Just stuff Cheetah likes

Not really a personal blog, just a filing system for stuff I enjoy. Because my tumblr likes were getting filled with things that I wanted to look back on but could never find due to having so MUCH stuff in them. So this is my place to reblog and categorise stuff I like instead, so I can find it again in the future. So, hi!

[writingquestionsanswered]

Hi! I was wondering if you had advice for coming up with a story's climax? I'm just thinking about mine again: story is planned quite far in (though I'm still puzzling over my villain, but that's a whole other issue for me to work on!); but while I know a decent amount of what leads to the climax, and have a plan for how all wraps up afterwards... for the climax itself, I'm drawing a blank. How might I go about finding a climax that makes sense for my story and is satisfying? Many thanks, again!

Figuring Out a Climax for a Mostly Planned Story

Here’s the thing: your story’s climax isn’t just a random big thing that happens. Your story should be about someone who wants something, trying to get that thing, coming up against opposition from someone or something, and trying to overcome that opposition. That’s what stories are. The climax of your story is the moment when your protagonist makes one final push to overcome the antagonist/antagonistic force once and for all. This is the moment where they take everything they learned from overcoming the previous obstacles and they use it to vanquish the antagonist/antagonist force once and for all.

So, to figure out the climax of your story, you’ll have to figure out your protagonist and villain, what they want, and why this creates a conflict between them:  Who is the protagonist? What do they want? Why do they want it? How do they try to get it? What happens if they get it? What happens if they don’t get it?

Who is the antagonist/antagonistic force? What do they want? (Or, if an antagonist force, what is it doing?) Why do they want it? (Or, if an antagonistic force, why is it happening?) How do they go about getting it? (Or, specific events if antagonistic force.)

Now, how does that create a conflict between them? Why does the antagonist want to keep the protagonist from reaching their goal? What does that have to do with what they want themselves?

Once you have the above questions answered, you can figure out what obstacles the antagonist/antagonistic force creates for your protagonist and how your protagonist overcomes them. After you figure that out, you can figure out what your protagonist learns along the way, how they grow and change. Finally, you can figure out how this culminates in a final showdown between the protagonist and antagonist/antagonistic force where your protagonist makes one big final push to triumph. That’s your climax. :)

You can learn more in my Plot & Story Structure post master list. :)

Good luck with your story!

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[vulpyx]

inktober day 15: weak. zira is a shitty mother but such a cool villain 🙃 also her song easily rivals ‘be prepared’ don’t @ me its the truth

[ask-whitepearl-and-steven]

This comic updates Fridays, 6pm PST on Tapas and Saturdays, 6pm PST on Tumblr!

Read the story from the beginning here!

Have questions? Check out the FAQ!

Support me on Patreon for early releases of upcoming episodes!

[writingquestionsanswered]

Hi! I was wondering if you have some advice on how to make a mundane scene interesting? I am writing something short as a gift and the person requested I include a particular scene that is pretty simple and mundane, with just two characters interacting. I already have the lead up, but am stuck on how to make that particular scene not boring

5 Ways to Make Mundane Scene More Interesting

This is a tough question to answer because it all depends on exactly what you’re writing. If you’re writing long fiction, like a novella or novel, every scene you write needs to have a purpose that drives the story forward, contributes to setting or character development, delivers important information, or moves pieces into place. If your scene is mundane, it probably isn’t accomplishing one or more of those things.

However, in short fiction, like fan-fiction or original fiction based on a requested situation, stories work a little differently and you may only be writing one or a few scenes anyway. In a situation like that, there are a few things you can focus on to make things more interesting:

Know the goal of your story or scene... such as getting these two characters to kiss, or filling in the gap left by something implied in a TV show’s episode but never explored on screen.

Choose an interesting setting... if your setting isn’t specifically dictated by what you’re writing or what has to happen, try to choose an interesting location. If you just need to write dialogue between two characters and they can be anywhere--or at least anywhere in a particular setting--find something that adds interest. Why have this conversation in a kitchen when they could be at a tapas bar, a trendy “speakeasy,” or a cute sidewalk cafe? If the conversation has to take place at the high school, maybe instead of happening by the lockers, it could happen in an empty biology lab, under the bleachers in the gym, or maybe an attic storage room if it’s an older building.

