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On The Table Read Magazine, “the best entertainment eBook magazine UK“, Roderick Edwards shares how today’s writers navigate the clash of art and commerce, blending fact and fiction in an AI-influenced landscape to captivate readers and thrive as entrepreneurial storyteller.
Written by Roderick Edwards
A Boy And His Dog
There was a time, not too long ago when information and news was presented as dispassionately and unbiased as possible. There was no activism or agenda involved. This was how encyclopedias and dictionaries were written. This is why students took journalism courses; not to change the world but to report changes in the world.
It seems now, authors pen books tinged with tangents. What is supposed to be a nice story about a boy and his dog might transform into a lecture on genderfluidity. It seems books, films, songs now come preloaded with political and ideological slants. Perhaps it’s always been this way but it has only become more obvious in an age of instant information and constant critique.
Hal 9000
Further, with the advent of A.I. (artificial intelligence for those that might be living under the proverbial rock), we are beginning to rely on a smaller subset of culled data. A.I. doesn’t “think” for itself. It is programmed and “trained” to pull information from preset sources. After that, the A.I. is massaged to spit out the most non-offensive, nuanced result as possible. In this way, the answers are acceptable to the widest demographical audience. This massaging may require the programmers to load the A.I. up with a pre-determined number of racial examples, even if the result is historically inaccurate.
A.I. is not the Hal 9000 computer from the film Space Odessey nor is it IBM’s Watson playing a friendly gameshow game of Jeopardy. It isn’t even the dispassionate automated phone system asking you to press 1 for Spanish. Today’s and tomorrow’s A.I. has the same biases and agendas as their programmers.
Do you know who is programming your favorite A.I.?
Fact or Fiction
As the literature industry adapts to diminishing readership, the art and industry clash at the apex labor of love and writing-to-market. They author might be liberated from the editor’s red pen, but print-on-demand also means writers have to do more to sell themselves. Sell themselves in an online environment that says it is socially taboo to promote yourself.
In this environment – or as Jim Morrison says, “thrown into a world, like a dog without a bone, an actor out on loan” – the 21st century writer must practice their art. They must construct fact or fiction that sells to the masses or ignore them altogether and write from their heart and run the risk of obscurity and poverty. So, some authors have figured out that they need to blend nonfiction and fantasy to get a viable end-product that can be given a glossy stock cover for the expectation of their cast-typed genre.
New Writer
But this article is not nerfing to the negative. All is not lost, oh reader! oh writer! The symbiosis survives. Despite the vanishing of Amazon’s Vella you can still get 24 volume series. You can still follow your niche author or write to your super fans. All the tricks of the trade still apply and more tools are being added daily. Email lists. Newsletters. Video of your favorite author twerking – okay, maybe that’s too much and too soon – but you get the point. While some authors pine for the good old days of rejection letters and 60% royalties to their agents, and their living room decorated with wall-to-wall boxes of their last three books waiting to be bought, more entrepreneurial authors are figuring out how to live in this new world.
So, if you’re ready to be a writer just know it’s not like Thoreau retreating to his cabin in the woods.
Maybe it’s not even like J.K. Rowling imagining Harry Potter while waiting on a train. Nor is it the Paperback Writer by the Beatles. The new writer builds both worlds in books and worlds in the reality of life. Are you ready? Then get going!
Find more from Roderick Edwards now:
Amazon: https://amzn.to/424iQef
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