Episode 18: Patricia Faithfull and Rick Williams, Aspiring Writers
A conversation about "The Emotion Thesaurus" as well as writing tools in general and whether human input can ever be replaced by tools.
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Transcript of Podcast episoDe 18: Interview with Patricia Faithfull and Rick Williams, Aspiring Writers
Mary: Hello, this is Mary Kole, and "The Good Story Podcast," helping writers craft a good story. With me, you will hear from thought leaders related to writing and sometimes not about topics important to writers of all categories and ability levels. Here is to telling a good story.
Hello, this is Mary Kole with "The Good Story Podcast." And for today's episode, we have a little bit of a different format for you. It's not just an interview with one person. It is an interview with two aspiring writers who I have sort of crossed paths with. One was a webinar student and one a client of mine.
And this came up because I was talking about a specific writing tool, "The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide To Character Expression" by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi. And they have a whole series of these books, but internally at Good Story, we have been sort of arguing a little bit about "The Emotion Thesaurus." And I did a webinar on first pages, and my first guest, Patricia, who will introduce herself in a moment, chimed in and said, "Guys, this is a really great resource," and I was, I am so ashamed to admit, a little bit rude about it. I was like, "Oh, yeah, it's just a list of synonyms for emotions," because my uninformed position at the time was that it would, you know, sort of lead to some clichés, which was my worry. And she really opened my eyes to how she uses it.
And then the same day, it came up in conversation with this other client, Rick, and I said, "Mary, this is hitting you over the head. This is a resource that you've heard so much about. This is worth exploring." So we are going to have a conversation today about "The Emotion Thesaurus" kind of on a granular level. And then on a macro level, we are going to talk about writing tools and whether creative writing or creative human input can ever be replaced by tools. So it's going to be kind of a weird one, but I am so excited.
My guest today are Patricia Faithfull and Rick Williams. Patricia, why don't you introduce yourself first?
Patricia: Hi, Mary. Thank you so much for inviting me to this podcast. Yeah, we had a great time on your webinar the other day and, yes, it's been a very interesting road to get to discussing this particular topic. I'm a writer and I have been I think most of my life. I have dedicated the last 5 years or so to really pursuing it on a professional level.
I originally trained as an actor at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York. And then I lived in New York for a while, and then I came back to Canada. I still kept writing the whole time but mostly in screenplay, actually not in prose. And then I started writing in prose, and I'm an agented author. Rosemary Stimola at Stimola Literary Studio is my agent. And I'm unsold but I'm still pursuing obviously the dream of having the sale and hopefully on a, you know, series capability. And that's who I am and thank you very much for having me today.
Mary: Of course. And that is wonderful. Rosemary is great. I'm so happy to hear it. And, Rick, why don't you give us a quick introduction to who you are and where you're coming from?
Rick: Well, thanks for allowing me to participate. I am a business executive, so I may be approaching these things in a business-like way but anyways I'm retired. And during my years of work, I took sabbaticals to write books. So I wrote and had successfully published two American history books.
So I have seven grandkids nearby. So the oldest, 2 years ago, who was 8 at the time, Brady, decided that he and I should write a book together.
And I said, "Okay," I said, "What are we going to write about?"
He said, "We're going to write a book about dragons and dinosaurs."
And then I said, "In the same book?"
And he said, "Yeah."
"Okay."
So that's how this all started, the adventure with Rick and his grandson. So I guess I would call it, again, an epic fantasy adventure which wasn't my forte because I was spending a lot of time writing thrillers. So I would call his version of this "The Lord of the Rings" meets "Jurassic Park" and "Wings of Fire." So somehow I've got to figure out how to put that into a manuscript.
So it started off as a family and friends indie book, and we did a lot of different imagineering. And about a year ago, maybe six months ago, I had six mid-grade beta readers go through it, and they liked it. And I gave them a 40-page questionnaire. I guess that shows I'm a business executive. So I gave them a 40-page questionnaire and I paid them.
And they showed the things that they thought were good, things that needed work, and by the time we were done, they said, "You ought to write a trilogy about this," and then I decided, "Well, maybe there is commercial potential."
So anyways I hired a local Disney author last summer to restructure the story, and then I have, when I think about it more as a business advisor, Jane Friedman. So I was talking to Jane in September, and I said, "Well, who's a top expert in getting kidlet projects commercial-ready?" She said, "Well, that would be my friend Mary Kole. Let me refer you."
And so anyways that's how this started. So we started working together about six months ago, and Mary's just done a spectacular job of taking my writing to a new level in which, she doesn't know this will be the big reveal, I have a Mary Kole notebook that I keep that's in the... And I keep track of all of the insights that I get, and now I'm going through the Blueprints course.
But anyways, no, it's been a great ride. And, again, Mary had a great impact on trying to take my writing to the next level, which I greatly appreciate.
Mary: Well, Rick, I am so flattered. Thank you very much, and thank you both for the introductions. I'm holding a copy of "The Emotion Thesaurus" in my hot little hands here. And for those who have not heard of it, I just want to describe real quick, before Patricia dives in, what this tool is.
And so it's set up very much like a dictionary or an encyclopedia with entries each one is spread. And if I open up to say the emotion of elation... I'm a writer. I want to convey elation. So I have definition, physical signals and behaviors, and then a list, you know, like dancing in place. Internal sensations. Raising heartbeat. Mental responses. Gratitude and thought scattering, being too excited to think straight. Acute or long-term responses. This is interesting. So this gets, like, really into the nitty-gritty. Loss of motor control, tears streaming down the face. Signs that this emotion is being suppressed, which I think is super interesting. Looking down to hide a grin that may escalate to, like, euphoria. May deescalate to satisfaction. And associated power verbs which I love so like beam, boast. That sort of thing.
