When Writing and Technology Intersect

I’ll be honest. I’m a technologist. In my day-job, I’m a software engineer. 

I’ve worked on big systems, small systems, low-level assemblies, object-oriented designs, database creations, web sites, user interfaces, server processing, performance tuning, and a whole lot of other stuff that fills my C.V.. One thing my experience has taught me is this: in the world of software, there is very little new under the sun. As a matter of fact, IMHO, software is devolving. 

As more and more lives are touched by the automation of previously manual tasks, the programming has simplified. Machine-level coding has given way to scripting, which has given way to plug-and-play frameworks, which have given way to online data entry. Of course, there are still islands of complexity in the software universe, but for the most part, those are few and far between, isolated to high-performance developers like game programmers, trading firm plumbers, and search engine servers. Otherwise, it’s the people who have made it complex. It’s always the people. 

I have a feeling that writing is going the same way.

Consider this. How many of you out there would have guessed back in the Nineties that almost everyone you knew would be employed in some type of HTML-based occupation? Whoa – you say – what do you mean? I mean that everyone is on the web, and the web, at its core, is a construct of Hypertext Markup Language. Even after all the XML, AJAX, Python, Django, and other enhancements that have sprung up over the last decade, the average website still boils down to HTML, a language that didn’t even exist until 1991. In other words, the world you live in today is completely unrecognizable from the world you lived in as recently as a decade or two ago.

One thing is constant. Writing is the universal input. While computers at their base level may operate via the mathematical logic of zeros and ones, their usage is overwhelmingly language-based. The profusion of blogging, social media, and other personal promotion has taken over the network. The engineers work like Morlocks to support the fancies of the Eloi. The serpent consumes its own tail.

Many of you have probably heard of SQL databases. They work like phonebooks, or columnar tables of data, presented row by identical row, extending for thousands upon millions upon billions of records to the last thrumming sector of available drive space. But now, there are abstract databases like MongoDB, which specialize in fuzzy formats like blogs. They eschew columns, and replace them with ad-hoc assignments. In a strange, perverse way, these data mechanisms are the anti-devices, automated machines bent to the whims of a human world. 

This trend continues. Cell phones were a Star Trek fantasy once. Now, they are ubiquitous. Today’s fantasy revolves around wearable computers. As a writer, you’re always looking for new input. Imagine a world where you have to cope with that input. 

You Will Be Replaced

The words you are reading follow an ordered structure. In fact, the language itself follows an embedded hierarchy of ordered structures. You know who they are. It’s all the usual suspects: paragraphs composed of sentences, sentences composed of clauses, clauses composed of words. At their most atomic level, the words themselves are formed by characters.

If you delve further into this meta-reality, you will find that these characters have numerical values assigned by the Lords of Convention; within our shores, we have the American National Standards Institute, and beyond, the International Standards Organization. These ANSI and ISO defined values are stored as electronic impulses, to be retrieved and formatted by a vast array of programmable devices.

It’s no surprise that they’ve managed to program beyond the ETL phase. Transcending the base operations of Extract-Transform-Load, they’re programming the structure itself now. That’s right. There are companies which create software to generate writing. These aren’t pipe dreamers. These are serious people, engineering serious machines, and they have serious funding.

Maybe the most well-known of these would be Narrative Science in Chicago. It’s operated by several professors from places like Northwestern and Yale, with advanced degrees in subjects like Journalism and Computer Sciences. They have multiple backers, customer cashflow, and most importantly, a compelling dream.

What they do is this: their computers fit data into a template, apply a few angles based on rules, and churn out a sequence which is appropriate to the client. For instance, the play-by-play stats coming out of a game could be plugged into a template of winners and losers, rules applied to determine if it was a “rout”, and a story fashioned to report on those events. Besides sports, many other venues are ripe with data – corporate reports, financial analyses, and educational books, to name a few. Considering we live in the dawn of Big Data, the sky’s the limit.

An endeavor like this raises questions. For example, how good is the writing? If you wish, you can run a simple Google search, and judge for yourself the quality of their prose. To me the central question, for which there is no readily available Google answer, is this: Can you be replaced?

Of course you can. That’s why you need to deal with this and take control. Computer aided writing is no different than computer aided design. Computer aided anything is a good thing. The bottom line is that it’s going to happen. The question beyond the question, in turn, is this: How will you exploit new technology to augment your own writing experience?

This is simply the next step beyond a spell checker or an online thesaurus. You can write, “See Jane run,” or you can write, “Observe with your born-anew eyes the passing form of Jane.” They both say the same thing. A software program following basic formulae of grammar, and backed by a dictionary database could spew out hundreds, if not thousands of such variations, one of which would certainly be the above. Writing Is Rewriting. If the measure of quality is found in the quantity of expression, you won’t be able to beat a computer.

