creativity

I love being right.

Unfortunately, because I am a cynic, I am often right about things that are terrible. I would much rather be proven wrong, but people being what they are…

Earlier this month, MIT released the results of a brain scan study of people who use ChatGPT. Hat tip to ABI Bouhmaida who discussed the study on his Instagram account. I doubt I’d have caught it and I certainly would not have been able to parse the results so quickly or maybe at all.

In fairness to our future AI overlords, these results are based on one study. But the results?

83% of study participants who used ChatGPT to write couldn’t remember what they wrote just a few minutes later. In comparison, only 11% of participants who used Google or their own brain forgot what they wrote in that short amount of time.

Brain scans of ChatGPT users revealed a drop in neural connections from 79 to 42, or nearly half capacity. That doesn’t mean anyone’s brain was damaged by AI, but that their brains did not connect to or pay too much attention to the task at hand while they were using the tool. Another way to describe it? Participants offloaded their reasoning and problem-solving, and thus their brains did not engage at the same level while working the task.

The writing produced by participants who used ChatGPT was described as technically “close to perfect” while lacking personal insights and creativity.

In the final round of the study, ChatGPT users were required to write on their own, without assistance. The quality of their work declined. They didn’t recover the mental capacity they relinquished when they relied on AI to write for them. In contrast, participants who initially wrote without ChatGPT maintained their neural connections, even when they were allowed to use the AI tool.

Is this single study the be-all, end-all on how we use ChatGPT? Of course not. We and the tool will continue to evolve. But the study does confirm my worst fear about how many people are using AI for their creative work, whether that is fiction, poetry, essays, or reporting.

In my previous post, I wrote about how one writer uses ChatGPT to help her outline articles, which I thought was a bit too far. I might owe that writer an apology, because recently on the Killzone blog, one of the contributing writers listed all the ways he uses ChatGPT to write fiction and blog posts. Here’s a bit of his advice, which he called “How to Use ChatGPT Like a Pro Writer”:

• Upload samples of your work so that the AI can train itself to write in your voice.
• Ask it to write headlines and opening paragraphs for your blog posts.
• Use it to rewrite part of your work in plain English or in the style of another writer.
• Ask it to create better metaphors.

If that’s how the “pros” do it, I’ll keep playing in the rookie league, thanks.

It would have been bad enough if this were merely an example of a writer becoming overly reliant on AI tools to create his work for him. Rather, he was actively framing his dependency as a hot writing hack and encouraging other writers to offload their thinking to AI.

I was so angry I almost had to break my fingers to stop myself from commenting on his post. Killzone has never been one of my go-to sources for craft advice or insights – they have one solid contributor, maybe 2 others who are pretty good, and 4 or 5 who contribute a lot of words but no content, including one I believe is close to lapsing into a persistent vegetative state – but now it’s out of rotation. If I were a contributor, I don’t think I could quietly watch another group member pimp AI like that. Not only gross, but an astonishing misread of where the writing community sits with AI right now.

This is anathema to me. My whole deal here is striving for authenticity and individuality, and encouraging writers to put as much of themselves on the page as they can. I wouldn’t have predicted this when I started, but over time, authentic voice has emerged as the central theme of my blog and my writing life, and I can guarantee my work would not have evolved this way if I had let AI suggest topics, outline posts, or write opening paragraphs.

Is it any of my business? No. But when someone loudly suggests using AI in our creative work, I will as loudly decry this advice. When we outsource our creativity and our thinking processes, we lose a bit of ourselves along the way. It astounds and offends me that someone could be willing to amputate an entire branch of their brain in favor of a cyborg replacement.

Will this lack of engagement of the brain towards creative tasks have a long term effect? We don’t know yet. Bouhmaida likens long-term use of AI for creative work to a person using a wheelchair when they don’t need one. Eventually, the leg muscles will atrophy and you might not have a choice about the chair. Given the preliminary results of studies of short-term users, creative people should pause to think before they find themselves unable to.

These rather alarming results aside, I’m not going to remove ChatGPT from my toolbox because I don’t use it for creative work. This week I asked it to identify some new WordPress themes for the blog, based on a few sample themes and my personal preferences. I had it debug a problem I was having in the site admin. I uploaded some photos of cracked plaster and asked it to write a step by step DIY plan for fixing my foyer wall. If I have a tedious job that I would rather not do at all, I am happy to let ChatGPT handle it, leaving me more time for the good stuff, the work that requires my creativity and authentic voice.

As a personal assistant handling fact-based work, the tool is pretty sweet. Still, it has the ability to come on strong. Insidiously, if ChatGPT thinks you are working on some creative writing, it will offer to do it for you: Do you want me to suggest some opening paragraphs? Do you want me to write a few paragraphs about this location in a certain tone or writing style? Do you want me to write a sonnet?  So far, I have resisted temptation, but I have caught myself typing ‘yes’ without thinking, though I always delete it. The fucker is just so polite, it’s hard to say no.

