The Craft of Writing

“The first idea to final book”-scale in creative writing

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When talking about the craft of writing, one piece of information regarding techniques and advice is more fundamental than many others: Where on the scale from first idea to final book does this piece of information or advice belong?

The scale

The scale loosely:

  1. Idea + (maybe) Synopsis
  2. First draft
  3. Editing
  4. Final draft (from the author)
  5. More editing/drafting in preparation of editing, perhaps with a publisher
  6. Final draft ready for publishing
  7. Published book
  8. Literary analysis etc.

You may also have a bunch of drafts from a beta reader process.

Where does that piece of advice belong?

A book is very different when it is a first draft to be edited and when it is a published work to undergo literary analysis.

Advice that is perfectly reasonable for a final book may be totally inappropriate for a first draft.

A first draft really only have to exist (or more bluntly, it’s always going to be shit in need of editing). Applying the whole “what must exist in a good piece of literature” to a first draft or even before sitting down to write one just risks deadlocking the writing process and cause anxiety and anguish.

Once you know if the advice or technique speaks of the draft, the finished work, the editing, the ideas phase or whatever else, you also know when to apply it, if it is important for you right now, or maybe even more importantly, if it’s something you want to use at all.

First drafting paradigms

One important discussion is what should happen between ideas and the first draft. Should anything happen (outlining) or should the first draft come purely from ideas (seats of pants) and then be edited into something that seems very planned?

This one depends on who you are as a writer. I’ve landed in that how “quick” your creative engine is will be one important factor. If you can switch it on and off, jump between scenes in the story with it without problem, then outlining may be for you. If, on the other hand, it’s like a hundred-car train that need a lot of effort to get going and then will keep going no matter what and no matter where, then seat-of-the-pants may be more your style.

Autism and ADHD

Policies

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It’s time for reading up on policies at work. Part of some certification or other.

So there’s apparently this “known by everyone” rule about dates. When you have to get back and read the policy again. But this is apparently a very complicated thing to communicate, so I’m betting on yearly and hoping it will not decertify us or some similar shit.

Then for the policy itself.

My boss: It is important to remember that it is not a matter of learning all the policies etc. by heart, essentially it is a matter of having a general knowledge of what parts they contain and above all knowing where the information can be found.

My autistic brain: So I don’t have to follow the policies? I mean, if I don’t have to know them, surely I can’t follow them.

But that can’t be right. Why would anyone spend hours and days to produce hundreds upon hundreds of pages of policies if they’re useless?

Maybe it’s just to make the certification people happy?

That doesn’t sound right either…

So, they’re all just signing off on the policies and hoping not to get caught knowing jack about them?

Or maybe they figure if they get caught, they’ll be able to land on their feet anyway?

Ok, I’ve decided I’m not a land-on-your-feet-type of person decades ago. I’m more of a hold-on-for-dear-life-type of person.

So why downplay the policy?

Because I shouldn’t spend a week reading policies.

For one, it becomes hard to explain to the customers what I did, since the time should be invoiced.

Which isn’t as strange as it sounds.

If I wasn’t working with customer projects on a certified company, I would for sure not be sitting around reading policies. It’s part of the work. I get that. (And yeah, it’ll be fun to try to squeeze it in edgewise).

No, the message here is… take no time to read hundreds of pages. Don’t break any of the rules.

There’s always the weekend, right?

And, maybe you already guessed it? The policies are of course shock full of “the employee must” and “the employee is responsible” so yeah…

Gotta love the NT-way of doing shit.

Politics and Society

Free speech or die!

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USA: Even offensive speech must be protected under the first amendment!
Europe: …says the guys who have never had their whole continent occupied by the Nazis…

I’m not saying one is right, and the other is wrong, but it’s really easy for someone who doesn’t share the history of Europe to judge Europe’s cautious stance on certain types of hate speech. Especially when we live in a time when critical thinking and fact checking seems to be totally out of style and Hatred is the new Black…

Humor, Language

Fear the umlaut

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Many years ago, I was working in a project with two programmers from London. These guys, being monolingual, were of the firm conviction that your verbal proficiency indicated competence, intelligence and ability to deal with… well language.