And this is just the beginning. If you think the program can’t improve itself on the fly with machine learning, then you, my friend, are sorely mistaken. All it takes is a clear-headed programmer. In this brave new world, nothing more is required. 

Synthetic, But Consistent

I’ve talked before about the concept of synthetic-but-consistent. At its root level, it is the source of verisimilitude. Although it’s a phrase commonly bandied about by several disciplines to the point of meaninglessness, I prefer to raise it to its own categorical status. In other words, how does any given piece of writing, in addition to its clarity and substance, adhere to this mandate of synthetic-but-consistent?

Any work of imagination is fashioned out of whole cloth, synthetically, with its own enhancements and limitations. A writer can expound only on what is already there, but at the same time, such expansion is obligated to be enhanced. And that’s the problem. When the writer starts throwing in everything but the kitchen sink, it becomes, in the popular terms, “over-done”, “over-the-top”, and “just plain messy”. The extreme depth of expression is not the issue; the issue is the haphazard, ad-hoc mishmash of different elements.

These elements, a character, a prop, a plot device, or a stylistic manner, have to be consistent. For example, a character known for his gentle soul can’t start cursing a blue streak. A machine gun introduced at the beginning needs to get fired by the end. A character’s double-cross should have some foundation in prior events. A staccato dialogue marked by its rapid-fire rhythm cannot suddenly drop into a ponderous monologue. And so on.

This concept is fungible in creative endeavors. You will note that most fine art you see in museums is consistent in its internal rearrangement of external reality. For instance, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, while seemingly nonsensical in its carving-up of time and space, is completely consistent nonetheless.

Most popular music acts have distinctive sounds. For example, you could probably listen to five seconds of U2 on the radio, and regardless of whether you had heard the song before, you would immediately know who it is. Most likely, that consistency of vision is why Bono and his boys play to sold-out stadiums, while you and I troll blogs.

I’ve said before that the most important aspect of fiction is attitude. Attitude, as “a mental position or feeling with regard to a fact or state”, ensures a consistency beyond color and sound and temperature. It describes a world-view. In that world, no matter how deconstructed and rebuilt, all aspects, as long as they adhere to the recognized, expressed attitude, will remain consistent.

The Good Book Review

Most book reviews are not entertaining. They grind axes that should best be left in the woodshed. They get really snarky. Sometimes they don’t review the book at all, instead reporting only on the reviewer’s place in life and his/her attitude toward the author.

At a minimum, a good book review should include a brief synopsis, follow the plot, address the characters, riff the dialogue, and comment on the pacing. Also, it should cover the story mechanics, flow with the language, and convey the message of the story. In short, a good book review should make its point with focus, clarity, and substance.

A good book review should have both positive and negative points, with a balance. Sometimes you write a review with the intention of giving a new writer a leg up; in that case, you may take it a little easier on him/her than you would on, say, the Larssons of the world. Sometimes, though, your true, toxic feelings toward the story are so powerful that you have to just let rip; in that case, it’s a lot easier if the author has already bought his yacht with the massive profits. Always, you need balance, because, as a reviewer, your integrity is on the line.

A good book review should also include an excerpt or two. Not only do you want to give a potential reader an opportunity to sample the stuff, but you also want to remain true to the material. An excerpt keeps you honest.

A good book review should address the two most important aspects of the reading experience: the reader’s enjoyment and the story’s consistency. Enjoyment is a subjective thing, of course, but in the end, you have to pass judgment. That may be why the rating system is so popular; it’s just so easy. 

Consistency, on the other hand, should be totally objective. We’ll cover that in the next installment: Synthetic, but Consistent.

Focus, Clarity, Substance

When I was in high school, my English teacher told me three words that I have never forgotten: focus, clarity, substance. If you fulfill the promise made by these three, she advised, you will be a long way toward effective writing.

Wow. How obvious, I thought. Of course, those ideas which are most obvious are often the most brilliant. What a different world we would inhabit if only decisions were made based on the obvious, rather than the implied, or worse yet, the rationalized.

Focus requires discipline – discipline to avoid tangents, discipline to stick to the subject matter, discipline to stay the course. There is no substitute. The only alternative would be a stream-of-consciousness, and that’s no alternative at all. Unless you’re a Buddhist monk staring at a cave wall for forty years and training your mind with laser focus, then your consciousness probably streams like an explosion of confetti. You’ve got all kinds of thoughts roiling around up there, moving in a thousand different directions at a million miles an hour.

Especially these days. Our generation was raised on television, and we’ve spawned a new generation raised on Internet. Let’s be honest: neither of those encourage patient, sober, critical thought. With insidious infiltration, television and the Internet have infected our collective minds with a strange, voyeuristic suspension of disbelief. People are just plain credulous. They are.

Which brings us to clarity. Clarity is a harsh mistress, whose raw, bright light generally reveals all the ugly little imperfections you would rather cover up. You can believe what you see, or you can see what you believe, but there doesn’t seem to be much middle ground. With respect to my old English teacher, clarity was the ability to express that rawness. There is a fundamental disconnect between your thoughts and their expression, and bridging that divide determines the level of clarity in your message.

