Why Does AI Fiction Lose Track of Whose Eyes We Are Looking Through? This is Essay 4 of 22 in the series Why Choose 100% Human Authors, addressed to readers who want to understand what a human author does that a machine cannot and why that difference matters to the experience of literary fiction. The Contract Between […]
Why Choose 100% Human Authors: POV Management Read More »
Why Do AI Similes and Metaphors So Often Miss the Mark? This is Essay 3 of 22 in the series Why Choose 100% Human Authors, addressed to readers who want to understand what a human author does that a machine cannot and why that difference matters to the experience of literary fiction. The Comparison That Contradicts Itself
Why Choose 100% Human Authors: Simile and Metaphors Must Make Sense Read More »
Why Does AI Pile On the Adjectives and Adverbs? This is Essay 2 of 22 in the series Why Choose 100% Human Authors, addressed to readers who want to understand what a human author does that a machine cannot and why that difference matters to the experience of literary fiction. The Sentence That Cannot Stop
Why Choose 100% Human Authors: The Modifier Epidemic Read More »
This is Essay 1 of 22 in the series Why Choose 100% Human Authors, which examines the specific deficiencies of AI-generated fiction and the corresponding strengths of fiction written by human authors. The series is addressed to readers who buy novels, who give them their time, and who deserve to know what they are holding
Why Choose 100% Human Authors: Alphabet Soup Read More »
Laughter does not interrupt a story. It belongs inside it, the way a breath belongs inside a sentence. I learned this not in a craft manual but in the pages of men who lived with the stench of open sewers and the fear of plague and somehow wrote the funniest prose in the Western canon.
What Boccaccio and Chaucer Taught Me About Comic Relief Read More »
I. The Problem Omniscience Does Not Have The omniscient narrator goes where he pleases. He enters rooms his characters have left, overhears conversations no witness reports, and delivers information to the reader with the authority of a god. He has no obligation to justify his presence. He is simply there, and the reader accepts him.
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I. A Word Most Readers Have Never Encountered Ask a hundred readers what a colophon is and perhaps three will know. Ask those three whether they have seen one in a novel published in the last decade, and the number will shrink further. In most readers’ minds, the colophon, that brief inscription at the end
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—and why the instinct to keep it was correct. I am a relentless line editor. Nothing survives my revision passes by accident: not a clause, not a comma, not an adverb that has wandered in without earning its place. And yet, across three different novels, passages have arrived in single drafts and remained untouched through
The Sentence That Has Survived Every Revision Pass Read More »
Early in Atalanta of the Wild, there is a moment where her father’s warriors lead her out of the Arcadian mountains and onto open ground, and the prose names it plainly: “the golden fields of fertile Tegéa.” I did not plan that sentence as a statement about her arc. I wrote it because that is
What the Landscape Knows That the Character Does Not Read More »
There is a sentence men have told women for as long as sentences have been spoken: “Here is what you are for.” A daughter is for marrying well. A wife is for bearing sons. A queen is for outliving her usefulness with grace. A princess is for the alliance her body can purchase. None are
Why I Write Women Who Refuse the Story Given to Them Read More »
