• Welcome to the Fantasy Writing Forums. Register Now to join us!

Being Honest...

Ban

Troglodytic Trouvère
Article Team
Of course, eventually AI's will probably be able to write stories of their own. Will this put humans out of business? Heh. What about AI's stealing the ideas humans input and creating their own stories from these, maybe even sabotaging their human clients? Any bets?

With the backing of other artists, editors and writerly sorts, writers will unite in writer's guilds to lock wanton AI out of business. These guilds will use any miniscule opportunity to sue the AI (and their operators) for plagiarism, thus making the AI writing market so hazardous that few entrepreneurs would wish to venture into it.

Alternatively all creative thinking will be outsourced to the machines and we will be reduced to nothing but mindless consumers. My two cents ;)
 
Okay, some of my thinking behind the last comment.

I'm fully confident that a competent, dedicated software engineer could create a rather useful "Beat Sheet Outliner Assistant" program now, already, without waiting for AI to advance far enough to do what I wrote. Whatever it'd be called, heh. Scrivener with Outline Assist, coming soon to an e-store near you!

I'm not a software engineer, far from it. But as a conceptualizer...heh. It would be necessary to come up with all the factors of a story, all the terminology Devor mentioned, the common understandings of story structure and elements, so a writer could interact meaningfully with the program. The program designer would need a solid understanding of these things as well, so the program could be designed to request meaningful input. Well...there'd be more to it, but I suspect it's doable already.
 

Devor

Fiery Keeper of the Hat
Moderator
We're way off track here.

There was an AI that's reported to be able to write blog posts that were so scary effective they refused to make it available to the public.

Still, AIs are not intelligent. They compute the data they're given, and often have to be steadily reprogrammed and modified to achieve any specific goal.

What might be possible? Somebody develops an AI. An author pairs with the programmer full time to write books for, say, the middle grades, and uses it to produce a new book in a series every 3 months, where the AI needs constant adjustments to lay out the book and fill in text that the author keeps editing and tweaking and directing as it goes. But you most likely can't take the author or the programmer out of the mix (maybe one person could do both parts), and you most likely couldn't use the same AI to produce a very different story without a huge overhaul to its programming.
 
We're way off track here.

Ah, I don't think we are? The initial questions were broad enough to allow speculation about AI. I don't know if you read my last comment before your latest...but that one was a little more to my point and should fit within this discussion. The AI wish-fulfillment speculation was just a case of taking the idea further to illustrate something I think might be lacking, a resource we could have now but do not.

I do think AI's are growing much more intelligent than most people think, at least verging on it already. I don't know whether we'll reach any singularity w/ AI's soon, but what Apple, Amazon, and Google are achieving is quite advanced already.

But putting AI aside, having an interactive outliner assist program could be quite helpful. I do think it'd be iterative, and the writer would still need to apply lots of thought while using it, adjusting this and that as he works through the outline he's creating with the assistant. Additionally, a comprehensive outlining tool could probably include multiple examples from literature to help writers brainstorm each step of the outlining process for their own stories. Having a problem creating pinch points? Here are some examples of what others have done. Final call would still be the author's to come up with his own pinch points. And so forth.
 

pmmg

Myth Weaver
Hard to top Malik's answer. I'll just stick with his. With enough time and energy, I could create anything.
 

pmmg

Myth Weaver
Ah, I see we drifted into AI :)

Prediction, an AI will create a story (and other forms of art), that will win universal appeal as the best ever created sometime in the future.
 
Hi guys! Currently I'm looking for ways to make writer's lives easier. To that end I have a couple of questions...

1. As a fantasy writer, what are the TWO biggest challenges you face in the process of creating and completing your novel?

2. When it comes to writing a novel or series, what would you wish for more than anything else?

Thanks in advance guys! Very curious and looking forward to reading your answers :)

1. i have like this intersecting web of challenges, but I think all of them connect to a central idea of "being a perfectionist." I get random attacks of sickening self-hatred and become stuck constantly in the early/planning stages of an idea due to the fear of starting it and thus becoming able to mess it up. It's hard for me to discern actual problems from just random things I am obsessing about that a reader would likely never notice. I get immobilized by anxiety the moment I actually *do* determine that I have a problem, which shuts down my faculties of coming up with a solution. It's a mess.