All of which culminates in substance. Here is where the rubber meets the road. After all, who doesn’t want a little detail in their otherwise skeletal plot? Without such supporting material, any message would devolve into empty shouting. In fact, the most effective messages are those which go unspoken, because the reader already knows them to be true. By creating an entirely consistent, synthetic world via the printed word, you can let the idea communicate itself.

I’m not sure if that is what my English teacher was getting at, but hey – it was high school, alright?

Tournament Profession

The famous Freakonomics professor, Steven Levitt, in his famous analysis of drug dealers, used the term “tournament profession” to describe any line of work in which only a very small number of people actually succeed, while an infinitely larger number of people underneath them toil for little or no reward. Recently, I’ve been reading a lot about “self-publishing” being such a profession. That’s hard to dispute. 

Here is a partial list of the things which I’ve done to promote myself and my book, Machines of Kali. I’m having fun, but it’s a little appalling. Without even trying too hard, I’ve already established four separate Internet presences.

I have a website which is hosted by my domain name provider. This website is itself pointed to by several other domain names which I own, and I have at least one email account associated with it. This website consists of a splash page, an illustrative cover page, a plot synopsis, a chapter sample, an artist bio, and a link to my book’s Amazon page. I concocted the entire website myself, but only because I’ve had so much experience doing this in the real world, it would have been silly to outsource it. 

I’m already on my book’s 2^nd book cover, both of which I conceived and executed. I could have paid someone else to do this. Many authors do just that. With all due modesty, though, I couldn’t think of anyone I knew who was better at art direction. Doing a cover, however, required some basic leg/grunt work. I bought a font collection from my local computer store, asked my printer to scan some pictures for me, learned GIMP from scratch, acquired several images from IStockPhoto, and so on.

I opened a Blogspot account, which you are reading. I actually enjoy writing this stuff. It’s not heavy lifting or anything. The only cumbersome aspect is dealing with a 3^rd party, but I know that I don’t want to host my own blogging site.

I opened a Twitter account. This was especially weird for me, because I don’t yet grok Twitter. However, I’m starting to see its charm. It’s like any other strange new application – difficult to grasp at first, but indispensable over time. It was the same way with Lotus 1-2-3 back in the 80s, just as it was with Mosaic in the 90s. (FYI: those were, respectively, the first popular spreadsheet and the first proper Internet browser.) 

Naturally, I had to update my Amazon author page with everything listed here, including my email, website, Twitter handle, etc.. There are so many other little bullet items, but I’m only scratching the surface. It’s just a lot of stuff, and that's the tournament profession.

GIMP Uber Alles, Part 3

Computer graphics apps are bursting at the seams with cool features to tweak and manipulate your images. If you’re at all familiar with visual arts concepts like color spectrums, contrast fades, and like, you know how prevalent these are in even the most simple programs. The sophistication only rises the further you go, starting with MS Paint on your Windows Accessory Menu and moving up the scale to monumentally expensive, custom installations like the Avatar suites. For most of us in the middle, of course, there is PhotoShop, and its open-source counterpart, GIMP.

I made my first book cover with MS Paint, and it showed. For my next attempt, I used GIMP. What a revelation. If I hadn’t had the experience of using Paint, I would never have appreciated the magnitude of the upgrade.

Here’s the deal. The most critical difference between a serious image processing program like GIMP and a simple graphics app like MS Paint is its ability to maintain multiple, separate layers of the same image. For instance, take a simple logo on top of a photograph. Think print ad. In a graphics app like Paint, you would have to write your logo text directly onto a JPEG image. If you needed to move the logo, then you had to undo the text and start over. With GIMP, you would load the JPEG image into one layer, then create a wholly separate layer for your logo. This you could color, distort, and manipulate any way you want. You could see how it would interact with the image underneath it, then move it, resize it, or do anything else that the occasion fancied. 

For my new book cover, I decided I needed multiple elements. The first thing I did was troll IStockPhoto.com for appropriate imagery. My book featured 1) a beautiful woman, 2) a full moon, 3) a satellite, 4) a city at night, 5) guns, 6) cars, and 7) circuitry. For each of these, I copied a dozen different thumbnails. By loading these into separate layers in GIMP, I was able to recombine them endlessly, trying new combinations at will.

 Eventually satisfied that my mock-up was as good as it could be, I procured the images themselves. When I replaced the blurry thumbnails with these high-resolution files, it was like - Bam! The effect was immediate. With these real layers in place, I spent the next week rotating, moving, scaling, distorting, shading, colorizing, cropping, and doing everything else I wanted within GIMP. 

Wow. It was such a better experience. But don’t take my word for it. Here are my two book covers, side by side. See for yourself.