Writing Prompts

I woke up from sleep, the room still dark, and had a thought about writing prompts. Recently, I enrolled in a writing course advertised on Facebook that also had a course of writing prompts. This may be the missing piece that will help me get started as a novelist. The course I am taking right now is a series of exercises where I copy passages from famous novels curated by the teacher. Following the experience of writers like Hunter Thompson,  started his career as a writer by copying Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. This anecdote is frequently shared on the web.

I have done about seven lessons so far out of a total of twelve lessons email to me. This is an effective way to study the work of these authors, as well as get into a 'writing' habit by typing the work of the greats. The 'teacher' also places his comments on sections of these works to highlight the author's technique. While doing these lessons on a regular basis, you get the understand not only the work you are copying but also get the feel of typing a novel daily. So this is how a writer works by getting in front of the computer or typewriter and banging out a novel.

I have also been reading Peter Elbow's book 'Writing Without Teachers', and I thought this was a method to also use to start a daily writing habit. To make the effort more fruitful, writing prompts would be useful to get the juices going instead of waiting for the mind to have a rhythm of consistent ideas relevant to the plot at hand. I do have a rough draft of a plot of a novel that I am working on that I started to us a tool called Sudowrite, which is an AI-based tool that tries to help would-be authors. At best, the tool is a writing assistant rather than a tool to do the writing for you.

So these have been my attempts to start my writing career with the use of AI tools, but one does not become a writer by having a machine do the work for you. Instead, AI tools can provide writing prompts, perhaps critique the draft and offer suggestions, but not do the actual writing, which AI tools like Sudowrite attempt to do. This seems to be the dilemma of writers at the cusp of the unrelenting wave of artificial intelligence. Other experiments would be to use Gemini, ChatGPT, and tools like Notebok NLM to augment the writing craft of today's writers.;

During my early morning usings in the dark, several ideas for a novel also came up aside from my current idea of hiking with a French colleague:

• driving cross-country with my son from the South to the West Coast to begin his Army tour
• migration for work from Asia to the United States
• Further stories of my French colleagues with their families and animals

During these reveries, I thought about buying a motorcycle so I could roam the local countryside to rest from my writing labors. I used to have a Honda Ruckus and regretted having sold it when the scooter would not start. So my daydreaming started with thoughts about how to better organize my garage so that the new motorcycle would fit in; perhaps by raising the rack to place my 3 bicycles above the ground to make way for the Royal Enfield motorcycle that I planned to buy. As I get into my writing rhythm, churning out novels, motorbiking on the weekends, working on my garden, and having my sons and friends critique my drafts, using writing prompts and live the life of a productive novelist.

Soon I heard my wife's alarm sound, and I had to get up and prepare to work from home. I went to the bathroom to meditate, and I sat on the toilet, listening to binaural beats and the vibrating headpiece around my forehead, and when I finished, I did Tai-Chi to prepare for my day as I watched the thoughts swirl in my head of all the writing progress I would achieve with writing prompts. Now is the time when the actual hard work begins. As a start, I need to organize my work area on my computer and continue my experiments with AI, and create a model to help me with prompts

Distrust This Particular Flavor

William Gibson writes about his evolution as a science fiction writer in his recent non-fiction book; first an admirer of HG Welles’ work, such as ‘Time Machine’- a movie I watched a few years back with excellent special effects; but Gibson is wary of this type of fiction writing; a forecasting effort, something like predicting the future, a feat that George Orwell achieved in his book ‘1984’ (or was it a warning shot?). Instead Gibson was attracted by the works of ‘beat’ writers like William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, writers who often write about alcohol and drugs, or living in the edge of experience; for instance - Burroughs accidentally shooting his wife dead, or his life in Tangiers or Kerouac on the road and dying of alcohol abuse; writers who focus on chemically induced transcendence. The influence of HG Welles, Burroughs and Kerouac results in the interesting mix in Gibson’s work; avoiding the predictive ‘flavor’ of Welles though with enough elements of forecasting to qualify as science fiction; with living in the edge quality derived from altered insights; reminiscent of chemical hallucinations from the stories of the beat writers – themselves a forerunner of a new type of writing, futuristic in itself (i.e. spontaneous stream of consciousness). 

Lying in the background is the immense influence of George Orwell, a better ‘futuristic’ writer than Aldous Huxley; Orwell is a giant, not an ordinary novelist who rushes out to scribble but one who establishes a central theme relevant to society; then crafting the appropriate literary vehicle to expound his views: poverty in ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’, imperialism in ‘Burmese Days’, politics in ‘Animal Farm’ and totalitarianism in ‘1984’. Despite his meager output, Orwell remains relevant today because he accurately pinpointed the important issues of the age, crafting wonderful plots with excellent humorous writing, influencing artists everywhere (see Apple computers first Super bowl commercial).  Orwell insights in ‘1984’ influenced Gibson one thinks, himself a circumspect writer not known for prodigious output like Stephen King, but with a minimal, almost ascetic and elegant style, who did not strive to predict the future but enough to foresee the coming age, to coin terms like ‘cyberspace’ and write about pattern recognition, Soviet martial arts, Cuban spies, computerized intelligence gathering, Japanese anime, drone surveillance and other esoteric subjects way ahead of its time; indicative of carefully research and reflection reminiscent of Orwell.

