken ideas and concepts, to capture that lightning in a bottle, cannot be commoditized. You can’t do any of those things unless you’re ready to, or need to, do one simple thing: relate.

That’s right. Humans use art to relate to each other, and we aren’t ready to delegate that function to a robot. At least, not yet. We – non-sociopathic human beings, that is – want to relate to each other. We want to be related with. We measure our value against each other, using intrinsic, unspoken value systems that refuse the level of control necessary for an artificial intelligence to understand.

So while artificial intelligence can tell a story, while a robot can play a musical instrument, nobody’s offering a book or album from AI right now. First, AI’s must learn to relate to humanity. Until then, that seems to be our job.

I apologize in advance, I usually like to cite my sources. Today’s post is about the writing craft; how and why modern authors need to read modern fiction. This originally came up several  months ago in a number of Twitter threads and for the life of me, I cannot find them. However, the main point is this: if you wanna be a modern author, you must read modern fiction.

Let’s discuss why: most of my favorite novels are from the last century. To Kill a Mockingbird, The Caine Mutiny, Neuromancer, selected short stories by Elmore Leonard. I’ll re-read them about once a year because they’re literary comfort food and I enjoy them.

What does that do to you as a writer, though? Just like literal comfort food, the literary version can be unhealthy for your writing and ultimately work against you. I learned this the hard way while drafting Mesh, causing a lot of re-writes.

I’ll give you one example. Re-reading a book after finishing my last draft of Mesh, I found myself editing the prose of the novel the way I had just edited Mesh. Over and over again, I saw the author overusing words like ‘was’ and ‘were’ in many scenes. “Their burns were swathed in thick yellow-stained bandages. There were men with gashes from the exploded ammunition, and one sailor with a crushed foot, swelled to twice its normal size and mottled green. Chief Budge was one of the burned ones.”

Hullo, I realized. He’s overusing those words … I’m doing the same thing! Unconsciously, I had been imitating that same style choice as I wrote Mesh. I did a quick text count – those two words show up about 3,000 times in that entire novel. I’m embarrassed to admit that previous drafts leaned on that style choice more often than it should.

So yes, when reading you find yourself absorbing and consuming not only the story but the writing styles. The result? While you wouldn’t do anything as crass as plagiarizing the material, you do find yourself imitating style choices if you aren’t careful.

That’s when I remembered what other authors had been saying on Twitter. If you’re writing modern fiction, you have to read modern fiction. I didn’t understand what they were saying before, but I do now. Over the past century, writers have found new ways to efficiently communicate ideas and concepts. You’re doing a disservice to yourself if you don’t benefit from their discoveries, learn from their mistakes.

So to sum up this post, read modern fiction. Costs you nothing but time, all the books you’ll need to write in your particular genre are available at the library (or at least they will be, when Coronavirus has passed). I hope you find this piece of advice useful. Now it’s time to get back to work.