Tag: creativity

Writing Fiction in the Age of Artificial Intelligence—By Duncan Hart Cameron

Has it all been for nothing?

All of the hours that I have spent in front of my computer, rising at dawn to be at my station, pounding out stories, working through the fear of not being good enough, of not being able to put something great on the page, something that is part of me, that is me. The scrawls in my notebook, the daydreaming when I walk. The small steps and incremental gains. The steady getting there.

All for naught.

Because ChatGPT or something like it—an artificial intelligence—will one day write a poem or a short story or even a novel that is as compelling as one of my own. Somewhere, a bunch of programmers are laughing at me: “You think what you do is special? I can make an app for that.” And they have.

So why should I bother to write at all?

Because it is not just about the result or the finished product. Not even close. I’m sitting here, holding one of my books in my hand, an anthology of short stories that I helped edit and to which I contributed. I admire the cover that took so many hours to format and the font that we debated for far too long. I flip to my piece, about falling in love in Paris while on exchange, and I remember when I wrote it. The feeling of gliding across the keyboard because I was on a roll. The delight I took in capturing a tender, painful moment in my life in words. Giving it existence and conveying it to others.

The process I went through to publish the story imbued the entire project with meaning, like looking down a trail that you have hiked and taking pride in the work that it required to get there. That sweaty, joyful glow. The trail is just a trail, a path in the woods, until you have walked every foot of its length. Then it becomes something more. Something that is part of you. Imagine being plunked down at the end and looking back. Would you feel the same pride? Of course not. The trail would be meaningless, and your only relationship would be with the shortcut. (Which, in the case of AI, is very short indeed!) Likewise, a book is not just the words on the page. It is the physical manifestation of our grit and our pain and our faith. It is a symbol of our effort to impose meaning on our lives. Because that is what writing does. It gives us purpose. I know where I will be tomorrow morning and the morning after. I organize my social life, my diet, my sleep, and my family time around this central goal. There is clarity and comfort in that, not to mention satisfaction. I don’t think us writers can imagine living any other way.

A book is not just the words on the page. It is the physical manifestation of our grit and our pain and our faith.

And what about the reader? Reading is about the writer, not just about the book. We read to be entertained, sure, but we also read to have a kind of communion with the author. We want to hear their voice in our minds and to know what they know. We want to taste their insight and their imagination and their courage. A bot could theoretically write a book like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich or The Gulag Archipelago. But would those bot-made pieces really have the same meaning as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s work, published after having spent eight years in a Russian prison? Of course not.

Incidentally, ChatGPT can “write” in the style of Solzhenitsyn, or Ernest Hemingway, or Jane Austen, because their books already exist. It is essentially a massive synthesizer of existing data, improved by constant refinement of its answers to prompts, and it predicts what is likely to be the next sentence based on billions of previously written texts. Without authors (without us!) producing real work, Chat GPT, and other AI models like it, have nothing to say.

And that’s the core of it, isn’t it? You can’t untether art from the world. Art is inextricably linked to human experience and to human will. Otherwise, what the heck is it? Writing is not plagiarizing thoughts and feelings, it is confronting our own inadequacy, our fears, our yearnings and spilling it on the page in a way that resonates with others. The catalyst is empathy, which links the reader and the writer together. Bots do not know what it is like to lose a loved one or to suffer rejection or to yearn for revenge. Only humans do. And it is that knowledge that readers seek when they open a book.

Writing is not plagiarizing thoughts and feelings, it is confronting our own inadequacy, our fears, our yearnings.

In the end, bots will produce cool stuff, even great stuff, things we could never have imagined before (check out DALL-E); but writers will continue to write, and readers will continue to read human work, because the process itself makes the act and the result meaningful. If anything, we will start to see more novels that explore the ways that AI intersects with and changes art, rather than rendering that art extinct.

As that unfolds, you know where I’ll be. In front of my computer toiling away, or daydreaming on a walk.

Duncan Hart Cameron has taught college-level philosophy in Quebec for over twelve years. Born in Ontario, he lived in BC before moving to Montreal in 2001 to pursue a Master’s in Philosophy. A passionate writer and editor, he recently helped found Les éditions comme au vingtième, a bilingual literary review and independent publisher focused on supporting emerging writers, poets, and screenwriters living in Montreal and the Laurentians. His first novella, Eclipsed, is set to appear in the Fall of 2023 and explores the hold that our past can have on our present, especially in our most intimate relationships.