And so basically what this does is there are 130 entries here of all of these emotions. So when we want to write emotions as writers, which we definitely do, we can come to this resource and sort of pick through some of the associated behaviors, associated words, that sort of thing. Now, I will refrain from my commentary on it which originally got me into this whole mess with Patricia during the webinar, and I just want... Patricia has been so lovely to prepare a use case for you. She's going to talk you through that now. I can't wait.
Patricia: Great. Thank you so much. So, yes, that was a great explanation as to how the book is laid out kind of on that two-page spread, like one per emotion, and 130 different emotions. And I think the hardest thing as a writer in prose is that you have to write the emotion because that's the connection between the writer and the reader but you actually can't say the emotion. It's like this magic trick that we do as writers. It's like we want to convey the emotion but we can't say that this is the emotion that we're dealing with.
So this book gives you kind of those categories, right, where you can actually, you know, decide whether you want to show a physical sign or talk about an internal sensation, a mental response, and then, you know, prolong that as an acute or long-term response, and then chapters later, choose something to escalate to or deescalate to depending on your plot. So that was a great introduction, the way you did that. Thank you very much.
So I think what I'd like to do is show how this would be used. So I chose a text that actually predates the publication of this book because my point is that the author that I'm going to share an excerpt from would never have used this particular resource, but this resource is invaluable because the way she constructs this particular excerpt, you could easily kind of look at it as, as Rick would say, kind of, reverse engineered. Like, you would basically be able to see how she had wound these things into the text without having this resource and therefore why this resource would be valuable.
So the text is written by a woman named Mary Hershey, and it was published in 2008. And the book is called "10 Lucky Things That Have Happened to Me Since I Nearly Got Hit by Lightning." And it is a middle-grade text, and it is from a 10-year-old girl. So the setup is that Effie keeps a list of the luckiest things that happened to her on her fridge. And in this excerpt, she is finally allowed to have a sleepover for the first time, and she's planned it on St. Patrick's Day and in honor of her best friend, Aurora, who has just moved to a new school.
So in this section of the text, and it's three-quarters of the way through the book, Aurora, her best friend, is about to back out of attending. So you could already get a sense of what that's going to mean to the main character Effie. So I'm just going to quickly read the text.
"Aurora went on, 'Is there any way that you could move your party to another night?'
'No, I've already sent out the invitations and everyone is coming.'
This is terrible. I couldn't believe it.
'Well, could you at least come for the sleepover part, you know, when you get back from Houston? And could Fancy's mom bring you over here?'
Aurora was quiet a minute and then said, "Well, Fancy wants me to have a sleepover with her afterwards.'
This was just getting worse. 'All the team or just you?'
She cleared her throat and then said in a small voice, 'Just me.'
'But you said no, right? Please, Aurora, tell me you said no.'
'I haven't exactly said no yet. I wanted to talk to you first. I hate to say no to her, Eff. She's kind of lonely and I didn't want to hurt her feelings. Plus, it's her birthday and all. And, I mean, if it was your birthday, I wouldn't even think about going to her house.'
Kind of lonely? Oh, no, she was trying to get Aurora to be her new best friend.
'Effie, how about this? You have your fun, cool party, and I'll go to my party and my team, and I'll do the sleepover with Fancy just to be polite? But the next week, you and Nit can come over for a sleepover. We can do all the same games and everything. That would be almost as good, wouldn't it?'
I felt like I was going to cry, but I didn't want to do that in front of her.
'Effie, are you still there? Please don't be sore at me.'
'I'm not,' I said, my voice a tight knot.
'But I need to go. My mom is waving me to come help with her in the kitchen.'
'What about dinner tonight?" she asked, 'What time should I come?'
'Oh, gosh, did I say tonight? I meant next week. I'm getting things so confused with all the party planning and shopping. Sorry, I'll talk to you later. Bye.'
I clicked the phone off. As much as I had wanted her to come over, I was not in the mood to be an understanding best friend. I watched the picture in my head of my party as it burst into flame and went right up in smoke, bright green St. Patrick's Day smoke. Where the heck had all my good luck gone?
I grabbed a black magic marker from the drawer under the phone and went over to my list of lucky things. I slashed a line right through number 8, my good luck had just gone south."
Mary: Oh, I love this. I love that you chose this. And so I think I want to piggyback on a point that you made in your sort of introduction to this excerpt that you chose which is... So you have a screenwriting background, and there we have all of these tools at our disposal because we're imagining this being acted by actual people who have tone of voice in their toolbox. They have body language, facial expression, all of this stuff in their toolbox. And those are the ways in which we humans are used to sort of reading "the emotions of other humans."
And so you don't have to necessarily do so much writing into how a person is displaying or sort of creating the emotion for readers. In a novel, that is the work that we're doing. We do not have access to an actor who is going to act out all of the emotions that we're putting on the page and we have to do it. And there are so many ways to do it. Like you said, it's sort of like, what is it, catchphrase or taboo, the word that you're not supposed to say. You can't say, you know, "She felt disappointed." You have to kind of twist yourself into a pretzel and have her, like, x out the line on her list. And so there are so many opportunities in this excerpt for different portrayals of emotions. So I am just super stoked. I cannot wait to hear you break it down.
Patricia: Great, thank you. Yeah, so what I really, again, loved about this was that this writer is quite masterful in this enterprise. And so what I want to look at is three different aspects that I really like about "The Emotion Thesaurus" book which is the mental responses, the internal sensations, and the behaviors.
