Purpose: To share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds!
TL/DR
*sigh* I've lived long enough to see a TON of technological advances. I remember being so excited when my office got an electronic typewriter with 2K memory! Good heavens, it was amazing, and it saved me so much time. Yes, even 2K of memory saved me so much time!
Whiteout was such a blessing, but then I got a typewriter that had correction tape as part of the keyboard, and I didn’t have to mess with whiteout anymore.
Then we got a word processor. Oh, my heck! I could edit a line without having to retype the entire page. And believe me, there was nothing worse than typing a document you thought you could fit on a single page—but you missed by one freaking line!
When we got spellcheck and it could spot where I’d
transposed letters and misspelled a word, it was awesome. Of course, some
advances can bite you. *coughautocorrectcough*
The Internet made it so I didn’t have to run to the library every time I needed
to look something up, or skim through loads of books. Once again, it comes with
problems, and you have to verify your information. But you should be doing that,
anyway.
And now we have AI. And man has it got lovers and haters. I’ve heard the term “witch hunt” a lot, and I can see why it’s called that.
It’s a complicated issue because AI isn’t a new tool that only does one thing like so many others
I know authors who dictate on the go. The biggest pain was taking those words and cleaning them up. They found they could give it to AI with the instructions to separate it into paragraphs and add proper punctuation but nothing else. Then the authors can shape what they dictated into a book that makes sense. They’re all still their words.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, there are people who give AI an idea and let it run with it to create an entire book.
And I’m hearing of varying kinds of use that range in
degrees between those two. They’re all described as “using AI,” but they’re
very different things.
I know people who claimed back in the day that “writing” a book on a word processor as not really writing. Ugh It makes me think of the person who told my son that listening to a book didn’t count as reading it, and this to a young man who has amazing hearing recall but is such a slow reader that he loses track to what he’s read. Try telling a blind person that listening to a book doesn’t count as having read it.
So, back to the original questions, I think I’ll ask some questions of my own.
How much assistance changes authorship?
I have several beta readers who give me feedback and help me
to shape my books. And editors offer more feedback. When you’re with a trad publisher,
you often have less say in the final product than you do when you’re indie.
Is there a “right” way to create a book?
Does it really matter if someone writes it by hand, types on
an old manual typewriter, uses editing software, brainstorms with a critique
group, or uses other tools available to them? At what point is it no longer the
author’s book because there have been so many fingers in their pie (human or
otherwise)?
What does an author’s name on the cover actually promise
readers? And along that line, does it make a difference if you find out that something
you assumed about an author was incorrect?
I loved the books written by Madeline Brent and was very
surprised years later to discover that it was a pen name for a man named Peter
O’Donnell. Did it make a difference in how I enjoyed the stories? No. But it
could have made a difference on whether I picked up a historical romance
written by a man.
It would have been my loss.
And for my final question.
Do most readers really want to know how the sausage was made, or do they just care if it’s a good story?
You really don't want to know how sausage is made!
ReplyDeleteI think some assistance is fair just not letting it do everything.