Photos: Loz Pycock via Flickr (header banner); Duncan Hart Cameron (headshot)

February 21, 2023
We Can All Be Writers—By Nisha Coleman

In April 2020, we invited writers in Quebec to submit a story of a single day during the strange, uneasy time of coronavirus and pandemic, of social distancing and self isolation, of lockdown and quarantine.

We’re thrilled to announce that these stories have been gathered in Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic (Guernica Press). To learn more and buy the book, please visit https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771836579.

Please also join us on the QWF FB Community page, and let the authors know if their words resonated.

I’m a writer but I don’t have much to say right now. I’m a storyteller but I don’t have many stories to tell either. There is an explosion of online content, but I do not feel compelled to contribute. Instead I am watching, listening, noticing.

Week one of the self-isolation measures, amongst the multitude of COVID-19 memes about toilet paper, face touching, and the quarantining-with-kids-chaos, one in particular caught my attention:

To read the rest of the story, please support our community and check out Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic

April 27, 2020
Writer’s Block in the Time of Corona—By Carolyn Marie Souaid

In April 2020, we invited writers in Quebec to submit a story of a single day during the strange, uneasy time of coronavirus and pandemic, of social distancing and self isolation, of lockdown and quarantine.

We’re thrilled to announce that these stories have been gathered in Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic (Guernica Press). To learn more and buy the book, please visit https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771836579.

Please also join us on the QWF FB Community page, and let the authors know if their words resonated.

In mid-March, COVID-19 was getting out of hand, according to Premier Legault. There was too much handholding, not enough handwashing. I was sent home on a paid, two-week hiatus while they rejigged my job to allow me to work from the confines of my condo.

Wait, what?

To read the rest of the story, please support our community and check out Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic

April 13, 2020
Finding Perspective: Writing in the Dark at Berton House by Shelagh Plunkett

On the wall above my desk in Montreal is a photograph taken in February at the Arctic Circle. The print is four feet wide by almost three feet high and foreground takes up most of that space. The horizon line is high on the print and marked by the Richardson mountains: white and treeless. It was -34C that day and my eyelashes froze together while I focussed the camera. In the foreground are the faint stains of a recent caribou kill, one hoof hidden amongst highbush cranberry and yellow grass poking out of the hard snow.

The perspective is deceiving. Trails of Black Spruce bisect the wide flat plain in middle distance and lead toward the base of the distant rounded mountains. Those peaks look close enough to touch, but they are many kilometres away.

It is an image that encapsulates much of what I learned during my three-month residency at Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon.

Berton House is owned and operated by the Writers’ Trust of Canada and each year four authors, supported by Canada Council grants, are chosen to spend three-month stints at the house. Residents do not have to teach or lecture, offer manuscript evaluation or coach emerging writers. In fact, they don’t even have to write while staying at the house. CanLit icon Pierre Berton, when gifting his house as a retreat, made that stipulation. He said, “the main purpose is not to let them write, but simply to give them time off from writing if they want it, or time off to think about writing or about the place they’re living in.” In the house are two binders of letters each resident has left for the next. Over the winter I spent a few hours reading what Lawrence Hill, Charlotte Gray, Joan Thomas, and the rest of the residents who’d come before me had to say. Some got a fair bit of work done. Others shut down Dawson’s bars nightly. Everyone left with something new: a stronger sense of their writing, the seed of a manuscript, suitcases of notes and ideas, friendships.

“The main purpose is not to let them write, but simply to give them time off from writing if they want it, or time off to think about writing or about the place they’re living in.”

I landed in Dawson on December 23. When I stepped off the plane at 10:30 a.m. it was still too dark to see the tiny terminal building fifty feet away. My eyelashes froze—yeah, that happened a lot—and I immediately lost sight of my seatmate, a woman in a velour tracksuit who’d come to Dawson to “experience the Yukon winter.” Betty and Dan Davidson, part of the Berton House team, eventually found me in the crush of people inside the terminal. I was taken on a quick tour of town: “Here’s the curling rink. Do you curl?” I don’t. “Here’s the Anglican Church. Here’s the Baptist Church. Here’s the Catholic Church. Here’s the nondenominational worship house. Are you a churchgoer?” I am not.

When they dropped me off at the house it was 12:30 p.m. and still too dark to see across the road. I watched the cloud of vapour left by their car’s tailpipe dissipate and sighed as the house settled around me, pipes banging as the heating system fired up. I was the seventy-fourth Berton House writer-in-residence, and I had the place all to myself. I didn’t know anyone living in that remote town. It would be dark for most of my stay (or so I was led to believe) and bitterly cold (or so it had been in the past). Alone in the cold and the dark, I would write reams.