So when I just think about just, you know, that little bit there, she had... I've listed here actually four mental responses. "This was terrible. I couldn't believe it." The second one, "This was just getting worse." The third one, "I watched the picture in my head of my party as it burst into St. Patrick's Day smoke." And then the fourth one is, you know, she hung up the phone but her thought process would have been...she wanted to be alone. All of those things from a mental response perspective, you know, make us believe that she is quite devastated.
And then when you look at what the internal sensations are, you know, she didn't say, you know, she felt a tear. She just says, "I felt like I was going to cry but I didn't want to do that in front of her." And she also says, "My voice, it went into a tight knot," which is, you know, there's the cliché of, you know, I swallowed hard, you know? But, you know, she uses "my voice is a tight knot" which is not cliché and really, you know, kind of, really illustrates the point.
And then for her behaviors, she clicked off the phone. She slashed a line through number 8 because her good luck was not with her. And then she even ups her game kind of towards the end, and she uses the suppressed emotion. She says, "Oh, gosh, did I say I invited you over tonight? No, I meant next week." And that's really kind of feigning kind of a false...putting on a false front, right? Like, "I'm not going to let her know that this has really affected me this badly."
So she uses all of those very subtle ways of using the prose, broken down into those different categories to really convey that emotion without saying... You know, because she could have, you know, at the end of the conversation, she said, "Well, I talked to her but then I was really disappointed," which is not how you write, right? You have to draw it out, right?
So I broke it down the way the book does. And in the actual book, I retrofitted it, right? So under disappointment, her feelings were of dread, and she had defeatful kind of thoughts and she had this hopelessness of watching this party go up in smoke. Her eyes were watering. She wanted to be alone, and then she kind of offered that false cheer. And she did it in a way that was true to her story and true to her character. So it's not like this material is going to be, I don't know, clichéd if you, as we're talking earlier, just drag and drop. You can but you can also expand it and make it very specific to your character's circumstances. And it was just done so artfully in that particular passage, that I thought it would be a great way to just illustrate it. And that's why I love "The Emotion Thesaurus," and I use it on a regular basis.
Mary: So I do love that you were able to sort of take something that was published before this resource became available and reverse engineer, as you said, your way into some of these things that I am finding on the disappointment page because I started looking. Now, I think that what launches us into our bigger discussion, Patricia, is what you said about, "It has to fit the character." And that is really my argument against this resource and I was very honest with you when I sort of said, "You know, Patricia, I was super rude about this resource that you recommended." I said, "I haven't actually read it," so of course I tucked my tail between my legs and I beautifully ordered my copy because I'd been hearing so much about it.
And so my hesitation with it—and I'm not sure whether it's founded or not—is that drag and drop thing that you identified because some of these things, you're right. In this book, the emotions really, really fit the character. We get that middle-grade voice. We get these sort of gestures and these thoughts and kind of this false cheer thing that is very consistent with kind of this middle grade girl character that doesn't believe that her luck is sort of piling up, right? She feels like she's short on luck.
And so a lot of these things are really consistent, but my worry—and this is where, Rick, I'd like to bring you in in a second—is this sort of, like, I don't want somebody to sit there and write a novel by box-ticking. And so an example of that would be, "Hey, I'm writing a scene that calls for disappointment. Okay, physical signs and behaviors. Okay, a heavy sigh and, you know, wincing. Okay, great." And some of these, you know, are just a little bit strange in the thesaurus. I mean, there's so many different things here like, for example, stumbling mid-stride for disappointment. You know, they have all kinds of things for you to choose from. It's meant to be very comprehensive.
But what I don't want a writer to do is to just say, "Okay, this scene calls for disappointment. Okay, we get the lump in the throat. Perfect. And we get this," and they're not really sort of making sure it integrates with their voice, their character choices, all of that. They just sort of make themselves a list, check all these boxes, think that they've done disappointment, and then they move on. And either they keep using the same five signals for disappointment no matter who the character is or what the situation is or they jump all over the place for the sake of variety, you know?
And soon their characters look like marionettes who are performing all of these, you know, actions that correlate with various emotions, but is that shortchanging the reader and shortchanging the sort of nuance and depth that we'd love to see in our stories? So that was sort of my position. Patricia, why don't you respond and then we'll go to Rick for that because he has some really interesting thoughts. So, Patricia, what are you thinking here?
Patricia: Yeah, I totally see where you're coming from. Obviously, if you had a plotline and you just wanted to drag and drop some of these behaviors in, it's going to read as flat as if you didn't write. It's just not going to fit. There is an art to writing. There is a style to writing. There is a sense of people, and what's age-appropriate, and culturally appropriate, and all of those things that have to fit into the prose, and into the story, and into the character. And it's really hard to even articulate how many different ways those things have to integrate, but I do fully see what your point is as an editor. If people think that they can just do that, drag and drop, it doesn't work.
But I think what I love about having the variety of being able to choose is it's also a place to leap off with your imagination to go, "Oh, that's what it is," because there are emotions here that we all haven't experienced, right? And, yes, some of the basic ones like guilt, shame, disappointment, elation, I mean, we've all experienced those, but I haven't grieved for someone in a very long time. I don't think I've ever felt neglected, right? So there are certain emotions where I don't know if I wanted to write that character. What's my way in? What's my way into that character, right? And I'm not a psychologist, so I don't know. So I would really use this for those types of purposes.
Mary: And one thing I do love about it is that psychological, acute or long-term responses for this emotion and signs that this emotion is being suppressed. I really like that one because you could play with it a lot. And, you know, so disappointment. Congratulating the victor makes a lot of sense and is very subtle. See, I like subtle. I don't like, kind of, this, like, one size fits all approach. I really like subtle. And so that does tickle me in terms of my rubric for how a tool like this might be useful. So I completely take your point.
