Articles

Jun 28 2024

Worth the Wait

Author: Jamie DeBree

I’ve been writing rather sporadically lately (fiction too, not just these blog posts). With fiction, I’m working on a tale of the old(ish) west, wherein a woman (or two, actually) runs away from her life on the east coast to find herself and hopefully make space in a male-dominated world here in my home state (newly minted just then) of Montana.

The part I’m working on is her journey – getting from point A to B, which in the late 1800’s was not a comfortable or particularly “fun” feat, though most of it would have been accomplished by train. Uncharacteristically, I had the first two-thirds of her travels planned out with a nice/odd little meet and hand-off, but when I got to the final third leg, I was stumped.

Not being Tolkien (or particularly liking descriptive passages of the landscape spanning more than a page or so), I had to take a break and figure out what I wanted to make of that final leg of the journey. I did some brainstorming and outlining (yes, I used AI for that, because it is very well-suited for such things and without that kind of efficient help, my very long-winded notes and research would most definitely never have been organized). I did a little more granular plotting, and got sidetracked by yet more research (because history is fascinating, which is why I have a history degree).

Then a couple nights ago, I sat down to write. My method for that when I don’t know what to write (dictation is useless if I don’t have some idea of where I’m going with a scene), is just to write the next word that logically follows the previous one, and keep typing, and eventually I find my way back into the story flow.

Well, I found my way into the flow that night, all right. I overshot my writing time by a good fifteen minutes just because I really had to get all the things out “on paper” before I left them to stew for the night. And I ended up with a nice little plot point that will add depth to my heroine’s story, fit in nicely with one of the overreaching themes of the book (that of how difficult it was for women to do anything on their own back then), and it will add a nice amount of both internal and external conflict to that first act of the book.

Not that I was thinking about any of that while writing, of course. Once you get into a writing “flow state”, the story literally just writes itself for the most part – I’m just the typist. And that is what makes writing so much fun.

I could have forced myself to keep writing when I got “stuck” on that part, and when I was younger, I probably would have. I’m glad I didn’t in this case, because the result was so much better than it would have been if I hadn’t waited. Patience was key, and I’m really glad I waited and just did more creative work “around” the story instead of bulldozing through. There’s a time for the bulldozer, of course, but in this case, it definitely benefited from a more patient touch.

Have you been rewarded for waiting lately? I think we should all be rewarded more often for that, don’t you?

Comment below, email me at jamie@jamiedebree.com, or catch up with me on Facebook or Instagram.

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Jul 05 2023

Getting to the Point

Author: Jamie DeBree

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.

Jun 27 2023

Call In the Robots!

Author: Jamie DeBree

Photo of the Week

Rhubarb crisp I made this past weekend – one of the most perfect deserts ever, IMO, and equally as good hot or cold!

About This Whole Artificial Intelligence Thing

Artificial Intelligence: the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.

Articles about AI are everywhere, with the advent of ChatGPT and the rise of other large language model based programs. And of course everyone is familiar with the legal and ethical issues surrounding how they were “trained”. Much hand-wringing has ensued, which is to be expected, and in some cases I’m sure it’s warranted, but not all. The courts will figure out the legal stuff, and I really don’t expect it will change much about how the tech is used or available on the public/user side.

The cat is out of the box, so to speak, and there’s no shoving it back in now. I am a bit leery of creating/using AI generated images until those copyright issues are all worked out, but I’m not all that worried about text, especially since I have no plans to actually publish anything written solely by AI (because it really wouldn’t be good enough, and also, I just like writing).

People are always scared of new technology, especially when they don’t understand how it works. Which is fine, and not an implicitly bad thing (it’s good to be somewhat skeptical), but at the same time, I think it’s easy to overlook the exciting things that new tech, and this new tech in particular, can do to make certain tasks easier.

I am a tech person – I work with databases and scripting queries, creating reports, moving data around for logical organization, and things of that nature. I was a web developer for sixteen years before that. So while I haven’t worked with this AI in particular from the development side, I have a pretty decent understanding of how it works in the background, and while I understand the instinct we have as humans to look for the “humanity” in everything, I also understand the limitations of the algorithms used in these programs, and that in the end, it’s still just a computer program that will respond based solely on the information you give it. It’s not truly “intelligent”, hence the “artificial” preface. It can only do what we tell it to. So the results are only going to be as good as our requests, which is as it should be.

All that to explain why I’m really not all that scared of AI, and I’m actually pretty excited about what it can do to make my life easier, especially in terms of writing (and writing code, too).

Just this past weekend, I started playing with ChatGPT. I watched some YouTube videos by authors who have been using it for all sorts of things, but the most interesting to me was taking an idea, writing and refining a synopsis, and then actually having ChatGPT create an outline, which the author then refined to suit, and then creating scene and chapter outlines (also refining after those).

I have been trying to force myself to become more of an outliner/plotter, because it makes writing by dictation much, much easier if I know exactly what I need to write (dictate) on any given day. Pantsing is much more difficult with dictation, and also, I really think my writing will be better with some advanced planning (read: there will be less major revision needed). I’ve been writing a lot of unorganized story/background/plotting notes for my recent drafts, and this is where I think ChatGPT could be really useful for me. If I can put my notes into it, and have it create an outline for me that I can then tweak to fit my vision of the story perfectly (or nearly perfectly), that would save me a *considerable* amount of time and effort, and get me that much closer to my goal of writing with an outline.

Could I do all of this without AI? Of course – writers have been “just writing” for ages (and before that, sitting around telling stories verbally or in pictures). Some writers still prefer to write with pen and paper (I do that too for micro or flash fiction, sometimes). As far as I’m concerned, things like ChatGPT and Sudowrite are just more tools to add to the desk, and I’m totally going to take advantage or anything that leaves me more time and energy for the thing I like best, which is actually telling myself the story.

So…AI for outlining and organizing my thoughts (ChatGPT), dictation with AI transcription (Dragon Anywhere) for getting words down because it’s far faster than typing or writing longhand, an AI editor (ProWritingAid in Dabble) for cleaning up the dictation and making me think about what might need to be rephrased as I go, and an AI “writing partner” (Sudowrite/ChatGPT) to help me with revision ideas (description, tone, whatever else I feel I need more work on) and to stimulate my own learning as I revise. Then my human editor (Carol!) can focus on telling me where all the plot holes are, which is something AI simply can’t do…yet.

**And no, none of this post was written with AI. I don’t really know how I’d even do that with blog posts, given mine are normally thoughts and ideas that I work out as I’m typing. This post was actually about three times as long when I started, and required several revision passes to make it short enough to be “internet palatable”. And I’m pretty sure it’s still too long…but that’s sort of my “thing” (along with ellipses).

Recommendation(s)

The Nerdy Author videos on YouTube are my favorite as far as AI discussions and tutorials go. If you’re interested in writing with AI, I’d highly suggest you check out his channel, and these videos in particular:

Brainstorm an Entire Novel in 1 Hour

Is AI Writing Cheating? My Honest Opinion

Jamie DeBree

Writer | DBA | Dog Wrangler

Worth the Wait

Getting to the Point

Call In the Robots!