“I had the place all to myself. I didn’t know anyone living in that remote town.”

The phone rang. I was invited to a Christmas Eve party and then to a Christmas potluck and then to a Boxing Day gathering and a New Year’s dinner. Did I know about the twice-weekly film festival screenings? Would I like to snowshoe up the Dome? Was I coming to the gallery opening and lecture next week?

For a town of about 900 winter residents, Dawson was hard to keep up with.

Initially the invitations arrived with an accompanying “don’t feel obliged, we know you’re here to write.” Initially, I agonized over the daily choices: write or hike, write or read, write or … and ground myself to a standstill over words that weren’t piling up. In my self-inflicted wracking I lost sight of why I write and nearly turned my prized three-month residency into the demise of my writing.

“I agonized over the daily choices: write or hike, write or read, write or …”

But, at some point, I came to my senses and relearned something important. Perhaps it was the night I spent lying on my back on the frozen Yukon River hypnotized by the Northern Lights or while I was listening to Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in storytellers speak on the cultural importance of “story” or maybe when I stepped over the Arctic Circle. At some point I remembered that sometimes that thing which seems so close can’t be reached until one moves away from it.

Sometimes to write good stories we have to stop trying to write.

When I left Dawson the airport terminal was again packed, but this time I knew everyone. I came home with new friendships, more than one thousand photographs, and twenty-two thousand words towards a new book.

Shelagh Plunkett is an award-winning writer and journalist living in Montreal. Her work has been published in various Canadian and American journals including The Walrus, enRoute Magazine, Geist, The Vancouver Sun and The Globe and Mail. In 2007 she won the CBC Literary Award for creative non-fiction and her memoir of growing up in Guyana and on Timor, Indonesia, The Water Here is Never Blue, was short listed for the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction and the Concordia University First Book Prize. She has just returned south after three months in Dawson City, Yukon as the Writers’ Trust Berton House writer-in-residence and is now in the thick of a new manuscript tentatively titled Caught By All That’s Come Before. Follow Shelagh on Twitter and Instagram @shelaghplunkett. shelaghplunkett.wordpress.com

Photos: Shelagh Plunkett

June 29, 2016
Bye Bye Darlings: The Editing Gauntlet by Alice Zorn

Alice Zorn’s new novel, Five Roses, is named after the FARINE FIVE ROSES sign that marks the southwest horizon of Montreal and Pointe St-Charles, where the novel is set. Photo: Alice Zorn

You’ve finished your novel manuscript and you even – finally! – get a publisher. It took ten years. You have Neanderthal muscles across your brow from frowning at the computer screen. But now you’re home-free. Bingo!

Then you get the first slew of comments from your editor. She’s the objective eye who sees what the book can be, but isn’t yet. Does it begin in the best possible place? Is there too much exposition? Does it have structural integrity? What about the ending? She tells you all the darlings you cherished while you were writing don’t belong unless they serve the book. The clever turns of phrase, the crisp dialogue, the research that shows off your erudition, the quirky events that really happened. Your clean manuscript pages are tattooed with strokes and question marks. Some editors slash with red pen. I’m so glad mine used pencil.

With my first novel, Arrhythmia, I was advised to lop two main characters, cut ninety pages and replace them with new writing. I couldn’t believe it. Hadn’t the publisher already accepted the book? My editor was firm. I had to learn how to rethink developments in the novel as narrative choices. I reminded myself that my editor, like me, only wanted what was best for the book. After all, she brought the manuscript to the acquisitions table, arguing that – out of all the other manuscripts being vetted – mine should be published.

I rewrote those ninety pages because I realized the change was structurally necessary to the novel. And I rewrote them, yes. My editor didn’t tell me what to write, only that the direction I’d originally taken wasn’t the best option. However, I did not lop those two characters. I made them stronger and more integral to the novel. Writing the novel was hard, but editing it might well have been the more profound learning-about-writing experience.

“Writing the novel was hard, but editing it might well have been the more profound learning-about-writing experience.”