2. Wishes?...Maybe a longer attention span?
 

ThinkerX

Myth Weaver
Hi guys! Currently I'm looking for ways to make writer's lives easier. To that end I have a couple of questions...

1. As a fantasy writer, what are the TWO biggest challenges you face in the process of creating and completing your novel?

1 - finding the will/energy to proceed.

2 - sequence issues. I visualize the tales sections as a great many 'mental movie clips.' Usually, writing said snippets is not difficult (and when it is, it usually means I'm on the wrong track.) The problem is assembling these fragments in a plausible order - it's rough even with outlines. Much of the rewrite process for me consists of relocating scenes and incorporating 'bridge' pieces.


2. When it comes to writing a novel or series, what would you wish for more than anything else?

Thanks in advance guys! Very curious and looking forward to reading your answers :)

It is real tempting to say 'will and energy to proceed' again, but with two series mostly written...I'll go with 'Beta Readers who actually get back to me.'
 
Hi guys! Currently I'm looking for ways to make writer's lives easier. To that end I have a couple of questions...

1. As a fantasy writer, what are the TWO biggest challenges you face in the process of creating and completing your novel?

2. When it comes to writing a novel or series, what would you wish for more than anything else?

Thanks in advance guys! Very curious and looking forward to reading your answers :)

1. Organization of a lot of stuff. I think the background information is required and much thinking is done on this in order to create a world that has certain standards and certain objectives. I have thousands of word documents for characters and places as well as maps in order to visualize and even remember all of the information. Making it easy to find is the hard part. When you need information about something that you already wrote previously in an early chapter, a lot of times you have to re-read it and perhaps end up changing it at times. Then you have to change everything related to it when you have a better idea. I have even had it change the story a bit also. Kind of irritating to be honest but you just have to endure it.

2. Wish for? It is like that old joke about the simple guy who finds the genie lamp on the beach. The genie pops out and says, "you are now the master of the lamp and I will grant you three wishes of anything you desire". The simple guy says, "Well I would like a drink of rum, Mr Genie." Poof. A bottle of rum appears in his hand. He takes a big swig and swallows it down. Suddenly the bottle refills itself magically. The genie says, "It is a magic bottle of rum, my master, that will ever replenish itself!". The genie then asks the man, "Now for your two other wishes my mater?" The guy pauses, then looks at the genie and says "Two more of them please!"
This is like when you write a novel. My wish would be for the genie to give me 'two more of them please!'
 
Hi,

Biggest problem I face - running out of interest in a work. I'm pure pantster and so write in an absolute fury for a while. But too often I reach a point where I don't know where the story's going and I have a whole new idea and start a new story instead of completing the old one.

What would I wish for? To be more able to stay on track instead of following each new story idea that pops into my head.

Cheers, Greg.
 

Insolent Lad

Maester
I run out of interest for just the opposite reason. I know where the story is going and it turns into an exercise in paint-by-numbers.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
I used to think I ran out of interest for that reason, Insolent Lad. It accounted for any number of uncompleted projects. I'd say, I already the know the story now, why take the trouble to write it out?

Once I started finishing stories, though, I revised my thoughts about that.

Now, when I know where the story is headed, I'm eager to see it arrive there, because "it's about the journey not the destination" *gag* Yeah, but it really is. The fun part, the engaging part for me lies in the individual scenes and in moving from one scene to the next. It's not that the farm boy winds up as king, it's how he get there, the cost of it, as well as the rewards. The devil is surely in the details, but there are angels there as well.

To go with another metaphor, as a painter I can look at exactly what I'm going to paint. Might be a portrait or a landscape. The end is right there in front of me, so why not take a snapshot and go home? Because the joy lies precisely in the execution.

If it was all only about knowing the plot, then yeah that'd be boring. But it turned out that taking the trouble to write it out is the only part really worth doing. For me, anyway. I say all this not to try to persuade or dissuade, but on the off chance that it might resonate with others who read this thread.
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
I used to do this... I would never finish a novel if I had an outline... EVER. No way in hell. But I went full pants on fire it never ended. Hence, I am a waypoint writer. I know the ending (not every detail) and key points, and then I find the joy in bringing them together.

I run out of interest for just the opposite reason. I know where the story is going and it turns into an exercise in paint-by-numbers.
 

Insolent Lad

Maester
Yeah, I do somewhat less planning than I used to. Anyway, none of it has ever actually stopped me from finishing a story.
 
Top