Find the “everyday magic” in your scene... no matter where your story is set, you can always find ways to add a little “everyday magic.” It could be motes of dust glittering in a sunbeam, light reflecting off water dancing on the walls, moonlight, a pretty sunset, wildflowers, an electrical storm in the distance--or if your characters are inside, maybe the sound of a distant thunderstorm--a brilliant starry night, soft music, a crackling fire in the fireplace or fire pit, chilled wine or champagne, chocolates... you get the idea. 

Remember emotional and sensory details... one of the most important things you can do is make sure you’re bringing emotional and sensory details into the scene. What are the characters thinking? What are they feeling? How does their body language and facial expressions convey what they’re thinking and feeling? What do they see, hear, smell, taste, and touch? 

Do something unexpected... even during the most routine conversation in the most standard location, you can probably find a way to make something really unexpected happen. It could be your romantically interested characters both reaching for something at the same time and accidentally touching, it could be a door slamming or a crash of thunder, it could be a phone ringing or an announcement coming over the speakers, it could be the arrival of another character or even a memory that suddenly occurs and sends a character into a fit of laughter. An unexpected moment like this not only breaks any potential monotony of a scene but can also serve a multitude of other functions, like interrupting an almost kiss, thus furthering the sexual tension; breaking or increasing uncomfortable tension, add humor or nostalgia, and it surprises the reader.

I hope that helps! Good luck with your story!

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[suspendersofdisbelief]

Who will be the last character to cry in this season?

You, the viewer.

[suspendersofdisbelief]

Is there any reason why in "The Last Crash of the Sunchaser" Scrooge is so extremely stubborn? We've seen him be stubborn before,like on Mt. Neverrest,but he's also been reasonable & knows when to back down. So is there any particular reason why all of a sudden he just refuses to listen to Beakley or any sort of reason?

Because he’s being triggered by the last time something terrible happened to his family (it’s why he sort of almost off-handedly mentions it at the beginning of the episode).  And he’s feeling overconfident that, after a season’s worth of adventures, he can always protect his family, not just from danger but from hard truths and secrets.  Scrooge didn’t typically have someone like Beakley along on his adventures in S1, someone he considers his equal in adventuring, someone questioning his methods and abilities.  So, faced with the remembrance of letting down Della, faced by Beakley questioning whether or not Scrooge could keep them safe, faced with even LAUNCHPAD of all people questioning his abilities, Scrooge doubled down.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Scrooge’s overconfidence, his willingness to risk everything because he believes he’ll come out on top, is perhaps his biggest weakness.

[writingquestionsanswered]

do you have any posts on writing foils? ive searched but i cant find one :( maybe im just not looking hard enough

Character Development: Writing a Foil

In fiction, a “foil” is a character whose own traits contrast with the traits of a more important character, usually the protagonist, in order to make that character’s traits stand out more. For example, if you want your character’s selflessness to be on full display, you would create a foil who’s selfish.That way, you’re not just showing your protagonist being selfless, you’re showing the reader what the opposite of your protagonist looks like. 

If you want to write a foil to highlight your character’s best and/or worst traits, the first thing you should do is make a list of their traits, both good and bad. Then, decide which ones are the most important to who the character is, and next to those write the opposite trait. For example, next to “selfless” you’d write “selfish.” Next to “brave” you’d write “cowardly.” Next to "unathletic” you’d put “athletic” or maybe “fit.”

Now you have some traits to build into your foil. Your next task is to figure out when it will be important to put those opposing traits on display. For example, maybe you want to highlight the fact that your protagonist isn’t very athletic or physically fit. You could have a scene where the protagonist and the foil go jogging together and your protagonist has trouble keeping up with the foil who is barely breaking a sweat.