One reads Gibson to make sense of the new age, of technology, or to understand the trends surfacing in the world, someone who sees future markers before anyone else; Japan as the future state, Singapore as totalitarian Disneyland, the internet as a vehicle that cultivates solitary experts, or as a global nervous system (where dead people remain alive), an expert in cool trends (guerilla fashion, ‘avant garde’ videos). His essay show the thinking behind the writer, derived from a unique perspective or an altered state of consciousness; a contemporary attuned to modern tastes; his appreciation of the music of ‘Steely Dan’ for example, identifies him amongst the cool hackers of today, writing for ‘Wired’ magazine, give him street cred. William Gibson is maybe today’s George Orwell, a writer living within the complications of his age, where the big issues lie buried in the infrastructure, with pattern recognition the needed skill to decipher reality.  His journey through the worlds of Burroughs and Kerouac kept him remarkably intact, perhaps more so than writers like Hunter Thompson; avoiding the excess and chemical indulgences that this type of writing induces; a continuation of Hemingway’s hedonism; but instead emerging as a modern seer from this psychedelic mixture. 

At Home Alone

A few of my colleagues are offsite this week; one team in San Bernardino, another in Reno, a project leader in France and my wife in Vancouver; leaving me behind to watch the store and support any project work remotely, actually offering me time to work on other stuff that needs to be completed by month end, including the filing of taxes this coming weekend in order to get a discount. Travelling this week would have required me to rush some work and miss deadlines, so glad the week would be spent catching up; for instance, I purchased office supplies in Staples to organize my papers; not achieving a lot but getting some order though more needs to be done; getting a chance to visit a small museum near home and eating lunch in a Japanese restaurant after church on Sunday. I had planned to complete my taxes, but I was caught up with housework and reading magazines that needed to be returned today, rushing to watch movies and television shows like my favorite Sunday show ‘The Walking Dead’, managing to catch ‘The Rum Diary’ – Johnny Depp’s belated homage to his friend, the writer Hunter Thompson; a wonderful work, especially the scenes on drinking and indulging in chemical substances in exotic locations like Puerto Rico; scenes I would have appreciated in my younger years.

In lieu of actual travel, I listened to Mark Twain’s excellent memoir ‘Innocents Abroad’, his humorous account of travels in Europe and the Middle East in the 1860’s; at a moment when America was about to emerge as a world power; years before Theodore Roosevelt’s adventures in the Spanish colonies of Cuba and the Philippines; first as assistant secretary of the Navy, then as Rough Rider, then Vice-President and eventually as President. Read today, Twain’s account would be labeled as racist, condescending and arrogant; the typical ‘ugly American’ especially in today’s charged atmosphere of political correctness, but that was a different time; Twain being the last person to be accused of being a racist, in fact criticizing the American occupation of the Philippines; instead his account should be taken as a humorous satirical tale of a naïve traveller. I finished the 15-CD audio book, listening at home after work or in my car; listening while driving to Simpsonville 15 miles away from home, looking at a possible new house on Saturday afternoon before going to the gym to swim. I also read Nathaniel Philbrick’s ‘Why Read Moby Dick’, an excellent primer to Melville’s masterpiece, in essence a travel book of the high seas (and of the soul), from the whaling town of Nantucket to the vast oceans, sailors born of distant shores amidst the adventure of capturing an elusive white whale.

 In Ron Suskind’s ‘Confidence Men’, the condescending Lawrence Summers would remark to his team of being ‘home alone’, alluding to Obama’s inexperience as compared to Bill Clinton, an unfortunate statement considering Obama’s achievements. It’s a question of competence, a challenge hurled by the GOP contenders, of the peril of learning on the job, an unfair accusation as one feels Obama is a sensible natural leader, gifted with unusual intelligence and luck – a trait that one should not underestimate.  With the office supplies from Staples, I organized my papers from the creative writing workshops that I attended last year, getting an impression of progress and emerging competence (like Obama?); the 2-day Wofford workshop, the 8 day one-hour course at the Greer community center, various hour long seminars at other places, watching the 24 lecture series on crafting sentences in DVD, blog entries and extensive book reading. A fair amount of study and practice but still lacking confidence, like earning an MFA on the cheap, spending more time in public speaking events, thinking these experiences enrich the writer; it’s about personal expression after all, filling the well with stories; recalling the article in the magazine ‘Poet & Writers’, that literary agents prefer story tellers, recalling the piece on a young author who writes without thought of plot, shaping a story from the many written paragraphs, discarding those unneeded words, looking at the output without emotion. This is a useful skill to learn while planning attendance on coming writing seminars.