Now, let's bring Rick on. He's been sitting so patiently. So how did we get started talking about this, Rick, during that faithful phone call?
Rick: So I'm going to do a little quick backstory. Again, we were at that point where we have a good book, a good, solid book, but I focused because it's an epic fantasy more on the outer world, right? So we spent a lot of time on the complex plots and subplots, the world-building, my grandson's crazy creatures. I'm a military writer so lots of action. So I thought we were in pretty good shape.
So then I had my first call with Mary Kole, and I looked it up on Friday morning at 11:00 on October 9th, and I thought it was going pretty good. So anyways so that's where I would go into the inner world. So Mary began to immediately go into the characterization because I've created, since I'm a crazy business guy, a more complex situation because I should have just wrote about one protagonist in first-person. But I've got three [inaudible 00:23:55.455] middle-grade protagonists between 13, 14, 15, and Mary began to home in on how I was differentiating the characters, then the dichotomy, again, of being a kid of wanting to be independent, and then getting into the emotions because I've got time travel in my book. So she wanted to know why these kids were time-traveling.
Mary: Yes, a lot going on.
Rick: I didn't really care. I just wanted to get them to the new world. Anyways so interestingly after that session, I must have been inspired because I went to my first bookstore in six months during the lockdown and I came across this book that I'm holding. It's called "Quintessence." And it's not a book that I personally necessarily would have bought but I was attracted because my book has an astronomy element to it and this has an astronomy element about a humanized falling star. But then when I read about the author, I realized that the author was a psychologist. So I thought, "Wow, that's kind of an interesting combination. I need to learn about the inner world."
So I bought this book and I would say, you know, you get to those times in your writing journey, this was just a gamechanger for me because it came on the heels of the discussions with Mary Kole. I then went in, again, to study Mary's book but specifically from the inner world. And then I went to Donald Maass' "Emotional Craft of Fiction." And I thought I was making pretty good progress until I had another session with Mary. So we had multiple sessions.
But anyways so my writing partner figured that I was emotionally challenged so she gave me the "The Emotion Thesaurus" about a month ago. Who would be crazy enough to spend two years writing a book and then Mary has the person go back to write a brand new Chapter 1? So that's rather strange.
So I'm writing this brand new Chapter 1 and revising Chapter 2. So I decided, since I'm emotionally challenged, I will use "The Emotion Thesaurus." So then when I got Mary's critique back, I had a couple places... I think she said to me, "Your emotional descriptions seem like cut and paste," and then I responded, "You busted me because that's exactly right because I used 'The Emotion Thesaurus.' " So that's what I call "The Emotion Thesaurus" confession. So I said, "No, you're exactly right. That's what I did."
And so anyways obviously I didn't use it quite as artfully as Patricia but anyways... So that's the backstory and that's a whole different topic because then that got us into my other world, which I advise an artificial intelligence. And so I spent four years advising one of the top life science universities in the world and one of the top computer science universities in the world trying to take their high-tech and bring it to solve problems for kids with rare disease. So I've been doing that for four years, and then I'm now starting... We spun off a company, so I'm helping friends advise this company.
So then Mary knew that I was doing this, so then she starts asking me, "Well, do you think that a computer can take the place of an editor?" And I said, "I don't think so." So that's how we got into that discussion.
So I think the inner world to me is the part that was deficient in my book, and I think this has been profoundly helpful to figure out how best to take it to the next level. The question is, "How do you do it?" And obviously I found out it's not cutting and pasting, and then you'll hear with my AI world, I talk more about find and replace. And so it's not find and replace, but I think, Mary, you pushed me to think about digging deeper as you just talked about keeping it in context in setting that character mosaic. So I've got more work to do. So anyways so that's my backstory on the inner world.
Mary: So now I want to build a bridge between this tool and kind of this larger topic of tools. So I'm going to talk for a bit, and hopefully it'll make a little bit of sense. And then I would love to hear from both of my esteemed guests here.
So I read in 2007, and I'm not sure when this book came out, but I have about 87 tabs open on my browser at any given time because I'm always thinking of, like, 17 different things. So "The Bestseller Code" by Matthew L. Jockers and Jodie Archer, it came out in 2016. I read it about a year later because one of my other clients. So I love that I'm always getting inspired by, like, little conversations that I have here and there and sometimes they come together into a podcast episode.
So this client said, "Hey, I read 'The Bestseller Code' and I'm applying it, right?" So this client was very interested in sort of doing this fiction by the numbers sort of approach. And what "The Bestseller Code" is is this Matthew Jockers guy, one of the authors of it, he basically developed a proprietary algorithm and this algorithm scanned... You know, he kind of fed through a lot of these bestselling novels, you know, your Dan Browns, all of these projects that, you know, people would really want to emulate. And he came up with a bunch of findings which you can read in the book of kind of what tends to correlate positively or negatively with sort of bestseller status in a book and/or in a manuscript.
And what he's actually doing now is called Marlowe AI based on this proprietary algorithm that he designed for this project. So he kind of did it privately and then he kind of made it into a company. So Marlowe belongs to Authors AI, and it's an analytical software for novels that is based on this kind of research that was first published in "The Bestseller Code."
And so people including Jane Friedman, our buddy, have gotten to sort of take a crack at it. And now it's sort of becoming available to publishers, to agencies, and to individual writers. And you can, you know, upload your manuscript into Marlowe and it will sort of analyze structure, analyze character, analyze writing style, you know, your sentence length. One of my favorite parts from "The Bestseller Code" that I took away from and I used to shame people about semicolons is that the more semicolons you use, the less likely your book is to be a bestseller. That was one of the very granular insights that they gleaned by developing this algorithm for what it's worth.