They called my attempts at English “Yoda English” so when the time came to add texts to the app we were building one of the Brits were put on the task.

The customer was not happy.

See, the language in question was not English but Swedish and having someone that didn’t understand a single word of Swedish do the language management produced one of my favorite misspellings of a Swedish word.

The guy had entered “gödkanna” where he should have entered “godkänna”.

Godkänna means “approve” or “confirm”.

Gödkanna doesn’t really exist in a dictionary, but it is a grammatically correct word since it’s possible to construct compound words in many different ways in Swedish (yes every writing app programmer on planet Earth, you heard me right! If you want to create a list of all possible Swedish words aspell-style, it’ll probably be a pretty long list—like listing all possible positive integers…—the local dictionary on my Mac currently contains a whopping 3404 “unknown” Swedish words… 😐)

Anyway, “gödkanna” is a compound of “göd” here used as a prefix relating to “göda” meaning fertilize and “kanna” meaning can/pitcher.

Fertilizer can.

A can of shit?

(As a parenthesis; at this writing, Google Translate suggests “manure can” as a translation of “gödkanna”…)

The customer being in Telecom, it is correct to assume they did not want to pay for a can of manure…

Politics and Society

Emerging Dictatorship

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The latest stunt of the US Junta now is to ban words like abortion, autism, birth, woman (not man but men that have sex with men), disability, diverse, race, minority, Native Americans…

Yeah, Trump can go fuck his minions.

Assumably, I’m banned in the Un*ted Sh*t of Amer*ca… so hey, I’d as likely visit this asshole of the world as I am to go on a fishing trip to the South Pole…

The Economist Democracy Index and Visual Capitalist classifies the United States as a flawed democracy.

The US is not a flawed democracy, it’s an emerging dictatorship.

Yes, for sure, some better president will take power. Yes, sure, they will not overreach as much as Donald Trump.

It doesn’t matter.

The unimaginable power of the president tells us that this is not a democracy. It may behave democratically, but hey, a tiger may not eat you… but it can… would you pet it?

I can only assume, once this thing emerges fully, it will erupt into a civil war… or, should we hope it does?

Otherwise, Trump could do the sensible thing and spontaneously combust. His whole gaggle of MAGA-minions could as well.

Computers and Internet

Understanding AI

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I believe the largest threat from AI in the coming years, possibly even decades, will not be that it will take over and turn humans into zoo animals. Rather, humans will overestimate its “intelligence” and use it to their own detriment.

This will mostly consist of companies and individuals putting too much faith in AI and making bad decisions because of it. E.g. company owners firing talent and trying to do with AI or individuals getting stuck in trying to create the perfect prompt when figuring out how to do it without AI would have been faster, or at least safer when talking about accuracy.

AI hallucinate, may require enormous amounts of compute without giving us correct answers, and the people doing AI don’t really know what they are doing.

So, do I say AI is useless and should not be used?

I think the Russians (yeah, those guys) say it best: Trust, but verify.

Do not take what comes out of an AI as gospel or truth. Or, as Qui-Gon Jinn said: The ability to speak does not make you intelligent.

One trick in order to think more clearly about AI is to drop the “I” (intelligence). Instead, you get “artificial content generators” (or “artificial decision makers”—just don’t mix “intelligence” in there and you’re ok):

  • Artificial picture generator
  • Artificial text generator
  • Artificial music generator
  • Etc.

I.e. more of a music box than a musician…

By all means, use GPTs or Image Checkpoints, but know that e.g. the text they generate are artificially generated and are neither fresh, original nor necessarily accurate.

However, right now there is a huge problem with AI in that the companies selling it steals copyrighted material with the insane notion that AI’s learning would be human level and this copying, rehashing and abusing of material would be something every human does when they learn something new.

Eh, they are not human! (Not even close.) Also, ok, so pay the price of one book per user that gains knowledge from that book then, or?

So, it could be good to not use AI too much before a satisfying model of payment to content creators have been put into place. After all, no content creators, no artificial content generators.