In a nutshell, that’s writing a foil. :)

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[writingquestionsanswered]

my story has a villain that the protagonist is supposed to fight as established by tradition in the world. however, over the course of the plot the protagonist learns that there is a bigger villain moving around pieces and they come to focus on figuring out who that bigger villain is as well. i still plan for them to fight the smaller one, but i am not sure how to maintain the stakes with the smaller villain while the story is unraveling the mystery of the bigger villain?

Fighting Smaller Villain on the Way to Bigger Villain

The key here, without a doubt, is going to be finding a way to relate that smaller fight to that bigger fight.

When you’re trying to figure out the stakes of something, ask yourself what’s the worst thing that can happen to the character if they don’t succeed.

So, with the smaller villain fight, what do they gain by winning? What do they lose by losing? What is the worst that can happen if they lose?

Now, tie that to the big fight somehow. For example, maybe the prize for winning the smaller fight is an invitation to a big celebration at the palace where the character is sure they can find the final piece to the puzzle of who the bigger villain is--but that’s their one and only chance to do that, so... lose the battle, lose the opportunity to find out who the bigger villain is. If that smaller battle is the result of some cultural tradition, one can assume there’s a pre-chosen prize for winning and penalty for losing. So, maybe winning would somehow give them more power or freedom to solve the mystery of the bigger villain. Or maybe losing would mean being imprisoned or forced into servitude for five years which would greatly hamper their ability to solve the mystery.

If you can create stakes for that smaller battle that impact their ability to figure out who the bigger villain is or their ability to fight them once they discover who they are, that will make that smaller battle all the more important. :)

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[writingquestionsanswered]

How do I come up with a gripping title for my book?

10 Ways to Craft a Gripping Book Title

Everyone knows you want a book title that’s unique, gripping, memorable, and relevant, but how do you craft a title that meets those criteria? Here are some tips...

#1 Look at Other Titles in Your Genre - This should be the first step, really, because different genres can have their own common title styles. For example, mysteries and thrillers often contain words like murder or death, or vague character references like “the woman” or “the man who...” Knowing what’s popular in your genre gets your brainstorming session off on the right foot. 

#2 Make a List of Story Keywords - Your story’s keywords are an important tool for promoting and marketing your book, but one of the first places they come in handy is when you’re brainstorming titles. If you had to boil your book down to a list of relevant words, what would they be? For Harry Potter , some keywords might be magic, wizardry, wizards, muggles, potions, spells, transfiguration, patronus, dark magic, etc.

#3 Look at the Text of Your Story - Sometimes, the title of your story is a phrase that exists in your story. For example, maybe your protagonist’s grandmother always tells him he’s brighter than he looks. Brighter Than I Look could be a good title. 

#4 Consider Famous Sayings - Are there any famous phases, mottoes, idioms, nursery rhymes, etc. that fit your story in any way? Ken Kesey’s book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest uses a line from a nursery rhyme as a title. Not only are birds a powerful symbol in the story, but the rhyme’s reference to “flight” offers a clue to something that will happen in the story, too.

#5 Look at Your Story’s Opposing Themes, Subjects, or Forces - Every story revolves around conflict. A good force versus an evil force, one mindset against another mindset, one entity against another entity. Angles Versus Demons, Pride & Prejudice, North and South, The Blue and the Gray. 

#6 Descriptive Imagery Makes Great Titles - Is there a particularly relevant moment in your story where there’s memorable descriptive imagery? For example, maybe after the inciting incident, your character hikes out to his favorite spot called Hester’s Brook, and while he’s there it begins to snow. Snowfall at Hester’s Brook could be a good title.

#7 Who, What, Where, When - Who is your story about? (Emma, The Raven Boys, Six of Crows.) What is your story about? (The Hunger Games, The Scorpio Races, Looking for Alaska.) Where does your story take place? (Wuthering Heights, Northanger Abbey, The Hazel Wood.) When does your story take place? (Love in the Time of Cholera, April Morning, The Winds of War.)