And this is where we run right into this problem of, okay, I sleep very well at night because I don't personally think that in these soft humanities like writing, creative writing, character development, theme development, voice development, I do not think that AI is ever going to be the monkey at the typewriter that comes up with "Hamlet" and I also don't think that tools like Marlowe AI will replace the editorial vision or a literary agent's vision, a publisher's vision completely. I do maintain and think that that human element is really important.
And same goes for tools like "The Emotion Thesaurus." You can copy and paste but then your friend, Mary, is going to call you out on it. You need a human filter to sort of apply the tips and tricks in here intelligently with the filter of your own story in mind. And so it's this idea of kind of, "What is the writer's role? Is the writer's role still primarily this creative developmental role even though we have tools available to us to, a, generate the writing and, b, revise and give feedback on the writing?" So that's kind of what I wanted to put to you guys. I know it's sort of a big nebulous question, but I'm really curious to see if either of you have any thoughts in that direction.
Patricia: So I do see the value in certain types of tools. For example, I write just with a regular Word document but I also purchased a ProWritingAid software. And it gives me an analysis on a chapter by chapter basis when I'm at that stage where I want to... I start to make things a little bit more solid. And I can look at things like sentence length and diction. And if I wanted a House Style Check or plagiarism... Not that I would need to for plagiarism because I write fiction but you want to make sure if you were writing a paper that you did. It also offers a check for proper grammar, overused words, repeat words, too much alliteration, sticky sentences, and that kind of stuff.
Mary: What is the software that you use, Patricia?
Patricia: It's called ProWritingAid. It's very affordable and it's a Word plug-in, so I love it for that. What that can't do for me... And I can't speak of how Scrivener or Dramatica Pro or this new Marlowe how they work. They can't come up with the idea. They can't give me a character with a wound. They can't come up with an inciting incident that will make my character and their wound be transported through Act 2 to a climax where there's a big twist in that middle there, and then have some kind of incredible disappointment at the end of Act 2, and then take them straight through to a climax, and do a denouement that's satisfying. That I don't think can ever be done by AI.
Can AI analyze that based on specific word choices and word selection? Yes. Can AI see a proper climax coming based on chapter length and sentence length? Yes. And if it's a middle grade or a YA, can AI identify things like appropriately used white space? Probably. But those are things that are identifiable in the structure of the linguistics on the page. Not part of the creative process or the character or character psychology or plot development which I don't believe can be done by AI. That's my opinion, but I would love for Rick to try and change my mind or at least get a dialog going.
Mary: Yeah. Rick, what do you think?
Rick: Well, Rick is not going to change your mind. But what a great discussion because about three months ago, I got ProWritingAid, and I have been running around talking to all my writing friends. I call it my proofreading parrot on my shoulder because this is exactly what Patricia said. I'll just go through the checker and all the stupid mistakes I made will show up. And I'm like 50 chapters in the book. I've only had one chapter where I got through with no problems, but every other time, there's multiple mistakes.
They're not all mistakes. I mean, obviously, there's some ways to enrich or improve the project, but, no, it's funny, Patricia, that that's what you were using because I know nothing about any other writing tool online except that's the one I've been using, ProWritingAid. So it sounds like we're both advertisements for ProWritingAid.
So anyways so my thought, if I could, I think that... Here's my view. Nature is typically nonlinear. So one of my favorite books is a book from a Duke professor called "Design in Nature." And, Mary, your journey hasn't been linear. It didn't sound like Patricia's has either. But most people I find that are entrepreneurs do not have linear journeys, and so then the question is, you know, what constitutes nonlinear?
So in the book, this professor spent a lot of time researching nature, and it seems obvious once I...
Mary: And creative, I would say.
Rick: Yeah, but once I say it, you'll laugh because it seems pretty self-evident. He's done well with his book in his classes. But anyways he looks, again, the tree branches and the tree roots, the Mississippi Delta, and lightning. And he pretty much goes through all of nature and finds very few straight lines.
So then one of the parts that connects with my world since I'm in the biotech world is that the organ systems are typically examples of complex integrated networks. So we have the brain, we've got the heart, we've got the lungs. So can an AI approach replicate the brain? Well, we know in medicine that's been a complete failure. And so while IBM's Watson did great on Jeopardy, it has failed to become a diagnostic for medicine at this point.
So then I think about, if nature is typically nonlinear, then so is creative writing, right? So creative writing is [inaudible 00:37:43] the brain. It's a complex, integrated story network, and nature fosters inspiration. Our life experience and memories amplify the creativity, but then there has to be some kind of multifactorial analysis and complex decision making that drives the creative expression.
So when I'm talking to my AI friends, obviously I'm advising for them, and this is their world, they agree that at this stage of the game, a computer is not going to make as complex of decision making necessary for writing a book or, in his case, he's a musician. So the example we laugh about is we don't know that a computer's going to create Dark Side of the Moon or Sgt. Pepper, but we don't even know if they could re-create it. I mean, that's one of the things that's pretty funny about when everything comes together.
But anyways so the next question I ask, can creative writing be automated? I think this is a trap that we've been falling into these discussions, Mary, is that it's not just writing per se, right? So I have a friend who started a company where he took fantasy league football games on Sunday and wrote summaries of them on Monday with a computer. And then that led to doing things for Associated Press and Yahoo! But these are all pretty defined kind of collections of data and then putting in some stories. This isn't writing a complex novel.
