On Lost in France progress, AI, managing your attention despite the state of the world, and writing that makes me swoon.

Happy Sunday. I have four things to share.

 Lost in France progress

This is a photo of the city hall of Bourmont, Entre-Meuse-et-Mouzon, France, where I did research for my next book, Lost in France

My next book, Lost in France, approaches a finish line. I say ‘a’ rather than ‘the’ because getting a book into readers’ hands, I learned with At Last Count, is a long road of multiple finish lines (a marathon, not a sprint, in other words).

I got past the finish line of delivering the manuscript to my book agent and received a big thumbs up—she really liked it, which was great—and had only seven notes—even better. Five were very specific and doable, but the other two were more general notes which threw me for a loop.

The first was about weeding out clichés. I’ll admit my ego took a little beating. Who, me? Clichés? Impossible! It turned out that what my agent felt was a cliché, was, to me, more a saying, a colloquialism, a piece of dialogue in the common vernacular that made the writing snappy. But my agent’s point was that she had had other books turned down by editors because of overuse of clichés—especially in the first few chapters—and given that is not a hill I want to die on, I did a cliché pass. Ultimately, anything that makes the writing more original is good.

The second note, though, was on weeding out ‘show don’t tell.’ I will say, that after 27 years as a screenwriter who has had a lot of writing produced, this note in the world of publishing was one I could not fully understand. What does ‘show don’t tell’ even mean?

Of course, the Internet is very helpful—there are lots of craft articles available about how to address ‘show don’t tell,’ and all of them made sense. But I could still not see it in my own writing. And in the 30 marked-up pages my agent had sent me, she hadn’t found any instances of ‘show don’t tell,’ even though she said they were in the over 300 pages of the book. Now what?

This was a very challenging spot, because even though this is a common note for novelists, I literally could not see it on the page.

So I turned to my writing colleagues and a trusted beta reader, and got help from several wonderful souls. One, Dolly Reisman, with whom I trade writing on a regular basis, had this to offer: anytime you tell us about the emotion a character is feeling (she was furious, he was happy, etc.) try instead describing it physically (she clenched her fists, he trembled a bit, etc.). Very actionable feedback.

My wonderful writing mentor, Sue Reynolds, also came to my rescue, and gave me this advice: When a character is thinking but you don’t specify ‘she thought,’ we’re eavesdropping into her brain. It triggers a reflection or inner comment, and we move seamlessly. But if you move into an omniscient pov, delivering backstory out of the blue—this is more tell-y. If you can’t weave these moments into dialogue, it’s likely you’re trying to tell the reader more info, or backstory, than they need to know in that moment. That’s tell, not show.

I had a sudden realization that this business of telling the reader what a character is feeling is actually something screenwriters do on purpose, so the actors and director know what’s what, succinctly, in a screenplay. Once I made that connection, it was a lot easier to weed the ‘show don’t tell’ moments out of my book.

I’m so grateful for this help. Writers and really perceptive beta readers are good eggs. Stay tuned for further news about Lost in France progress.

These are the steps up to the top of Bourmont. In Lost in France, they have become the path to the tiny, magical village of Lavigny, where Marlow, the protagonist of the book, buys her one-euro house.

AI

The AI issue, and its recent explosion in our lives, is a disaster for so many creatives. I’m watching colleagues lose their jobs over it, and others have their work stolen outright. The Writers Guild of Canada, which is my film/TV writing guild, almost came to strike over the producers’ desire to have the option to use it to replace writers, and this is just the beginning of a long fight.

I’ve been listening to a good podcast for writers called Six-Figure Authors, hosted by Lindsay Buroker, Joseph R. Lallo, and Andrea Pearson, and the episode I listened to recently, SFA 130, articulated the problem very eloquently.

Here’s Joseph @ 49:15 in the episode: “I think there are some pretty clear ethical problems with AI in its current form. I’ve actually written some AI in the past, and at present, pretty much all of AI is trained on publicly sourced information. And the overwhelming majority of that information is protected under copyright. It’s an open question if the output of the AI is protected under fair use, like if whether you’re allowed to use it under fair use, but it’s inarguable that the actual training model contains the actual original copywrited stuff, so that’s a problem. There are multiple class action lawsuits aimed at at least two different AI art generators from the creators of the original artwork, and another couple lawsuits aimed at people who are doing text generation… The ethics of current AI are fraught, and most of the response I’ve seen from the AI creators boils down to, we know we didn’t get permission to use the inputs, but that would have been hard and expensive, so we didn’t bother trying and we’re pretty sure it’s not going to matter. That’s not the words they used, but that’s the thrust of what they were saying. And like I implied earlier, AI right now is basically a search engine. It scrapes the internet for other people’s stuff and feeds it to you based upon your queries. Which is exactly what a search engine does. The only difference is, before it does that, AI boils it down to the structure, and builds it back up from that structure. But it’s still other people’s stuff at its heart. Remember when someone went through and rewrote 5 of my books, and released them as their books? And we all sort of agreed that that was a scummy thing to do, and almost certainly a violation of my rights as a creator? That’s what AI is doing. It’s doing it in much smaller, much less identifiable pieces, but at its heart, that’s what AI is doing, and that whole ‘can’t create new emotion and experience’ thing won’t matter to people who just want to shovel zero-effort spam into the marketplace. That it is potentially criminally derivative of other people’s stuff isn’t going to matter to them either. There’s a whole lot of unanswered issues with AI ethics right now.”

Excellently articulated. Thanks, Joseph. And by the way, the italics above are mine, for emphasis.

Managing your writer attention

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been having trouble with focus, because the world feels a little like this:

I’ve been listening to wonderful author coach Becca Syme lately, who has lots of great advice. In her podcast episode about managing attention, she says that the news is to be checked, not watched. This has helped me not dive headlong into the crazy. She reminds us that we get to be the owner of our early time (my most productive time for writing), and if we can do ourselves one favour, it’s to stay off social media for as long as we can in the day, so our attention doesn’t get pulled off that thing we really want to do. “Stop listening to everyone, stop following everyone, stop being present to everyone else's attention desires.” Very hard thing to do in these high-input days, but how else will we get our own stuff done?

To finish, some writing to swoon over

My friend Barbara Barnes is an actor and poet. Her poems have appeared in Under the Radar, The Interpreter’s House, Poetry London, Butcher’s Dog, Brixton Review of Books, Ambit, Arc Poetry Canada, The Alchemy Spoon, Perverse and Black Iris. She conducts workshops with the MA students at the Poetry School London and has been commissioned to write poems for art exhibitions in London. Her collection ‘Hound Mouth’ was published by Live Canon (UK) in 2022 and is available here: https://www.livecanon.co.uk/store/product/hound-mouth-barbara-barnes. You can find her at her Instagram account, @barbaracbarnes.

Hound Mouth is a gorgeous poetry collection to be savoured one poem at a time. Go get it!

Meanwhile, here’s a taste of Barbara’s powerful poetry:

https://www.blackirispoetry.com/the-confession