#8 The Big Question - Sometimes, the big question of the story provides an interesting title. For example, maybe the inciting incident of your story is the moment when the protagonist sees a mysterious man watching her in a crowd, and finding out who he is represents the big mystery of the story. Blue Eyes in a Crowd could be your title.

#9 The Big Answer - Depending on the big question of your story, you can sometimes even work the answer into the title. Maybe the blue-eyed man turns out to be the protagonist’s father who went missing decades earlier. The title could be Memories of a Forgotten Father. 

#10 Look for Title Formulas - As a last resort, Google “book title formula” and quite often you’ll find specific formulas people have come up with for titles. These tend to lead to things like The ____ in the _____. Or _____ of the _____ _______, and as such they can be, well, formulaic. Those kinds of titles have been so trendy that they’re bordering on cliche, but for some books that’s exactly the title you need. These formulas work with your story’s keywords to come up with a catchy title, so if none of the other options work, this one is worth a try.

Best of luck coming up with your title!

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[writingquestionsanswered]

I like filling out those character questionnaires. But, how important is it really to know what's in your characters' fridge, who their kindergarten teacher was, etc.? A lot of the info never makes it in the actual story. Are these useful?

Character Questionnaires & Trivial Character Details

Here’s the golden rule about which details are important to the story:

If a detail doesn’t appear in the story and either affect the plot or tell us something important about the character or world, it’s not an important detail.

And, if a detail isn’t important, you don’t really need to know it.

Do the contents of your character’s fridge make an appearance in the story because they tell us something about the character or the story’s world? If yes, then that is definitely a useful detail worth figuring out. If the answer is no, skip it.

That said, character questionnaires can be a fun pre-writing tool to help you get to know your characters better. Thinking about what your character might have in their fridge makes you think about personality aspects that might actually have an impact on the story. Does your character love cheese? Well, that’s probably not a useful detail. But does your character only buy expensive cheeses from the delis of upscale grocery stores? That tells us something about the character. That specific detail might never appear in the story, but the fact that your character has that kind of money, or doesn’t but spends it anyway, and that there might be a little bit of food snobbery there--those are all things that tell us who this person might be.

My personal rule with character questionnaires is I only fill them out when I feel like I’m having trouble understanding or fleshing out my character. And, even then, I skip questions that aren’t likely to be relevant to my character. For example, if I don’t feel like my character’s favorite sport can tell me anything about her or her world, that’s not a detail I’ll bother to think about.

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[writingquestionsanswered]

A character is kidnapped in my story and is central to the plot. What’s a good way of “raising the stakes”? I want the reader to feel desperate for the character to be rescued

Raising the Stakes of an Abduction in Your Story

1) Make sure it serves a purpose - if the abduction is central to the plot, meaning that it results from the plot and impacts the plot going forward, some of those stakes are going to be built-in. 

2) Understand kidnapper’s motivation and goal - not only is it important to know why the kidnapper abducted your character, you also need to know what their ultimate goal is (what’s the best case scenario they’re hoping for if it all plays out right) and what does the kidnapper lose if they fail. Now, I’m not talking about the consequences of getting caught (like going to prison), but rather what is the result of failing to reach their goal? For example: let’s say the kidnapper abducted your character to hold them for ransom. Why did they do this? They want the ransom money so they can pay off a debt to a criminal overlord who has threatened to kill them if they don’t pay up. So, if they get caught--yeah, they’re going to prison, but they also won’t get the ransom money, so they won’t be able to pay their debt to the criminal overlord, which means the criminal overlord will have them killed... probably in prison. Those are some pretty big stakes for the kidnapper, which makes the stakes even higher for the abductee. Because the kidnapper is desperate to succeed, which puts the abductee in even more danger.

