Thanks for the writing, and a merry late Christmas!
Here is a question for the end of the year: Has previous antiquarian views been re-evaluated (e.g. organizational theories as analogy to AI, biomimicry)?
some examples (a) Roko's Basilisk is Cancel Culture, (b) Principle-Agent Problem as a blend of Shirky Principle (problem preservation) and Putt's Law (layered architectures fail) and Goodhart's Law (human reward hacking)
Personally, I love the 'personal' tone of your writing. And this post seems to be mostly about writing structure advice, less about achieving said tone. Do you have any 'via-negativa' advice on this topic?
PS: There are small typos here > 'This section is the easiest to write and the easiest to neglect. The more familiar you are wiyou'll territory, the more you’ll forget about how non-obvious it is to get there.' and here > 'Here is what the landscape looks like (I went out and looked)/Here is what I think it should look like (I thought about it very hard)/here is how I feel the wrinkles can be reconciled (I paid attention to these details that have What'seglected before)/...'
Ohhh, thanks for finding the typos Sam! <3 Ironically, Grammarly has messed up the text by randomly deleting/inserting words. I thought I'd fixed them all.
Regarding the tone - I can't quite put the finger on that... Perhaps the tone is a function of how you want to address your audience? The short description for this Substack is "Welcome to my little corner of mindspace", so I try to be welcoming/hospitable while giving a perspective on how things look like in my head.
This is an interesting view on writing. As a professional novelist, I think I've been using a somewhat similar thought process, mostly unconsciously, when deciding what kind of novel I should write next. So maybe this is applicable to fiction writing as well.
Topic: With me, this is usually driven by some kind of spontaneous inspiration in combination with a general preference. For example, I'm very interested in AI, so I tend to write about it.
State of the art: What have others written before? Of course, I can't read all the other SF novels out there, but being aware of who are my role models and why I love them helps a lot when thinking about what a story should look like.
Problem with the state of the art: This is interesting. In public readings, the most frequently asked question I get is "where do you get your ideas?". My answer usually is something like what I wrote about "Topic", but I always add "... and bad books or movies". Because reading or seeing something bad (in terms of "unrealistic", "unbelievable", "illogical" etc.) always causes an itch to write something better in me. In fact, my very first attempt to write a novel (I was 12 at the time) came after I read a particularly bad science fiction story. Of course, it is much harder to find "problems" with the good novels (if there are any at all). But unlike science, in fiction there isn't just "one truth", so there's always room to write another good story.
Solution to the problem with state of the art: That is the hard part. It's easy to see the faults and mistakes others make, but its hard to do it better. But of course this is also the fun part. If I can come up with a novel (in both senses of the word) idea I think is strong enough to carry a main character through the story and drag the reader with her, I can't wait starting to write it.
Impact of the solution to the problem with state of the art: This is of course where the fate of a novel is decided. Sometimes, even during writing I realize that my idea wasn't strong enough, and I go back to the draft board. Sometimes, my wife - my first and most important test reader - tells me that "this is rubbish" or something similarly sensitive, and I delete a large part of the text or start all over again (or, in some cases, abandon the project completely). If I get past that point and the novel is published, it is for the readers to decide what impact my story has on them. In the best cases, they write me and tell me about it.
All in all, TSPSI is an interesting concept that I hadn't heard of before. It will help me think more clearly about the books I'm going to write in the future. Thank you for posting this!
oh wow, that kind of blew my mind! thanks for the pointers, will do a deep dive
Thanks for the writing, and a merry late Christmas!
Here is a question for the end of the year: Has previous antiquarian views been re-evaluated (e.g. organizational theories as analogy to AI, biomimicry)?
Merry late Christmas to you too! (:
Hmm, I'm not quite sure what you mean with "organizational theories as analogy to AI, biomimicry".. Can you expand a bit?
> organizational theories as analogy to AI
some examples (a) Roko's Basilisk is Cancel Culture, (b) Principle-Agent Problem as a blend of Shirky Principle (problem preservation) and Putt's Law (layered architectures fail) and Goodhart's Law (human reward hacking)
> biomimicry
This but for AI, e.g. tripartite brain as Encoding Summarizer, Decoding Generator, and Discriminator? https://wyclif.substack.com/p/let-biological-metaphors-back-into
Oh wow that kind of blew my mind, thanks for sharing! Will do a deep dive asap
Thank you for posting this!
Personally, I love the 'personal' tone of your writing. And this post seems to be mostly about writing structure advice, less about achieving said tone. Do you have any 'via-negativa' advice on this topic?
PS: There are small typos here > 'This section is the easiest to write and the easiest to neglect. The more familiar you are wiyou'll territory, the more you’ll forget about how non-obvious it is to get there.' and here > 'Here is what the landscape looks like (I went out and looked)/Here is what I think it should look like (I thought about it very hard)/here is how I feel the wrinkles can be reconciled (I paid attention to these details that have What'seglected before)/...'
Ohhh, thanks for finding the typos Sam! <3 Ironically, Grammarly has messed up the text by randomly deleting/inserting words. I thought I'd fixed them all.
Regarding the tone - I can't quite put the finger on that... Perhaps the tone is a function of how you want to address your audience? The short description for this Substack is "Welcome to my little corner of mindspace", so I try to be welcoming/hospitable while giving a perspective on how things look like in my head.
This is an interesting view on writing. As a professional novelist, I think I've been using a somewhat similar thought process, mostly unconsciously, when deciding what kind of novel I should write next. So maybe this is applicable to fiction writing as well.
Topic: With me, this is usually driven by some kind of spontaneous inspiration in combination with a general preference. For example, I'm very interested in AI, so I tend to write about it.
State of the art: What have others written before? Of course, I can't read all the other SF novels out there, but being aware of who are my role models and why I love them helps a lot when thinking about what a story should look like.
Problem with the state of the art: This is interesting. In public readings, the most frequently asked question I get is "where do you get your ideas?". My answer usually is something like what I wrote about "Topic", but I always add "... and bad books or movies". Because reading or seeing something bad (in terms of "unrealistic", "unbelievable", "illogical" etc.) always causes an itch to write something better in me. In fact, my very first attempt to write a novel (I was 12 at the time) came after I read a particularly bad science fiction story. Of course, it is much harder to find "problems" with the good novels (if there are any at all). But unlike science, in fiction there isn't just "one truth", so there's always room to write another good story.
Solution to the problem with state of the art: That is the hard part. It's easy to see the faults and mistakes others make, but its hard to do it better. But of course this is also the fun part. If I can come up with a novel (in both senses of the word) idea I think is strong enough to carry a main character through the story and drag the reader with her, I can't wait starting to write it.
Impact of the solution to the problem with state of the art: This is of course where the fate of a novel is decided. Sometimes, even during writing I realize that my idea wasn't strong enough, and I go back to the draft board. Sometimes, my wife - my first and most important test reader - tells me that "this is rubbish" or something similarly sensitive, and I delete a large part of the text or start all over again (or, in some cases, abandon the project completely). If I get past that point and the novel is published, it is for the readers to decide what impact my story has on them. In the best cases, they write me and tell me about it.
All in all, TSPSI is an interesting concept that I hadn't heard of before. It will help me think more clearly about the books I'm going to write in the future. Thank you for posting this!
Neat, really interesting to see that the framework can also apply to your craft! Thanks Karl!