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Strengths and Weaknesses as a Writer: a Pointless Question

March 11, 2024

art, creativity, fiction, genre, writing

I recently had a hilarious (as it turned out) experience in a professional capacity. A Gothic writer wanted to hire a freelancer and I was one of the candidates. One of the interview questions was, What are your strengths and weaknesses as a writer?

On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with this question. Lazy recruiters have been using this for a long time and equally lazy and conformist candidates have been giving nice canned responses.

The thing is, al this falls apart once fiction writing enters the picture.

So this ridiculous experience – I’ll offer you more details in a while – inspired me to write this post, to clarify why What are your strengths and weaknesses as a writer? is a profoundly pointless question. Any writing adviser, guru, coach, or whatnot who tries to sell you a course or method to “fix your writing weaknesses” is just after your money.

strengths and weaknesses as a writer, AI render of a dystopian city made of files and folders — Those who are dead set on finding “strength and weakness” in everything, will end up living in a city made of files, folders, and boxes.

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Literary Genre Detector: a Simple AI model in Python

July 17, 2023

Literature, Programming

genre, literature, programming

2 comments

My knowledge in Python is scant compared to JavaScript, though some years ago I did play with it a bit. Still, lately I’ve been interested in AI models, so I decided to give Python another go. As it turns out, it’s trivial to train some simple AI models with it. In today’s post, I’ll show you how I made a very simple literary genre detector.

AI models of this kind work in a very simple manner, conceptually speaking. They simply take as input a list of data the programmer has supplied in the form of [("love","positive"), ("care","positive"), ("hate","negative"), ("rage", "negative")] and then return guesses for a supplied string. For example, a sentence like “love, care, and blah blah” (in this extremely simple example) would be classified as positive.

As you can appreciate, it all boils down to the quality of the data – garbage in, garbage out, and all that. So, with this important caveat in mind, let’s see what a literary genre detector looks like!

Literary Genre Detector — A literary genre detector doesn’t have much to do with cookies and cat-shaped mugs, but reading does 😉

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How to Start Writing a Novel: Tips and Examples

January 30, 2023

Fiction Writing Tips, Writing

book, creativity, fiction, genre, writing

6 comments

Beginner as well as more advanced fiction writers often struggle with a seemingly simple question: How do you start writing a novel?

Just to be clear, I’m not referring to the textual part – that is, narrative strategies beginning a novel; its first few paragraphs. If you’re looking for that, here are 17 ways to begin a novel.

Instead, in this post I will show you tips and examples on how to start writing a novel in the sense of how to set up the foundations. In other words, in this post I will share with you the bare minimum you need to know before you even think of typing the first word.

As I often say, many people – and that includes authors – believe that a writer just “comes up with stuff” out of nothing. That’s simply not true. Writing a novel involves a subconsciously long, complex process beginning with experiences, memories, and imagination. These come before you decide to write a book.

But suppose you already have these set; you have had experiences that have fueled your imagination.

What next?

Let’s find out!

how to start writing a novel — “Writing a novel is not as hard as you think,” said Mr Whiskers

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