Why Does AI Prose Move at the Same Speed from the First Page to the Last? This is Essay 7 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. […]
Why Choose 100% Human Authors: Syntactical Monotony Read More »
Why Does AI Prose Refuse to Commit to What It Has Just Said? This is Essay 6 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
Why Choose 100% Human Authors: Hedging as a Worldview Read More »
Why Does AI Prose Count to Three Before It Can Stop? This is Essay 5 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 Number That Will Not
Why Choose 100% Human Authors: The Tyranny of Three Read More »
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.
Why Give a Minor Character a POV? Read More »
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
Why Does an Author Need a Colophon? Read More »