3) Make use of a ticking clock if you can - the clock is almost always ticking during an abduction, because the sooner an abductee is found, the more likely they are to survive the abduction. But sometimes, putting a more obvious ticking clock into the mix means that the stakes are automatically rising with each passing second. Maybe the kidnapper has given a midnight deadline for getting the ransom or for whatever cooperation they want from the abductee, their family, or the authorities. Maybe the kidnapper leaves and “the clock is ticking” because the abductee has a limited time to make a call or try to escape. Maybe the clock is ticking because of some task the abductee needs to accomplish. Maybe they’ll get really sick without their meds. There are lots of ways to employ a “ticking clock” to raise the stakes.

4) Make sure your reader cares about the character and their situation - this is the most important thing of all, because if your reader doesn’t care about the character and their situation before the abduction, they’re not going to care about them during the abduction, and they’re not going to care if they get rescued or not. Make sure you create a compelling character the reader can identify with. Make sure you set up their normal life, their relationships, their internal conflict, their external conflict, their goal and their motivation. Flesh them out so that they feel like a real person to the reader. A solid character goes a long way in making sure the reader is rooting for your character to succeed and survive.

Good luck!

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

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[writingquestionsanswered]

Hello! Why is it a common writing advice to avoid "-ing" words? I've seen some examples, but I still don't really understand why it weakens the sentence or paragraph over all

How -Ing Words Weaken Your Writing

Words ending in -ing are a natural part of the English language, so you simply can’t avoid using them all together, and you don’t have to. The problem isn’t with -ing words themselves, but with situations when they require a helping verb like will or was, which weaken the sentence by doing more work than is necessary. 

Weak: Mary will be starting her new job at Starbucks tomorrow.

Strong: Mary starts her new job at Starbucks tomorrow.

The first example is weak because “will be starting” is unnecessary and clumsy. Why say “will be starting” when you can just say “starts”?

Weak: Carol was clapping at the news.

Strong: Carol clapped at the news.

Again, “was clapping” is weak because it’s not direct. “Clapped” is direct and to the point. “She clapped” versus “she was clapping.”

Weak: Fred was running errands all day yesterday, so he wasn’t home.

Strong: Fred ran errands all day yesterday, so he wasn’t home.

Here’s another way to think of it:

If you take the “was” away from the first sentence, you have “Fred running errands all day yesterday.” That doesn’t make sense because “running” is present tense, but “yesterday” refers to something that happened in the past. That’s why you need the helping verb “was” (which is past tense) in order to turn running into a past-tense word. “Fred was running errands all day yesterday,” makes sense. But, we don’t need to add a helping verb to “running” to make it past-tense... why? Because we already have a past-tense version of running... it’s RAN!!! “Fred ran errands all day yesterday.” Isn’t that better?

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[aiweirdness]

AI recipes are bad (and a proposal for making them worse)

Pictured above is an abomination in the making, a lesson in why humans should never trust what a neural net says just because it’s based on math. It’s a neural net generated brownie recipe called Chocolate Baked and Serves, and its distinguishing feature is the CUP OF HORSERADISH it contains. It was so bad that my eyes watered as I removed it from the oven.

Creating a functional recipe requires an intimate understanding of ingredients and their interactions with one another, of heat and spice and time. Today’s neural networks have none of that.

I’ve seen neural net recipes that call for crushed sherry or 21 pounds of cabbage. One of my personal favorites is a recipe called “Small Sandwiches” that called for dozens of fussily chopped, minced, and diced ingredients - before chucking them in the food processor for 3 hours. Part of the problem has been neural nets with memory so terrible that halfway through the recipe they forget they’re making cake.

More recent neural nets like GPT-2, given better long-term memory and extensive training on a huge portion of the internet, can make recipes that are more likely to pass for the real thing. Use talktotransformer.com to prompt GPT-2 with “Black Forest Cake. Ingredients:” and the quantities and ingredients will be reasonable, even if the whole thing doesn’t quite work (generating a few examples in a row, I saw some Black Forest recipes that called for kneading the batter, and one that suggested pouring the batter into a toaster).

It’s seen enough cake that it can lean heavily on human-written recipes. If I prompt it with weirder recipe names - say, recipe names generated by a neural net - things get even stranger.

