Are you in St Louis? Will you be, next week? In that case, you could come to the Schlafly Public Library at 225 N. Euclid at 6pm on Wednesday May 13th.

Full information here.

I’ve been thinking about what Hal Duncan says in this post on Bluesky. And things I’ve seen some folks say about using LLMs to help them write better. And that’s just so incredibly wrong I’m not even sure where to start with it, but I wonder if some of the issue isn’t seeing writing (or any art, or the world) as a matter of getting the “right” answer.

Which is kind of ironic, because LLMs don’t actually give “right” answers, they just vomit out statistically likely strings of words. But even if you think an LLM is accessing the entirety of human knowledge (it isn’t) and somehow using perfect machine logic to give you the “correct” answer (don’t make me laugh), there are things that don’t have correct answers. Lots of things! Many, many, many things, in fact.

Like, history isn’t a list of facts. Hell, science isn’t a list of facts! And art isn’t just “do the correct things and you have a work of art.”

Speaking specifically to Hal’s example, there are as many ways to structure a novel (or a short story, or a poem, or what have you) as there are novelists (or short story writers or poets). Now, some structures get used a lot. Like really, really a lot. But that does not make them the “correct” structure. The structure comes from the decisions that you make as a writer. That can be as simple as “I want to write a sonnet” or as complicated as “I’m not sure what this novel is doing but it’s doing something and it feels like I want to repeat this imagery here.”

It’s understandable that a lot of beginners at any art want rules for how to do it. But there comes a time when one has to make one’s own choices about how one’s art is structured, how it’s executed, what you want it to do. There is no rulebook that will help you with that, you just have to step up and decide. That’s scary! But there’s no getting around it.

This also goes for reading, by the way! I wish I had saved the link to a post by a teacher who was trying to teach Shakespeare to some high school kids, and another teacher was like “Let’s do this, I’ll put a sonnet you’re not familiar with on the board, and you can work through it in front of the kids.” And it was a success! The kids enjoyed it, and even suggested some really cool ways to read the sonnet! It helped when it wasn’t “the teacher is telling you the way to read this” but instead “look, let’s read this together and see what happens.” And when I read that, I remembered the folks I knew in high school who were very much about Having Decoded a Great Work of Literature. The teacher had told them The Answer to how to read whatever it was, and that was it, and also btw the answer was WHY the work in question was great. Or something.

When actually there isn’t a right way to interpret a work of art. I mean, there are some that are pretty off base, and some that have nothing whatever to do with what the artist intended, and yeah, learning the original context of the work and what the artist thought they were doing is really cool and good to know and can give you a great place to start. But also, what you bring to a work, and the experience you have while reading it, are also important.

A poem, or a novel, is not a puzzle to solve. It’s an experience to enjoy and think about. And there’s no answer key for that.

Anyway. Take care, and I hope you all enjoy Radiant Star!

Ann