So then I said to myself, "Well, Leonardo Da Vinci, could you take his creativity and automate it?" Obviously, we don't think so. Could a machine create "The Old Man and the Sea"? Well, you know, it was a lifetime of work by Hemingway. And one thing I read that one paragraph he revised 14 times, but the computer would go into that paragraph and rearrange it, right? So I think there's still something different that, Mary, what you do with me is not just rearranging but it's enhancing and improving.
So anyways so then my net of this is that authors must... You know, we as authors—I think that's what Patricia and I are doing—are strategically trying to pick the right tool to use at the right time for the right application. So using ProWritingAid to polish up a chapter makes sense to me but it doesn't necessarily make sense for editing.
So, Mary, when you think about editing, how would you divide up the major categories of editing? Since I consider you a strategic editor, but how would you divide them up?
Mary: That is a fabulous question. So actually there is... Hemingway Editor is an editing app speaking of Hemingway, so that's one of the editing apps that sort of looks at your sentence structure kind of like ProWritingAid.
So for editing and I teach a workshop all about kind of self-editing for writers, and what I like to do there is this funnel type of approach where you zoom out and you develop sort of, how would I call it, like a mission statement for your work, your thematic note that you really want to hit. What is this work about at its most basic level? And that can be stories, so dinosaurs x dragons, right? But it can also be character-driven. And I don't want to sort of publicly pick apart your project, Rick, but, you know, something that the characters are hoping to learn or go through or their arc in sort of the most barebones sense. So your big thematic strokes.
And then what I would say the editor does is then we zoom in, and we sort of look at every story component as it relates to what I believe the mission statement of the writer to be. And writers can absolutely do this themselves. So, you know, I say, "Okay, this is their theme. This is sort of the non-negotiable elements that the story has to include. Now let's think about their structure and does their structure take us from A to Z in sort of a compelling enough way that hits these notes?"
Now let's look at the overall character arc and so we have the big broad character elements of, Patricia, you mentioned the wound. I would say the need, the objective, the motivation. So these sorts of reasons for the character doing what they're doing and the ways in which the character is driven forward through the story.
Then, we can zoom in a little bit further, go scene by scene. Does this scene serve sort of the mission statement, the plot arc, the character arc? Does this chapter serve it? And then obviously the sentence level editing is completely different. This is where we can get a lot of help from tools like ProWritingAid and what I'm seeing of, you know, Hemingway editor here, because a lot of these kind of, you know, overused words. I got Rick with some of my word echo notes during our last round.
Some of these things are easier to identify than the more creative piece that I just described, kind of the top of the funnel going from the idea, the very premise of the story, which, Patricia, you said, you know, it's the idea is the human thing. We can't depend on AI to create a whole premise for a story that sings to other humans.
So that kind of top of the funnel from the idea, the mission statement, the plot arc, the character arc into, like, the scene by scene level. That sort of organization I have a hard time thinking that AI would be able to put all those pieces together. And I do have it all put in the show notes. I do have a great article here from the book designer that breaks down a Marlowe report so you can see the sort of thing that Marlowe AI spits out. And it really can be very, very useful, but it does take just this broad strokes approach of what percentage of your manuscript is dialogue versus narrative, you know, and it says you want to be between 25% and 35% dialogue for example.
So it takes what its rubric is and it sees how you measure up based on criteria that you've inputted into it and designed for it to sort of analyze things against. That's how you train an AI from my very limited understanding. But then is the training of the AI biased? Who is inputting the training? Are they the ones that have ultimate authority over what makes a good book? You know, we can get into these other ideas and these bigger questions there as well. Does anyone have any thoughts on what I just rambled for about half an hour?
Rick: Well, I'll take a quick shot at it because, again, more synergies between the three of us. So my grandsons... My 10-year-old's now recruited the 8-year-old to help us do Book 2. So I call it [inaudible 00:44:45] kangaroos trying to work with a 10-year-old and 8-year-old. But both of them could articulate the funnel because that's what they've been taught. So we used a funnel in business when we're evaluating let's say opportunities, and I've taught them that that's how we evaluate ideas together.
So they throw in some crazy idea into the wide part of the funnel. I throw in my crazy idea, and then we've got to, you know, explore it, validate it, compromise, and then we come up with one that we finally decide, "Okay, it's a shape-shifting dragon girl."
But that funnel approach also fits another thing that I've done, which I haven't taught the kids, but when I'm teaching leaders, I teach this concept of being at 30,000 feet, the treetop, and the weeds, okay? So if I'm flying, I'm running the organization, I'm at 30,000 feet. I'm not going to succeed by only staying 30,000 feet, right? So I got to come down sometimes at the treetop level, and I go back up. And then I sometimes come down to the weeds, and I go back up.
So a micromanager never goes back up, but it struck me back to your world, Mary, that when I think about you, I think about you as my strategic editor, right? So I'm really working with you strategically, not working with you to copy-edit or to proofread. And I think that's where it fits the discussion of a computer because I think that the proofreading the weeds, we can use, you know, our basic spellcheck, grammar check, things like that. We start kind of getting into a little bit of the treetops with a ProWritingAid or Hemingway or Grammarly or whatever, but will any of them actually do the strategic editing? And I just am very skeptical about that at least my view of this at this stage of the game.
So I kind of laughed because my friends in the other company, right? So we started this not just 4 years ago but 10 years ago, we started working with big data. So algorithms underpin the whole thing. So the big data initially was just taking robust sets of data and then reaching in and bringing things out, so that's what I think about, the find and replace. Then we began to move into artificial intelligence. Well, I was kind of laughing this morning, I thought de facto there's a problem because it's artificial, right? Why would we think it's intelligent because it's artificial?
