It's well written, and worth reading. I'll wait while you do....
...OK then The problem with it is the author's barely-masked contempt for any real writing online, in his pursuit of the chimerae of dead literature mediated through AI. Had he connected with other living writers online, he would have realised that their conversations were what he was missing, rather than the simulcra he found. The implication at the end that we cannot tell stories except in person, and that new media cannot help at all is so wrong that it jars the rest of the piece.
Rageboy's attempts at failing the Turing test are funnier too. ¶ 12:19 AM
On a related note: Jonathan Peterson notes the google reflection of interest in voice:
Chernin's speech was heard by hundreds of people in the hall, and was fairly widely reported by both technology and mainstream press. But Google's link weighting algorithms and blogs have pushed my commentary above the mainstream press. Part of the reason people linked to my piece was because it was both contrarian and researched (unlike any of the "journalistic" articles), but I think part of why Google works in such a democratizing fashion is that we are more likely to link to something written with a human voice, instead of just another pre-digested speech summary.
Something here is encouraging - the levelling power of Google, radical in itself, converging with the attractive power of the human voice.
¶ 9:23 PM
Every writer -- no, every human being -- has a distinctive voice, which emerges when we speak and, with luck, when we write. In certain kinds of writing -- process writing, for instance, and legal writing, and highly formal discourse -- such quirkiness needs to be held under control, or even completely submerged. That is the only value of such guides as Elements of Style, which is often touted as a writer's guide to "good style," but which in fact is utterly useless to writers of fiction; no, worse than useless, because it tears the soul out of phrase, sentence, and paragraph, leaving only a lifeless skeleton behind.
Fiction writing is the opposite of these. The living voice of the individual author needs to be heard; the reader is hungry for it, and delights in the music of it. However, a contradictory force is also at work: The reader wants to be guided through the story so as to be able to follow what happens and why without confusion or uncertainty. The author's rhetoric, therefore, must be employed in such a way as to achieve the latter purpose -- clarity -- without killing the individuality of his style.
Unfortunately, what happens in many, perhaps most, creative writing courses is that the students are encouraged -- or encourage each other -- to exaggerate or artificially simulate the individual voice quite at the expense of clarity, so that the reader is left perplexed, confused, unguided through the mapless landscape of the fictional universe. All that the reader is given is a voice, but one without content, as if someone were singing in your ear in a language you didn't understand. Very pretty, but after a while you start longing for some content.
read the rest of this article for how
¶ 1:22 AM
