If you are reading these lines around the time this post went live, I’m enjoying the Greek summer sun having iced coffee on the beach. I’m visiting Lemnos, a Greek island in the north Aegean Sea, and I had a funny idea: How about if I wrote a travelogue – a form I’ve never written?
I’ll confess it right away: The reason I’ve never written a travelogue (as a blog post, let alone anything longer) is because I’m not interested in them. I don’t care about travelogues as a reader, either. But hey, it’s important to get out of your comfort zone every now and then, so I’ll give it a shot.
What’s in it for you?
Plenty of photos from a genuinely beautiful place, as well as intriguing details you almost certainly don’t know.
The Old Man Cat and the Sea, Lemnos-style. The cats around the port know the exact time fishing trawlers return, and patiently await their arrival(more…)
The popularization of artificial intelligence (AI) tools is arguably one of the most important things to have happened in terms of the internet and IT in recent years. We’ve already seen how AI can help programmers, and we’ve also seen the pitfalls of improper AI use. So let’s make it specific for writers and see what kinds of AI tools writers can use – and this will be a case of “it’s not what you think”.
You might recall a post where I explained how AI can write really well but it’s utterly lousy at producing art. This is a crucial detail to keep in mind here: AI can’t do your job for you. AI can’t produce art; currently it can barely produce something emulating it (though this might change in the near future).
In any case, if your goal is to write fiction that actually has something to express, completely eradicate from your mind the idea that you can delegate this job to AI. You can’t rely on AI for anything that is “client-facing”. In other words, you can’t rely on AI for writing.
Instead, I will focus on ways and AI tools writers can use to make their life easier, tickle their imagination, and produce literature that is affective.
This is an AI-generated image made with DALL-E and Microsoft Bing Image Creator. The prompt was “A white FIAT 500, old model, parked on a Greek island beach under a tree, late afternoon”. For a fiction author, this is an invaluable reference tool(more…)
The ending is perhaps the most crucial part of a novel. The reason is of course its role in tying narratively loose threads and overall rendering the narrative sense-making. Moreover, the narrative ending is what the author leaves the reader with as a last impression. And one of the attributes of this last impression is whether it offers catharsis or not. Inevitably, cathartic endings are an important topic in fiction.
Very generally, catharsis in psychology refers to an experience that allows us to express, face, and understand strong emotions – particularly emotions that are repressed.
With this in mind, then, cathartic endings are endings that release the pent-up pressure the narrative has generated – for affective reasons, of course. For example, imagine a narrative where two people have feelings for each other which they keep a secret, because of social or other reasons, but which they reveal to each other in the finale.
So, ultimately, understanding cathartic endings – their dynamics, how you can structure them, how you can use them – allows you to have maximum control of your narrative endings and thus narrative at large.
Cathartic endings in fiction work the same way as in life in general: Whenever you release emotional pent-up energy (because you acknowledge, express, or reveal it), the process creates a certain set of associated affective instances, mostly characterized by dynamic (often uncontrollable) emotions, deep reflection, and imaginative states(more…)