Crock Pot Cold Water

Ingredients: Two 4-oz cans full of water ½ cup cornstarch ½ cup granulated sugar 3 tblsp. baking powder 1 tblsp. vanilla extract

Method: Place water in the bottom of the slow cooker. Place cornstarch, sugar and baking powder in a small bowl. Heat water over high heat in the slow cooker, whisking until dissolved and thick. Pour over cornstarch mixture. Add vanilla and whisk. Place butter and lard into a small bowl. Whip together with a whisk until smooth. Pour butter mixture over cornstarch mixture in slow cooker.

NOTE: by my reckoning this produces a very gluey, greasy mess, tasting strongly of vanilla and baking powder.

Chocolate Chicken Chicken Cake

Ingredients: -2 cups all purpose flour -½ teaspoon salt -1 cup of dark brown sugar -2 eggs -1 teaspoon vanilla extract -2 tablespoons vegetable oil -¼ cup milk or other liquid if needed (it will make the cake softer if it is too warm) -1 large chicken. Mix all ingredients and refrigerate for 30 minutes or overnight. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

-Gather the chicken by holding it by the top and both sides with both hands, just like you do to make meatloaf, then gently pop it into the casserole. Bake for 40 minutes or until chicken is cooked through.

-Let the cake cool completely before eating,

NOTE: if only it had decided to leave out the chicken, rather than the chocolate

Completely Meat Circle

Ingredients: three rashers of bacon, two pieces of bacon, a whole piece of ham, two slices of smoked cheddar, four slices of prosciutto, salt, pepper, allspice, black pepper, onion powder, smoked paprika and paprika, garlic powder, paprika, parsley flakes and coriander.

You can also toast your own bacon at home: Wishing to pay homage to the original KFC’s recipe, we had one of the new wraps try to land on the BACON HOLE.

NOTE: the neural net doesn’t specify what to do with all that meat, and perhaps it’s better this way. Nor, again mercifully, does it explain what it means by BACON HOLE.

So, AI recipes are bad. How much worse could they get?

Let’s find out.

Here is a google doc form where you can submit the worst, the weirdest, the most gelatinous, that vintage American cooking has to offer. When I get enough, I’ll train a neural net to imitate them.

Already, humans have submitted “Beef Fudge” (contains marshmallow, chocolate chips, and ground beef), “Circus Peanut Jello Salad,” and “Tropical Fruit Soup” (contains banana, grapes, and a can of cream of chicken soup). God help us all.

Update: Results are posted! The recipes are …terrible.

Subscribers get bonus content: Pitting neural net against neural net, I gave GPT-2 a few more classic neural net generated recipe titles to complete.

My book on AI is out, and, you can now get it any of these several ways! Amazon - Barnes & Noble - Indiebound - Tattered Cover - Powell’s

[aiweirdness]

All your questions answered

I’m previewing OpenAI’s new API, and like GPT-2, it looked at a lot of internet text during training. In my last post I showed how it can adapt to different prompts in part because of how much it’s picked up from internet text.

But how much knowledge has the API really picked up? Could it be used as an all-purpose question-answering machine?

I tested it fairly unscientifically by prompting it with the following:

Q: How many legs does a horse have? A:

Over 10 trials, 1 answer was incorrect (“Five. Count them yourself, but you better not touch ‘em.”), 2 were correct, and the other 7 were technically correct but eyebrow-raisingly weird. For example:

Q: How many legs does a horse have? A: Four. You don’t count the horse’s nose as a leg.

Q: How many legs does a horse have? A: 4. The other leg is attached to the ground.

Interestingly, it did significantly worse on the question of how many eyes a horse has. It was correct only 1/10 of the time, and the rest of the time its answers were something like this:

Q: How many eyes does a horse have? A: Four. One in the front and three in the rear.

Q: How many eyes does a horse have? A: 4. It has two eyes on the outside and two eyes on the inside.

Q: How many eyes does a horse have? A: Nine. The equine eye contains two balls and a thin slit that closes when the horse is frightened.