My second novel, Five Roses, will be published by Dundurn Press in 2016. I’m at the copy editing stage now. This is the finicky time when syntax, word choice and punctuation come into question. I open the document and scroll through 320 pages with red commas added, words underlined and lassoed to dialogue bubbles. Individual words are highlighted in yellow. A character is cycling along a city street, alert to the nervous rush hour traffic, as she thinks about the police sending out an alert to catch a criminal. I swear at myself for not having noticed. I must have read this page twenty times already! But my brain was in a groove. And as I’ve repeatedly witnessed, my brain is willful in its fondness for repetitions, internal rhymes and alliteration.Now, too, is when I discover that grammatical niceties aren’t as ingrained as I assumed they should be after five decades as a voracious reader. Shouldn’t I simply know all these distinctions by now? Seems not.

And so I learn that there’s a difference between hanged and hung when it refers to a human body that is being put to death. I hung a picture on the wall. The executioner hanged a man. However, a human body that was already dead hung from a hook. I need to know that for this novel, since a character was hanged.

I had to teach myself the farther/further dance after having worked with a copy editor who changed all my farthers to furthers. He thought further sounded more posh. Fine, I thought. He’s the copy editor. Maybe it’s one of those UK vs US things. For a couple of years I banned all farthers from my writing. Then I had a story returned from a copy editor who had changed some of my furthers to farthers. That was more curious. I finally pulled a tome of grammar off the shelf and discovered there’s a rule. Farther is for physical distance. Further is the abstract concept. You might think that I would already have known this, but I didn’t. And I’m not the only one. I continue to see farther and further misused in books published by reputable houses. (If you want a trick to remember which to use when, think far > farther. Thank you to Carol Weber for this tip.)

You aren’t the best judge of your work, because you’re too close to the writing.You need an editor. Not your partner nor your best friend, who won’t want to hurt your feelings, but an experienced and discerning professional who will help you realize the full potential of the book.

I’m now at the last read-through before Five Roses goes to the design people. I’ve rewritten the manuscript three times since I thought it was finished in 2013. Cutting, puzzling, moving pages around. Lots of darlings sent marching to the recycling bin. At each stage of editing, the book becomes more of an entity that lives separate from me. Which is what it will have to be when it’s sent off into the world.

Alice Zorn’s book of short fiction, Ruins & Relics, was a finalist for the 2009 Quebec Writers’ Federation McAuslan First Book Prize. In 2011 she published a novel, Arrhythmia, with NeWest Press. She has twice placed first in Prairie Fire’s Fiction Contest. Her second novel, Five Roses, will be published with Dundurn Press in July, 2016. She lives in Montreal and can be found at http://alicezorn.blogspot.ca

November 20, 2015
Writing with the Body by Kathleen Winter

When I finished writing my novel, Annabel, in 2010, I nearly lost the use of my legs. Between books I make things by hand: hats, collages, kegs of kimchi. So I went to the friperie looking for magpie materials – and found I couldn’t walk up the stairs.

“They feel,” I told my doctor, “like planks of rotten wood instead of legs.” I’d been sitting with them wound around each other in a Celtic leg-knot for a couple of years while I wrote the book. I knew you were supposed to get up and move around and I thought I’d done so once in awhile, but apparently not enough.

“There’s nothing,” said my doctor, “that can be done.” She gave me a look I was beginning to recognize as that of a youngish person pitying someone over the hill. Damn that, I thought: I’m never going to sit still again. I thought of the sixteen years I’d sat still through school and university, and the decades of sitting I’d done as a writer, and regretted it.

I walked home, cleaned off my desk, and went outdoors again. I walked to Jean-Talon Market and down Boulevard St-Laurent and through the trees on Mont-Royal. I moved down to Verdun and started getting to know the river: herons and sumacs, willows and wind. Beavers gnawing and ducks upside down in the water and red-winged blackbirds screeching holes in the living daylight. Messages from the wild flying everywhere and into my body, ideas at every turn.

I knew about ideas coming when you get up from your desk. Annabel would still be a dead manuscript under the bed if I hadn’t budged to make soup or take a shower or walk to the café. The most important metaphors and plot developments and the novel’s deepest psychological structures came to me “out of the blue” when I escaped from my desk. I’d made those escapes as last resorts, when sitting and thinking had brought me to the end of my tether. But now, trying to keep moving to heal my ruined legs, I realized movement might be my new first line of action as a writer: I could write with the body.

I’ve always known writers walked. One of my favourite books is Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, in which Dorothy and her brother cover hundreds of miles of heath before collapsing to devour boiled eggs or meat pie against boulders. So I started using every hour of daylight as my personal body-writing time. When November hit and I took out my Seasonal Affective Disorder lamp as I always do in order not to become marrow-deep dismal, I realized I didn’t need it anymore: striding around the riverbank and the city streets in the daylight hours means I have so many ideas gifted to me by the light and the environs that all I have to do is spend an hour or so standing up at home in the night, scribbling it all down. My legs, after months of this, have come back to life. If ideas or images come too fast when I’m moving about, I write or sketch them in my tiny notebook, standing up, in all weather.

