AliceOverZero

Rogue Trans Void Witch

  • she/her

To evolve, to flourish.
To let die that which makes you dead.
My short fiction
Tag for my longform posts.


SamKeeper
@SamKeeper

it's this one here:

and the bit I keep coming back to is:

Here’s a boring sentence I wrote: “Quinn entered the dark and cold forest.”

And here’s a sentence Rephrase gave me: “Quinn shivered as he stepped into the cold, dark forest, the air thick with the scent of damp earth.”

I can build off that! Now I’m more excited to write this scene that was feeling bland.

this is so weird to me. like, ok, first off, the whole premise here is oh look how this tool let me replace a boring placeholder sentence with something better? but the llm's sentence also feels pretty "it was a dark and stormy night" tier to me you know? this is nothing to (literally) write home about surely. it's, by definition, a statistically cliched sentence and it shows.

but it's also like... ok you've allowed a statistical algorithm to make a ton of choices for your setting and narrative here! did you even notice?


you started with dark and cold for sure, but you didn't start with wet and boy this forest just got fuckin MOIST. it's also FECUND. the earth is not just damp, it's also so scented that it fills the air with its scent. is that what you want to suggest? moreover, is that accurate to your setting? cold and dark, I mean, that could be anything, maybe the air is eerily sterilized by the night's frosty chill! maybe it fits the whole theme better if that's the case, or maybe that sets up a dramatic irony when Quinn meets up with his virile but threatening werewolf boyfriend, who offers a point of warmth and intensity in the deadened, fallow ground of Quinn's small home town... but watch out!!

what the fuck was I talking about? oh, yeah, the fact that a lot of people don't seem to... give a shit about these details? in a way that I genuinely find really baffling and alienating. like, it's hard for me to get through a LOT of web fiction (and lite novels, and webtoons, for that matter) because the competitive market for both money and attention has sort of optimized towards a storytelling style that is aggressively plot forward, and tends to treat settings as window dressing. Lincoln Michel just posted about this today too actually, and in particular I was like ‼️ when he said, "Why write about paranormal fish hospitals if you don’t find them worth thinking about for even a measly 10 minutes?" yes! I'm deeply weirded out by the fact that so many people set out to write speculative fiction and then decide, well, this is fiction of ideas, so things like embedding the reader in a sense of place are immaterial and can be glossed over, because that stuff isn't really THAT relevant to the ideas, right? or like, we can just sort of gesture at this, handwave, you know what the deal is.

we could've done that on Maltara, "Crime Planet" in Godfeels. "oh you know what the deal is, it's Mos Eisley and Bladerunner." the name is even a bit of a nod to that, a metatextual joke about Planets of Hats. yeah this is the crime planet, where the crimes happen, and you can meet all the criminals.

here's how Sarah and I open the chapter where we get a good look at Maltara:

A column of limosleds trundles down the boulevard ahead, flashing lights, blaring tacky hydropop, and worst of all blocking Lenore and Mary's path. The street's packed shoulder to shoulder, bathing them in a roar of conversations and storefront barkers, mismatched tunes playing from personal speakers and the honking of horns from a distant unseen highway. It's hot, humid, and windless, like being stuck in a terrarium.

Lenore shifts from foot to foot eyeing the troll beside her. She seems oddly less jaded than usual, taking in her surroundings with wide eyes and a measured apprehension. For Lenore, the boisterous flair of life on Crime Planet is more than familiar enough to breed contempt. She understands the gaudy hovering party barges for the insecure display they are: the province of anxious mid-level thugs or vacationing rich kids from any one of a dozen galactic empires laying claim to Maltara. The serious crime on Crime Planet tussles and brutalizes out of sight in its sordid back alleys, or plays out at countless quiet desks in quiet offices by people in quiet suits: money laundering, large scale smuggling, tax evasion on an industrial scale difficult to imagine from the perspective of a single-planet civilization. Subtle; anonymous.

these opening paragraphs of description let us do a whole bunch of stuff. partly, it's establishing Crime Planet's specific vibes that make it stand out from the pack. (actually the bit I'm most proud of along those lines comes later, the street of banners people have strung up as personal business cards.) it's allowing us to talk about what Maltara's deal really is, like how do you get a "planet of crime" that's so silly, what kind of people end up here, how seriously should they be taken &c. I like the idea that there's this sort of theme park level to the setting, a resort for shitty rich kids, and the real engine of the setting rotates grimly out of sight. opening on this gaudiness with a sense of underlying threat helps set up the swerve of this track into danger as Dare and Dave, overconfident godlings, get in over their heads because they underestimate what dangers might be lurking under the surface of Maltara's glitz. and it allows us to see all this through the eyes of Lenore and Mary, one person disillusioned and world-weary, the other floudering out of her depth after having gone through a shattering personal tragedy.

but like

I guess we could've just told bing to write this for us too and that would've basically been fine.

I mean I can be sarcastic about it but there's a part of me that's like, man do people even notice or WOULD it basically have been fine? there's a certain bleak certainty stalking me that eventually we're just gonna get outcompeted here, and who can churn the most text out the fastest will ultimately drive the rest of us out. it's sort of irritating seeing some smug takes about like "well the nanowrimo thing doesn't bother ME, why does it bother YOU when you don't even participate?" idk man maybe because it's a major cultural institution throwing its weight behind the idea that quantity matters more than quality and caring about individual words is for saps? that feels like it could have repercussions beyond just the specific contest you sanctimonious ass, but whatever I'm glad it's water off your back. I can't not care though, it's why I got an english degree, it's why I keep doing projects like reading through The Grapes of Wrath and podcasting about it. I just can't stop caring about words and aesthetic choices and all the minutiae of putting art together.

I'm too much of a materialist to think that just urging people to care more too will change anything but, gosh, I do wish our spaces and discussions and beliefs about art and literature cared a LITTLE more about craft.

ps. obligatory patreon link thank you goodbye


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in reply to @SamKeeper's post:

This makes me think of fantasy/sci-fi writing that ends up treating any hard rules established early on as a literary technical debt that hinders the narrative. Brushing it aside is something that risks coming across as not having that much care about the worldbuilding in a way that cheapens the experience as a reader.

The topic has been on my mind because I can see this happening in the Dragonblood Assassin books as I read them, but at the same time Murder Drones dropped some of the rules established early in the show without feeling like it's suffering from the same cheapening of the world so I've been mulling over the exact line of how that happens.

The solution definitely ain't generative AI and the incurious people promoting it.

just makes me think about holodecks

just walk into a magic box and spout a time period or a genre and get the most cliched possible version of that generated on the spot

and then you pack it onto a chip and you can call yourself a "holonovelist"

The only way I could defend this dark forest example is that you see the machine suggestions and go "oh god, not like that, I now realize I have to specify that the forest is a dry, snapping cold, the trails hardened by frost"

kind of like the joke about how the best way to get an answer online is to confidently post the wrong solution to the problem, it can be inspiring to see work so bad it makes you think "well, okay, I may doubt my abilities sometimes but I know I can do better than that."

But I don't think this is the intended use.