Photo of the Week
I’ve been working my way through my comic book TBR stack this year, and I’m up to the 2021 issues of The Amazing Spider-Man (it’s the series I’m most behind on, simply because it publishes more than the others I read). This is one of the issues I read recently, and I love this cover, because it’s both creepy and romantic. It’s an interesting issue, too, because it’s mostly inner dialogue and Spidey working things out on a mental level. Not something you see in comic books all that often.
What’s the Point?
As I recently discussed here, I’ve been using some AI tools to help me outline and do some other writerly tasks that frankly, I find boring and tedious. I’ve even been using it to clean up my dictation files for spelling, grammar and punctuation, which saved me a fair amount of time just last week.
The outlining part especially has really been making me think. Using these tools to outline requires a fair amount of back and forth – it’s a conversation of sorts, where I give it a prompt, see what it outputs, and then I refine part of that output in order to get results that are closer to what I want/need. This forces me to really look hard at the plot of my story, character motivations, and most importantly when looking at the whole picture, it requires me to think about what the point of the overall story is.
That is not something I’m used to doing – writing off the cuff, I don’t worry about the story as a whole, I just write, and see where it takes me (often it takes me to a good and/or interesting story that requires a chisel and hammer to revise afterwards). To be clear, they do always end up with a definite beginning, middle and end, and a plot with a point of some sort, but I’m not used to thinking about or refining it at the start as I’m doing now.
Looking at the story as a whole before it’s written requires me to really think about what the point of the story is – why do I even want to tell it? What do I hope people will get from it? Entertainment, certainly, but without a point of some sort, it’s just a wandering diatribe of words that goes…well, nowhere. So I spent a lot of time thinking about plots and plotting and stories and points and why we tell stories and why *I* tell stories and…well, you get the point, so to speak.
All that to say, I’ve been using the back and forth with ChatGPT as a conversation of sorts as well, to help me refine the point I want to make with certain stories and themes and plots. It’s fascinating (and often amusing) what the chatbot comes up with, and while they are often off the mark by a wide margin, they always spur my own creativity and help me solidify the points *I* want to make in my stories.
Which is what’s important, of course. It was a bit disconcerting trying to outline without having a point, and it took me a bit to decide why I wanted to actually write the stories (series) I’m currently working on, just because I’m really not used to thinking about writing and story crafting in that way. But, as with all of this, I think it will make my stories stronger, and that’s the important part in the end.
Plus, it’s never a bad thing to get a different perspective. I’ve always just said that the point of my stories is to entertain, but that’s really only the shallow answer. The theme of the current novel draft is not only overcoming adversity, but also overcoming personal fears, as well as the notion that the boundaries we think we need and the boundaries we actually need are sometimes two very different things. Thinking about it in those terms has forced me to really think about what scenes and chapters will benefit the story, and how they all tie in together.
I did this instinctively before, and while I think my previous stories are fine and entertaining, I don’t think they’re as deeply fleshed out as they could be. And I think this new perspective will allow me to do that more easily.
Writing Progress
I got some more writing done this week – some dictation, and some decisions on the timeline, so I re-dictated a scene that needed to go a different way. I also moved some scenes around, and created the first draft of a flash fiction story with AI just to see how it worked, which was interesting. Then I started re-drafting that via dictation, and I have the first little bit done.
So lots of progress this week. Yay!
Recommendation(s)
I took French classes in college, mainly because I needed a couple years of a foreign language for my core credits. One of the things we learned in class was a song, and the chorus has been rolling around in my head for the past week. I couldn’t remember the whole thing (it’s been…well, over 20 years now), so I finally looked it up this weekend so I could listen to it and get it out of my head.
So that’s what I’m sharing with you this week – Sous les ponts de Paris (Under the Bridges of Paris) on YouTube: https://youtu.be/8iJId0reLj8. Enjoy!
That’s it for this week! If you have a favorite thing to share, or want to recommend a book, TV show, video or podcast, comment below, email me at jamie@jamiedebree.com, or catch up with me on Facebook or Instagram.
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