Mary: Well, both are right there in the name though. Artificial? Yes. But intelligence? Yes.
Rick: Exactly. But my friends and I noticed... because I'm advising them, I'm watching their language shift. So now they're talking about intelligent computing, right? So that tells me that they're trying to get away from the concept of AI because they're trying to create a more sophisticated approach.
And that more sophisticated approach gets into meaning because right now they're not really getting into meaning, right? So we think about content meaning, either the big data or the rudimentary part of this or the AI is, again, finding and replacing keywords. What I think about it is rule-based programming, right? So those are all the underpinnings of the left side, but the right side, the intelligent computing is meaning, making recommendations and decisions, not just doing keywords but phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and then not just doing what I think about rule-based programming but relational programming. And then in your world, Mary, it's deeper editing, right? Because right now they're not really doing deeper editing.
Does that make sense? So that's kind of my view of the three tiers of this, right? So if I want to be in the weeds, I can use spellcheck, proofreading. If I want to be at the treetop, I could use something that's quasi-AI because I'm still not sure they're all that far advanced. But I'm certainly not going to be using a computer when I could be using Mary Kole.
Mary: Well, thank you very much but I love the three-tier analysis that you've given it. Looks like, Patricia, you have some thoughts, too.
Patricia: Yeah, everything you said... I can understand what you mean and how you're perceiving that approach. And every writer has a different approach. But when I go back to, for example, Marlowe being able to provide this analytical analysis of whether or not a novel is going to have... I mean, basically, that kind of software would be used for commercial profitability, right?
So if you are programming that to find who the next James Patterson, Neil Gaiman, Dan Brown, Dean Koontz, or Stephen King, that's probably a great piece of software if that's your intention, right, because you would have those analytics in there and those types of authors probably do stick to those kind of structural... I don't want to call them formulas, but there are structures to novels.
Mary: It is a formula. People shy away from the idea of formula, and I'm so sorry to overtalk you but when we plug into this sort of like... I love Jessica Brody. I developed a character class for her for the Writing Mastery Academy, but her Save the Cat beat sheet has been called a formula and there are a lot of other plotting formulas. You know, you have to get to the inciting incident by the 5% mark, that sort of thing. There are formulas that people use to sort of overlay a creative story on top of.
Patricia: And I shamelessly use them.
Mary: Yeah, I mean they help, right? Why reinvent the wheel if you don't have to?
Patricia: No, exactly. And they do have value but again it's that interpretative, you know, what do I need for my work? So what I was going to say was, if you're looking at, say, for example, these bestselling authors and say for example we do take that they have analytical criteria for 25% to 35% dialogue. That's great, but then you're going to miss out on all the wonderful outliers and they would become outliers. Books like "Annihilation," "The Martian," "The Art of Racing in the Rain," those are books that are unusual in their lack of dialog because of the circumstances of... "The Art of Racing in the Rain" is told from a dog's perspective, right? "The Martian," he's trapped on Mars.
Mary: He's just talking to himself on Mars.
Patricia: He's talking to himself. And so a lot of that's internal dialog and what he's going through and there is some dialog with Earth and him talking to himself, but it's nowhere near when you get in a complex Earthly situation where you've got people everywhere. In "Annihilation," same thing. It's like, "Man, I was reading that book for, like, I don't know, it seemed like 30 pages before anyone spoke." But it was engaging and intriguing and it was science fiction and I loved it. But those books, if you used that particular metric, it would be an outlier and it would be lost. And that's where, you know, where AI can't find that connection. It wouldn't be able to. It wouldn't be able to see past its algorithm or its criteria being deficient because it only understands what's the criteria so it loses meaning.
Mary: And to add on to that, I'm just going to say SkyNet because we're all thinking it.
Patricia: Thank you.
Mary: You're welcome. So I love that point, and it goes back to what I was thinking earlier in terms of like, well, the person programing and training the AR is then the arbiter of taste, right? And in the case of Marlowe and "The Bestseller Code," this was based on kind of a control group of 100 bestselling novels that were used to sort of develop the criteria, then train this Marlowe AI model but it's like, "Yeah, so do we want to give the arbitration of what makes a great book over to this one rather inflexible way of seeing things because then some beloved stories that have actually done well in the marketplace would not fit that criteria and Marlowe probably would have bounced them, you know?"
So it's this framework just like a plot formula is a framework, just like this list of emotions that I'm holding in my hand is a framework, but it's the intelligent application of the framework, you know, that I think really puts humans ahead of this whole race to the artificially intelligent creation of creative work. Goodness, that was a mouthful. Rick, what are you thinking?
Rick: I lived in Silicon Valley for 12 years, and I would not have any of the people I grew up with writing creative books. If you go to the right side and those are the people that are developing the tools to help us move forward in literature, then I would be very alarmed. I think that's kind of my thought is that in the formulaic part of this... My friend and I have studied thrillers for a decade before we decided to do midgrade two years ago. And there's a formula. I'm not going to mention anybody's name, but we studied some of the top bestselling thriller writers. And, you know, after we've read several of the books, we could've probably written the 10th or 15th book and, you know, they get into that groove and that's fine. It doesn't mean we can all do it exactly the same way.
I think about the formula, again, it's not a mathematical equation. I think it's a construct. So I've read probably 50 kids' books in the last 2 years, so I can tell you exactly what's going to happen with Rick Ryan. And I'm an expert on John Flanagan. We've got "Wings of Fire," "The Land of Stories," right? So, you know, it doesn't mean I can necessarily write the books, or I wouldn't be getting all these challenges from Mary if I could write the books like them.