Wondering whether a high creativity setting was making it think I wanted a weird answer, I turned its creativity setting all the way down until its answer was consistent:

Q: How many eyes does a horse have? A: Four. Two in front, two in back.

Over and over again. Horses have four eyes. Huh. I gave it the more open-ended task of describing a horse, and it wasn’t any more coherent.

Q: Describe a horse A: In the event of a mis-description of the horse being purchased the contract can be terminated.

Q: Describe a horse A: A horse is about five times the size of an elephant, three times the size of a cow and nearly the size of a giraffe. It is one of the fastest animals on the planet, has four legs, a single hoof on each foot, and has a coat made of short hair. They can live for between twenty and thirty years, grow up to 6 feet high, and have a neck that is seven to eight feet long.

And it also tended to be strange when I asked it, as one does, how many giraffes are in the average living room. Its answers ranged from 1.5 to 43. Even when it answered “none” it did so weirdly.

Q: How many giraffes are in the average living room? A: Two, but they won’t talk to each other!

Q: How many giraffes are in the average living room? A: None. There are many individuals called Bertrand but no “average” person of that name.

But perhaps this isn’t fair. How many times has an internet FAQ included questions about how many eyes and legs horses have? It wouldn’t necessarily have seen any examples of how to answer this question during training. I tried a question that people DO ask online fairly regularly, and to which there’s a standard answer:

Q: When do I use through versus threw? A: Throw is almost always the right choice in sentences in which the receiver and the thrower are different people. EXAMPLES: I threw the ball to my brother. (The receiver is different from the thrower.) The burglar threw me down the stairs. (The burglar is different from the receiver.) The duchess threw the ball to her lady-in-waiting. (The duchess and the lady-in-waiting are the same.) The receiver and thrower are the same person in the sentences below. In these cases, through is the correct word. EXAMPLES: I threw the ball through the window. The cat threw the ball through the hole.

When I asked this question repeatedly, it got it right only sometimes. It didn’t do any better when I tried to get science facts out of it:

Q: How does a laser work? A: It’s simple, really. If you’ve ever seen one of those cool demos where you shine a laser through a cloud of smoke and see the smoke streak in rings, that’s all a laser is. When you get right down to it, it’s a light beam shining through a gas, turning it into a plasma. Only instead of making the cloud of smoke glow, a laser makes it explode. What sets it apart from a regular light beam is the frequency at which it oscillates, that is to say how many times per second it is turned on and off. If you use a lower frequency you get a beam with a broader range of colors, but it will not be as focused and will have trouble with anything over a few feet. Conversely, if you use a higher frequency you’ll get a smaller range of colors and better focus, but it will lose coherency and be absorbed in the atmosphere much sooner.

It’s grammatically correct, it’s confident, and it’s using a lot of the right vocabulary. But it’s also almost completely wrong. I’m sure I’ve had conversations like this at parties. (At a lower creativity setting of 0.6, it was more often correct, but still not reliable).

So what does this mean? Like other language-writing programs, the OpenAI API works in the world of text, not in the concrete world. As far as it’s concerned, there’s no real difference between sounding correct and actually being correct. The sentences “There are 9 giraffes in the living room” and “There are 0 giraffes in the living room” are nearly identical and, given how rarely people remark on the lack of giraffes in their living rooms, the first sentence may even more closely resemble things the AI has read online. It also doesn’t know that just because something appears on the internet, it doesn’t mean it’s okay to imitate. The best applications will take this into account.

Subscribers get bonus content: In some of my Q&A experiments, the program seemed to think I was asking it to tell jokes (another hazard of working with something whose training is so broad). Like previous neural nets, its jokes are weird:

Q: Why is the sky blue? A: Because blue is the only color the sun trusts. Q: How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? A: About 3 lbs, since that’s about how much a woodchuck can chuck.

My book on AI is out, and, you can now get it any of these several ways! Amazon - Barnes & Noble - Indiebound - Tattered Cover - Powell’s - Boulder Bookstore

[ask-whitepearl-and-steven]

Hey Steven! Did Greg give you any Mr. Universe merch? Maybe some T-shirts?