I’m glad I wrote my earlier blog post when I thought of it. Life is full of interesting revelations and developments that trigger my natural instinct to yell, “See? I told you!” when regrettably, I did not tell you. In this case, however, I told you on June 2, and MIT released its report on June 10. We’ll cut the institute some slack on their delay, as their research required more effort than roiling up some bile. I’m delighted and maybe a bit horrified my instincts were correct.

Remind me to tell you how in 1995, I predicted that the gay community would eventually splinter into 1000 sub-cultures with every niche preference and peccadillo having its own flag.

I could have warned everyone, but I didn’t.

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Have you ever experienced a strong burst of creativity, like a long stretch of productive daily writing, and then felt a crash when the wave crested? You’re not alone, and apparently, we can blame our brains.

These findings aren’t new, but they’re new to me, thanks to a recent post by Anne Allen on her blog. Not long ago (relatively speaking), scientists identified an anatomical link between the creative part of the brain and the part in charge of depression. Specifically, the part of the brain that activates depressive episodes is also the part we use for complex thoughts (i.e.: creativity).

Researchers have even suggested that humans developed depression – along with over-thinking and disinterest in daily living – as a way to boost our problem-solving skills. In other words, fat, happy, well-fed people do not invent better mousetraps. Other researchers believe that mild depression correlates to stronger writing, because we overthink and are more critical of our work. In other words, the fat happy writer is satisfied with their first draft.

Now the question – does this circuit flow both ways? If mild depression is conducive to creative thinking, can spending too much time in a creative flow state trigger a depressive episode?

It’s possible? Allen believes this can be the case, but I’m not convinced. I suspect the post-creativity crash – to the extent you have one – results more from physical and mental fatigue than actual depression. It may also be a result of exiting a fictional world where you enjoy the powers of creation and control and having to return to {gestures broadly at everything} this place.

Also, the other articles I’ve read haven’t differentiated between mild and severe depression. As someone who has dealt with depression for most of my life, I can confirm there is a big difference between feeling mildly disinterested in your hobbies and having to make a concerted physical effort to get out of bed or take a shower. The former might engage some creative problem-solving, but the latter makes simple activities feel impossible.

That said, the list of creative geniuses who battle depression is deep and encompasses every discipline. But I suspect the depression came first, and the creativity – art, writing, comedy, dance, acting, better mousetraps – is one way the depressed mind works out its own solution. I’ve often found that engaging in creative work is much better than meds for a mild dose of the crap.

Your mileage may vary, but I found this interesting and plan to read up on it more. Here are a few books that came up as I wrote this post. Caveat – I haven’t read any of them, so I can’t recommend or un-recommend them. They merely caught my eye:

• The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain by Alice W. Flaherty. Flaherty uses her experience with both hypergraphia (compulsive writing) and depression to explore the neurological and psychological mechanisms behind creativity and mental illness.
• Creativity and Madness: New Findings and Old Stereotypes edited by Barry Panter. This collection of essays examine the link between mental illness and creative expression, drawing from psychology and psychiatry.
• Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy by Eric G. Wilson. Wilson argues against the modern obsession with “being happy”, saying that sadness and melancholy are vital to creativity and deep thinking.
• Creativity and Mental Illness by James C. Kaufman. Kaufman analyzes research on the correlation between creativity and various mental illnesses, including depression.
• Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind by Scott Barry Kaufman & Carolyn Gregoire. Kaufman and Gregoire use research in psychology and neuroscience to examine how positive personality traits like openness, sensitivity, and emotional intensity are key to creativity, while also being linked to depression.

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I could have titled this segment “Be a Geek” but I don’t want to give non-geeks the wrong idea.

But also, you’re a geek. Maybe you aren’t a traditional geek, immodestly obsessed with science fiction and fantasy books, films, and other paraphernalia, but you go hard for your hobbies, interests, and likes. You might be a sports or political geek, or a music or film geek. You might be a foodie or love gardening. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re pursuing some creative geekery.

Put simply, a geek is someone who loves what they love, passionately and unapologetically.

Some of my favorite books are those in which the writers put it all on the page, not only their passions or deep background knowledge, but all the fringe elements and garnishes that make the work uniquely theirs. The kind of inside knowledge that you can’t get from research; you have to live with it. The kind of book that could not have been written by anyone but that single author.

Today’s examples come from the world of comics, where, by definition, writers have to be comfortable indulging their interests. It’s easier now that superhero film franchises make multi-millions at the box office, but still – the people who write and draw comics aren’t doing it for the money or prestige. No one is writing about superheroes with a Pulitzer in mind.

Because I’m a Gen X writer, both of these examples also come from the 80s. I could have found more modern examples, but the surge of high-quality, independent comics publishers from the mid-80s – much of it self-published – is one of my geekdoms.