But I've got actually a funny story which actually ties to TV. So during the lockdown, I've spent a year of watching Hallmark rom-coms with my wife. We're married 46 years. And so we've been watching Hallmark rom-coms and being an analytical person, we grade them after each one, and I keep track of it. But anyways we were watching these rom-coms.
So this past week is kind of hilarious because we watched "The Chef Show" that I take for her, and we both really liked it, right? We both gave it 4 stars and we said, "Yeah, this works." So then we had the exact same actress, a very similar leading guy, and what seemed like a good story. And we finished that last night. I said, "Okay, well, how would you rate it?" And she said, "If it weren't for the puppies, I'd give it a 1." And so the whole thing then was the motif, when I think about it, was really a puppy show, right?
So the find and replace story elements, right, they thought, "Oh, we had all these multi-dynamic emotional elements of 'The Chef Show' but we're just going to cut and paste and we're going to put in puppies." Well, it just didn't work, right? Because the puppies were cute but there was no conflict. There was no emotional draw and obviously, we both gave it a 1 instead of a 4.
But the last thing I'll tell you is not related to this but it's related to story structure which could be a different topic another day. So when we first started watching the rom-coms, I would stop the remote because I wanted to see where we were in the course of the 2 hours, right? In the beginning, it ticked her off but, at some point, she's now gone to the point after 50 rom-coms that I'm right and that is they follow a formula.
So we click the button at 25% and there's a pivot. Then we put it on pause at 50% and then the big problem has come up. And then we stop it at 75% and it's the all is lost moment, and it's almost invariable. And so now she lets me do it because she agrees with me that, okay, yeah, there is a formula. So that's the danger of Save the Cat and the hero's journey is that once you learn the formula, it actually takes a lot of the fun away of trying to do that.
So then my last thing I'll say is actually, again, very funny, is that can a computer replace a skilled author who's really going to take the leap creatively, right? And, you know, when Patricia was talking about the different books that came out, would they have passed the Marlowe test? I was thinking about "Cold Mountain." But there's a fantasy writer that I've been studying. His name is Brandon Sanderson. So he's the next G. R. R. Martin, and he's done adult books, midgrade, YA, etc. So he's got a series that I really like, and it's called the "Mistborn" series. So it's in this medieval era where the people have all these wild superpowers, right? So he does the trilogy on that and then he ends it.
And then I noticed on his catalog that he's two books from the Wild West, and I thought, "I don't think I've ever read a Wild West book." And so that does not interest me at all, and I love the "Mistborn" series. I just find it hard to believe how he's going to 300 years later, put it into a Wild West setting, okay? So I've been reading it for the last week. I'm on about page 100, and I love it. It's so clever. It is beyond the pale of creativity, but could a computer do that? Could a computer go from a medieval era with superpowers to the Wild West with superpowers? I'm not so sure.
Mary: I love it. So let's go to Patricia and then I could keep talking to the two of you. I'm so glad that I brought you together, but we do have to wrap up. Patricia, what are your parting thoughts here about writing tools, AI, creativity, left brain, right brain, anything?
Patricia: So in terms of what an AI can do, can you teach an AI to write a symphony? You probably could but it's not going to be a Mozart and it's not going to be a Beethoven or a Tchaikovsky. That's what I believe now. Who knows 20, 30 years in the future or sooner that may be completely erroneous as a belief?
In terms of the creative process, I totally believe what Rick was saying about the complex integrated nature of creativity and it being nonlinear. I write my character with the wound first. I concede to that. And then I write an ending. I know what my ending is because I know where they have to grow. I have to go back and put in a good midpoint twist and then I go back and I do how are they going to get to the midpoint twist in Act 2, how are they going to resolve it in the second part of Act 2, and then I go back and write my Act 1. I write my Act 1 after everything else because that's how my brain works, and it's completely messed up.
I have talked with other writers who have processes that are just as messed up in terms of being nonlinear. It's how it comes to you and how it works for you. And, you know, the structure, whether it's rom-com or comedy or a dramedy, identifying the structure is the easy point. The hard part is taking your creative process, which I said for me is almost backwards and nonlinear than applying the structure in a way that works and making it work and doing that on a consistent basis. And no computer can do that. I just don't believe it. And that's where I'll end.
Mary: Great. Thank you so much. And I love this topic. I loved this conversation. I have to say that I definitely resonate with that. You know, who knows? We may be proven wrong in short order here, but I don't know. I just don't think that... I think art and creativity are such inherently human things that I am not so quick to want to see them replaced by robots. And I'm also not so quick to see some of these writing tools like "The Emotion Thesaurus," which I have a newfound respect for, thank you, Patricia, replace the hard work of actually figuring out as novelists how to put emotion on the page.
Also a little bit of hope for Rick there. You heard Patricia. She actually does the beginning first, so you going back to your first chapter, I actually am not surprised at all. So it's all about how we work our way through with the tools that we have, but we still have to do the hard work I think is the endpoint.
Rick Williams, Patricia Faithfull, thank you so much for joining me for this sort of townhall debate on writing tools. And it has been a pleasure having you, and here's to a good story. Thank you so much, everyone, for tuning in.
Thank you so much for listening. This has been "The Good Story Podcast" with your host Mary Kole. I want to give a huge shoutout to everyone at the Good Story Company. You can find us online at goodstorycompany.com. The team is Amy Holland, Amy Wilson, Jenna Van Rooy, Kate Elsinger, Kathy Martinolich, Kristen Overman, Michal Leah, Rhiannon Richardson, and Steve Reiss. Also a shout out to our Patreon supporters. And to everyone listening out there, here's to a good story.
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