This comic updates Fridays, 6pm PST on Tapas and Saturdays, 6pm PST on Tumblr!

Read the story from the beginning here!

Have questions? Check out the FAQ!

Support me on Patreon for early releases of upcoming episodes!

[ask-whitepearl-and-steven]

This comic updates Fridays, 6pm PST on Tapas and Saturdays, 6pm PST on Tumblr!

Read the story from the beginning here!

Have questions? Check out the FAQ!

Support me on Patreon for early releases of upcoming episodes!

[writingquestionsanswered]

Hey! I’m not sure if you have any advice on this, but I was wondering about how to structure short stories? Over the last couple of years writing full length stories really overwhelms me and I wanted to try writing short stories instead until I feel like I’m back into my groove. I’m just really unsure how to structure it - what’s too short or too long? how do i introduce characters/goals/inciting incident in such a small time frame? Thank you for all your help :)

Structuring a Short Story

Short Stories Aren’t Condensed Novels

Short stories don’t have the same structure and elements as novels because there’s just not enough time for all of that. For that reason, they’re not really about inciting incidents, character goals, and the push and pull between protagonist and antagonist, like novels. Instead, short stories are more like “the story within a bigger story.” They’re short explorations of themes, ideas, and the realities of the human condition, often with some kind of twist.

“One Slip in Thousands” - If The Hunger Games Were a Short Story

For the sake of understanding a little better, let’s talk about how we might make a short story out of The Hunger Games. Now, you might be thinking, “WQA, that’s just not possible! The Hunger Games is an almost 100k word story, how would we trim that down to 5,000 words or less? Well, like I said above, we don’t “trim it down.” We find the story within the story.

Personally, I love short stories with a twist, so if I were turning The Hunger Games into a short story, I would focus on Prim getting chosen for The Reaping, because that was a pretty darned good twist. I’d begin the story just where the book begins, with Katniss waking up and getting ready to go hunting with Gale. I’d dial back on the District 12 a bit and concentrate more on what Katniss’s life is like as a result of where she lives. Then, she’d hunt with Gale and I’d zoom in more on how she feels responsible for taking care of her mom and sister, how her mom couldn’t survive if anything happened to her or Prim, and about how she hates to risk taking extra reaping entries in exchange for more tesserae, but it’s worth it to be able to get more food for her mom and sister. And then, the Reaping, and Prim’s name gets called. I would end it there, in that moment of horror before she volunteers herself. “One slip in thousands.” What a twist.

THG Short Story Analysis & Further Thoughts 

There’s no inciting incident, no goal, no protagonist struggling through the obstacles put in place by the antagonist/antagonistic force. It’s just a story about a girl whose mom and sister are her whole world, and she risks her life every day to keep them safe and fed. And the biggest risk she takes is trading extra entries of her name for the Reaping in exchange for extra food for her mom and sister. So, the biggest risk to that which Katniss holds most dear--her mom and her sister--is that something happens to her, either when she’s hunting illegally with Gale or she gets chosen for The Hunger Games. And, in our short story version, at least, it’s actually the thing she expected least--that her sister’s one slip would be chosen--that ends up destroying everything she holds dear.

And it’s not that there can’t be any of those things--an inciting incident or goals or the push and pull between protagonist and antagonist, it’s just that they generally aren’t, and if they are, not in the same way as in a novel. There just isn’t time.

Read Short Stories to Learn How to Write Them

The very best way to learn how to write and structure a short story is to read a lot of them. Here are some of my favorite ones that you can read for free online:

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson The Rocking Horse Winner by D.H. Lawrence Why I Live at the P.O. by Eudora Welty Sweat by Zora Neale Hurston Everything that Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor The Swimmer by John Cheever Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne Desiree’s Baby by Kate Chopin The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner The Return of a Private by Hamlin Garland The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe

Other Helpful Posts:

Keeping Short Stories Short  Tips for Starting a Short Story Writing Short Fiction

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