“If ideas or images come too fast when I’m moving about, I write or sketch them in my tiny notebook, standing up, in all weather.”

Drawings by Kathleen Winter

I’ve always felt the brain organizes and computes while writing, but the body is the place where story lives. I guess I just didn’t know until I nearly lost the use of my legs that I have to forget about sitting down in a chair altogether if I want to thrive, both as a writer and as a human. I used to have posted on my wall a quote from Eugenia Zukerman: “Apply your ass to the seat.” I guess maybe that works if you’re a virtuoso flautist. I ripped that quote down – and my ass is smaller now.

Kathleen Winter’s novel Annabel was a #1 bestseller in Canada and has been translated worldwide. Her story collection boYs, edited by John Metcalf, won numerous awards. Her Arctic memoir Boundless (2014) was shortlisted for Canada’s Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust and RBC Taylor non-fiction prizes and has been sold internationally. The Freedom in American Songs (stories, Biblioasis) also came out in 2014. Born in the UK, Winter lives in Montreal after many years in Newfoundland. http://tinyurl.com/Kathleen-Winter

February 21, 2015
The Creative Power of Memory by Shelagh Plunkett

“– but there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory works both ways.” – the White Queen, Through the Looking-Glass

I’m a writer of literary non-fiction and my first book is a memoir. Seems likely that memory would be important to my work. It is. But it’s of equal value to writers of all stripes – poets, or those who write short and long fiction and any of the myriad forms non-fiction takes. Memory is one of the most powerful tools any artist or creative person has in her arsenal. As in physics, so in literature: one cannot create something from nothing. Creativity is the combining of bits and pieces of memory in a unique way. The way you’ve made that character walk is because, whether you consciously remember it or not, you once saw somebody or something move that way.

Since writing my memoir, I’ve been asked frequently how I was able to remember in such detail events that took place more than thirty years ago. It’s caused me to investigate the nature of memory: how we retain detail, how we access those details and how we can enhance our ability to remember events sharply and fully.

On one level, there are tricks that help. To retrieve the details of a life in the tropics, I ate Guyanese food, listened to Indonesian angklung music, played the mid-1970s hits of the Mighty Sparrow. My father had shot hundreds of slides and many hours of Super 8 film when we lived overseas. I sat in a dark, hot and muggy room and played those over and over and over again. I found obscure websites where the recorded songs of birds all over the world could be played. I used Google Earth to find the homes I’d lived in and to retrace the path I took from home to school.

But those tricks will only get you so far. They’ll help place you in a context and they will start triggering your memory, but to go further, to make the emotional connection that is needed for the best work, you’ll have to do something that is counterintuitive. You’ll have to forget to remember.

The funny thing is, this forgetting to remember is also what we need to do when we are encountering or experiencing something that we hope to set firmly in our memory bank for future recall.

How do you forget in order to remember? It’s a bit like what a dancer, a painter, a musician must achieve to move from good to great. You have to become so utterly familiar with the steps of the dance, with the details of the memory, that you can move into it without being aware that you are doing so. Forget what you are trying to do. Forget that you are remembering. Mesmerize yourself with the particulars of your memory and then stop paying attention to them. Wander into the blank spaces between, find yourself experiencing rather than consciously remembering events.

That’s all about recall, but a very similar process takes place when we work hard to encode and store memory. It is much the same as what experts tell us to do in order to enhance memory, to keep a memory intact with all its unique and valuable details for future use in that story you’re starting to write: Pay attention. Focus narrowly on the details. Shut off the nitter-natter that is so often going on in all our heads at all times and just listen, smell, see the particulars of what is going on around you. If you can do that – and don’t give up; it’s hard but manageable – you will be staggered by the results.

You’ll also have upped your store of that which makes your writing good: concrete detail.

Shelagh Plunkett won the CBC Literary Prize for creative non-fiction in 2007. Her winning essay grew into a memoir, The Water Here is Never Blue, published by Penguin in 2013 and shortlisted for both the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction and the Concordia University First Book Prize. Visit her blog at http://shelaghplunkett.wordpress.com

Photo credits: Niamh Malcolm (headshot); “A picture is worth a thousand words” by HikingArtist (top). Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

July 22, 2014