Microsoft Office, like many companies in recent months, has slyly turned on an “opt-out” feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems. This setting is turned on by default, and you have to manually uncheck a box in order to opt out.
If you are a writer who uses MS Word to write any proprietary content (blog posts, novels, or any work you intend to protect with copyright and/or sell), you’re going to want to turn this feature off immediately.How to Turn off Word’s AI Access To Your Content
I won’t beat around the bush. Microsoft Office doesn’t make it easy to opt out of this new AI privacy agreement, as the feature is hidden through a series of popup menus in your settings:On a Windows computer, follow these steps to turn off “Connected Experiences”:
File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Optional Connected Experiences > Uncheck box: “Turn on optional connected experiences”
to be clear, odds are good that someone will hate what you wrote, but that doesn't mean the writing is bad. That means they aren't part of your audience.
Guys. Guys please. We have to remember that protagonist is not a stand in word for hero and antagonist is not a stand in word for villain. Please. We learned this in middle school. The protagonist is the character the audience follows. The antagonist is the character who is working against the protagonist.
Some years back, I brought something I'm working on to an adult writers group. Basically, the protagonist is a terrible person. I took some advice home under the understanding I was going too hard on his thinking and someone in the group was offended, so I reworked it a bit, brought it back in. And when they read it the second time, I realized that the group was thinking the protagonist was a good guy. The alterations they continued to advise me to do stripped him of being the terrible person he is. Ironically someone pointed out that his voice got weaker. This was not a group of chronic internet users, they were Gen X and boomers who read and wrote a lot, I was the only Millennial.
You not only need to be extremely talented to create a bad guy protagonist and properly signal that to the audience, but also people in general, no matter their education and experience, run on the default protagonist = good guy. Especially in this day and age of so many people trying to make things so black and white. It's hard to break through that right now.
For those of us who got desperately tired of (for a while) seeing every pitched screenplay jammed into the Procrustean bed of monomyth and then having to watch it get pieces chopped off it until it fit, this comes as a breath of fresh air...
A lot of versions of the Greek and Roman afterlife aren’t actually underground. They’re just really far west. Atlas is also supposedly out west holding up the sky. The Amazons are somewhere around the Black Sea that’s where all the weird people live right
Norse afterlife might be underground. It might just be really far north. If you go really far East there will be some kind of evil forest. You know the one.
If you read a thousand and one nights a weird number of the stories get set in “China” but when you read it, clearly it’s not China. It’s still describing things from the medieval Arab world. China was apparently just a code word for a long time ago in a galaxy far far away basically.
oooh have you ever done a post about the ridiculous mandatory twist endings in old sci-fi and horror comics? Like when the guy at the end would be like "I saved the Earth from Martians because I am in fact a Vensuvian who has sworn to protect our sister planet!" with no build up whatsoever.
Yeah, that is a good question - why do some scifi twist endings fail?
As a teenager obsessed with Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone, I bought every single one of Rod Serling’s guides to writing. I wanted to know what he knew.
The reason that Rod Serling’s twist endings work is because they “answer the question” that the story raised in the first place. They are connected to the very clear reason to even tell the story at all. Rod’s story structures were all about starting off with a question, the way he did in his script for Planet of the Apes (yes, Rod Serling wrote the script for Planet of the Apes, which makes sense, since it feels like a Twilight Zone episode): “is mankind inherently violent and self-destructive?” The plot of Planet of the Apes argues the point back and forth, and finally, we get an answer to the question: the Planet of the Apes was earth, after we destroyed ourselves. The reason the ending has “oomph” is because it answers the question that the story asked.
According to Rod Serling, every story has three parts: proposal, argument, and conclusion. Proposal is where you express the idea the story will go over, like, “are humans violent and self destructive?” Argument is where the characters go back and forth on this, and conclusion is where you answer the question the story raised in a definitive and clear fashion.
The reason that a lot of twist endings like those of M. Night Shyamalan’s and a lot of the 1950s horror comics fail is that they’re just a thing that happens instead of being connected to the theme of the story.
One of the most effective and memorable “final panels” in old scifi comics is EC Comics’ “Judgment Day,” where an astronaut from an enlightened earth visits a backward planet divided between orange and blue robots, where one group has more rights than the other. The point of the story is “is prejudice permanent, and will things ever get better?” And in the final panel, the astronaut from earth takes his helmet off and reveals he is a black man, answering the question the story raised.
airyairyquitecontrary
IIRC “Judgment Day” was part of the inspiration for the excellent Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Far Beyond the Stars.”
