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Put Some Heart in your Writing

August 8, 2022

guest post, Igor Livramento, literature, writing

Today’s post – “Put Some Heart in Your Writing” – is authored by Igor da Silva Livramento. He’s a fellow academic from UFSC, fellow author, fellow creative-writing advisor, and overall a great fellow. He’s also a composer, music theorist, and producer. Check out his papers on Academia.edu, his music on Bandcamp, and his personal musings on his blog – in Portuguese, Spanish/Castilian, and English. You can also find him on LinkedIn.

Despite the title, I am not talking about the organ that pumps blood through the body. It is a metaphor. I am talking about injecting blood in your text – again I commit a metaphor. It is about writing something captivating, moving, instigating. “Captivating” is another metaphor – a literary text is not a kidnapper to hold someone captive.

Although language brings these metaphors to which the metaphorical status we remain deaf (call this forgetting catachresis), do not think that writing literature is all about making clever metaphors.

heart writing — Putting some heart in your writing isn’t as simple as it might initially appear. It involves paradoxes and conflicts with much of what people (naively) call “writing”

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Behind the Scenes of Writing a Short Story

July 25, 2022

Criticism, Writing

creativity, criticism, fiction, literature, writing

With this post, I’ll do something pretty different. I’ll offer you a “behind the scenes” look, focusing on the intricacies behind writing a short story. But there’s more: In order to do that, I will use one of my short stories – indeed, one that I’ve posted on the blog before.

I’m of course referring to “1992”, which I shared with you some time ago – here are part I and part II. I’m offering this look into “what goes on in an author’s mind” from the unique perspective of being the author as well as someone with the academic expertise to use it as teaching material.

How did I come up with the idea? What does it mean on a personal level? Who is the protagonist? Why? What? How? Plenty of literary lessons awaiting!

Short stories are often minimalist. The behind the scenes, then, of writing a short story is about revealing some details that are **inherently** not to be disclosed – I’m doing it for teaching purposes, obviously

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Structuring Language for Automatic Text

July 18, 2022

Programming, Writing

creativity, imagination, language, programming, writing

If you’ve used Planet Generator, you must’ve noticed how it offers, among other things, what I refer to as “civilizational data”. These also include trivia for the imaginary cultures of the program, in the style of “Arranging a visit to Orphne? Avoid Flöchixäwu — and its rather ferocious beasts”. Such phrases are examples of automatic text.

To be clear, these examples are not entirely automatic – in the sense, they’re not made out of thin air, perhaps using AI or at least combining texts from other sources. Rather, they’re based on syntactic patterns I’ve offered the program, together with sets of words to choose from.

But it’s precisely this simplicity that makes this strategy attractive. It’s trivial to use, and the possible combinations it can come up with is staggeringly high.

So, in this post, I’m offering you a look under the hood of Planet Generator, showing you how it generates its automatic text. It’s easy, educating (in terms of teaching us how language operates), and revealing.

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