Another way of looking at it is that there needs to be a proper lead up, proper clues. Some of your audience are going to try to figure it out. There are people that like surprises, they're not going to dig too much but will enjoy connecting the dots afterwards. Then there are people that like to go "Aha I knew it! I was right!" The speculation was part of the entertainment. If you try to put something in no one can actually see coming, some random ass solution or twist with no basis in the plot anywhere, it's going to be bad and you're going to piss everyone off.
i'm actually very okay with "there was no other way this could end" endings. if they gotta die, let them die. if they gotta break up or go the wrong way or lose something important, let'em. so long as it completes the story. only thing i dislike more than a forced happy ending is a forced bad ending
i have rule i semi-adhere to for media criticism which is to ideologically meet shit where it's at (or where it's presented to me). i like to call it the "i didn't make you market it that way" rule--like, if lancer's union was just presented as a sci-fi setting, that would be fine. i don't expect all sci-fi settings to be communist utopias! but when the creators of lancer use the word utopia like 20 times & bandy around words like 'mutual aid' and 'post-scarcity' and 'anticapitalist' when describing it, then to me that becomes absolutely fair game. similarly if someone says 'stardew valley is fun i like farming :)' then i'm not gonna reply with a long post about how it's ideologically petty-bourgeois--but if they say 'stardew valley is anticapitalist', then they've opened up that can of worms and it's fair for me to point out that the worms exist.
it's the same phenomenon where a fantasy novel that says 'for the duration of this fantasy novel you need to just believe in the divine right of kings for the emotional stakes to make sense' is infinitely less objectionable than a fantasy novel that's also about restoring a king but takes painstaking time to point out how this king is A Good King who is Progressive and Nice and is going to do Nice Monarchy. when you try to sanitize something you end up turning any otherwise neutral or at least palatable depiction or framework you've included into a normative statement!
I feel like we're almost in an era of like, reverse queerbaiting. Used to be that you'd be tricked into watching a show because the story implied there'd be gay rep, but now they're using gay rep to trick you into thinking there'll be a story.
Pro-writing tip: if your story doesn't need a number, don't put a fucking number in it.
Nothing, I mean nothing, activates reader pedantry like a number.
I have seen it a thousand times in writing workshops. People just can't resist nitpicking a number. For example, "This scifi story takes place 200 years in the future and they have faster than light travel because it's plot convenient," will immediately drag every armchair scientist out of the woodwork to say why there's no way that technology would exist in only 200 years.
Dates, ages, math, spans of time, I don't know what it is but the second a specific number shows up, your reader is thinking, and they're thinking critically but it's about whether that information is correct. They are now doing the math and have gone off drawing conclusions and getting distracted from your story or worse, putting it down entirely because umm, that sword could not have existed in that Medieval year, or this character couldn't be this old because it means they were an infant when this other story event happened that they're supposed to know about, or these two events now overlap in the timeline, or... etc etc etc.
Unless you are 1000% certain that a specific number is adding to your narrative, and you know rock-solid, backwards and forwards that the information attached to that number is correct and consistent throughout the entire story, do yourself a favor, and don't bring that evil down upon your head.
"Two centuries later" just triggers a mental note to check if timing is consistent throughout the book, because it may mean more time jumps are ahead. "200 years later", or heaven forbid, "201 years later" will have me draw up a time line. The more specific the number, the more critical people become.
actually i think i might have an explanation for this from linguistics? i think folks get more nitpicky if you have specific numbers because of gricean maxims, specifically the maxims of quality and quantity
basically gricean maxims are a set of guidelines that we all carry in our heads that we expect other people to follow when having a conversation in good faith - i’m copying and pasting definitions from someone else because my attempts at summing up quality and quantity weren’t going so hot
The maxim of quantity, where one tries to be as informative as one possibly can, and gives as much information as is needed, and no more.
The maxim of quality, where one tries to be truthful, and does not give information that is false or that is not supported by evidence.
so basically, when you put a rough number in a text, people think subconsciously ‘oh, the exact number isn’t important, because if it was they would tell me an exact number, so i don’t need to worry about this’, whereas if you put something precise in, people’s brains go ‘wait, they think i need to know this information so i’ll remember it, but now it’s later and they’ve said something that contradicts it, so at least one of those times they were lying and i must figure out which time it was’
one thing about orpheus and eurydice is you guys are all like “i’m different i wouldnt turn to look at her” because you are all familiar with the story of orpheus and eurydice. but orpheus wasnt familiar with the story because he was in it lol.
“i wouldn’t look back bc logically if she’s not there it wouldnt help to look and if she is there looking back would cause me to lose her” cool so has love never made you stupid and insane
another thing thats interesting is i think most people assume its a walk of reasonably short length that you have to resist looking back. but we dont know how long that walk was. its out of the underworld, time could work very differently. could be days. could be months. could you walk for months without looking back to see if your love is okay? i dont think you could
One of the most common failure modes of deontological systems of ethics is the valorisation of bad outcomes. When actions are held to be inherently good or bad regardless of their outcomes, the willingness to accept demonstrably horrible outcomes in order to behave virtuously can itself come to be seen as virtuous; and, moreover, the worse the outcome, the greater the virtue demonstrated thereby. Left unchecked, this way of thinking can, and often does, lead to the perverse conclusion that those whose actions yield the worst outcomes are the most virtuous.
This, ultimately, is why media like Breaking Bad will inevitably be received as celebrations of the very ethoi they purport to critique by their adherents. When Walter White’s cracked funhouse mirror version of traditional masculinity repeatedly leads him and everyone around him – including those he claims to be protecting – to bad ends, his persistent refusal to reevaluate his behaviour is seen not as evidence of the moral bankruptcy of Walter’s ethos, but as evidence of Walter’s own moral courage. In this essay
telling creatives they owe it to the betterment of society to only write positive and uplifting content is the artistic equivalent of telling random women to smile and then saying “I’m just trying to make people happy!” when called on it
You are using an unsupported browser and things might not work as intended. Please make sure you're using the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.