With Aztec Ace, writer Doug Moench created a comic that combined a vast range of interests: time travel, the Aztecs (naturally), Depression-era America, Sigmund Freud, comic books and pulp magazines, and philosophical paradoxes. The result is a compelling, intelligent, and yet action-packed science fiction/mystery adventure comic. It’s Dr. Who for conspiracy theorists, with gams and boobs.

The title ran for 15 issues in the 1980s, at the time a solid number for an offbeat non-superhero comic published by a small independent company. It ended rather abruptly, but 35 years later, it has been collected in a gorgeous hardbound edition, with a new story.

In Time², writer/artist Howard Chaykin explores an other-world where time is experienced at a different level, and where demons, advanced robotics, and zombies co-exist. Film noir mobsters, city politics, urban renewal, Jazz-era New York, and sex collide in Chaykin’s most personal work. Chaykin has said he did not expect Time² to find a large audience, either at the time of its creation or more recently, when the first two graphic novels were collected in hardcover, along with a new full-length story. He proudly affirms that – damn the torpedoes – these stories were for him.

In addition to zombie jazz musicians (above), the comic featured haunted horny police cars…

Sex robot serial killers…

…and legally binding wills that required a black widow murderer to cohabitate with her undead husband for five years before she could inherit his estate.

When he launched the series, Chaykin was coming off his very popular American Flagg! series, which itself was an amalgam of Chaykin’s interests in speculative fiction, late stage capitalism, pop culture, sex kinks, and soft-core porn, which formed the foundation for a series of stories that were part science fiction and part political thriller, with frequent interludes for quickie encounters between the protagonist and various side characters, and sometimes side characters with each other. Only Raul the talking cat missed out.

The 80s were a grand time for comic artists with vision, who were unafraid to indulge their interests and passions in their work. Aztec Ace and Time² are both well-remembered, but I wouldn’t consider either very well known. I’d love for them to find a wider audience, by whatever means.

Others I could have mentioned: Cerebus (sword and sorcery, religion, political satire, gender politics); Zot! (super-heroes, science fiction, art deco); Love & Rockets (science fiction, punk music, magic realism, South American politics, Archie comics). Yes, those are all from the 80s, too. With the exception of Zot!, they all wore their sexual proclivities on their sleeves. That probably says something about me, too.

What kind of novel or story would combine my multiple interests? If I were writing the most indulgent work imaginable, it would likely feature some combination of tough women and mean gays, exclusive clubs, kid gangs and chosen families, political intrigue, family dynasties, comic books, early 20th century European literature, ghosts, Nazis, writers and artists, time travel, talking apex predators, secret societies, conspiracy theories, Celtic mythology, alternate worlds, and doppelgangers.

It would explore themes of identity, purpose, individuality and authenticity, spirituality, alienation, belonging, and sacrifice, wrapped up with more questions than answers. There’d be awkward sex, casual violence, vengeance, loss, family secrets, love’s cruelty, passion for creation, and resistance and dignity in the face of life’s absurdity.

It would definitely mash up genres (SF, fantasy, horror, true crime, murder mystery, superhero, alternative history) and if I could work in an Excel spreadsheet, ice cream, and a dinosaur, I’d be in Heaven.

What about you? If you gave yourself, permission, what’s the most balls to the wall indulgent story you could concoct?

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Writers may find it difficult to bring attention to their work. Thanks to the internet, there are so many more people writing and places to publish and books available for free that it takes a lot of money, luck, or both to rise above the din.

Authenticity can help. In addition to being good for your soul, authenticity makes you more relatable and more memorable. Pursuing your passions – rather than chasing the market – can help you attract like-minded people, the very people who are most likely to enjoy, follow, and share your writing.

So be different. Take risks. Write what no one else is writing. If you follow as many blogs as I do, you’ve probably seen tips like “write a great premise!” and “create interesting characters!”, without any practical advice to back them up. Even when a blogger goes a bit deeper, their recommendations tend to come from the shallow end of what they personally find interesting and likely to sell well, rather than what’s truly unique.

Unlike this week’s look at being honest on the page, you can probably think of many examples of novels with attention-grabbing premises: A mystery told from the POV of an autistic boy (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time); a boy goes on a quest to solve a puzzle left behind by his father, who died on 9/11 (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close); a group of residents in a retirement community solve cold case murders (The Thursday Murder Club); etc., etc.

But even the most interesting genre novels – and I love them – are written in a fairly straightforward manner. Characters are introduced, the action rises and falls, the hero falters but probably wins the day, even if the win is not complete or what he expected. The drapery is unique but the scaffolding is familiar. Rarer, though, are those books that play with structure or language.

China Miéville’s The City and the City plays with storytelling and reader experience in an interesting way. In the book, considered part of the New Weird genre, two Eastern-European city-states simultaneously occupy the same physical space. Citizens of each city can see and interact with their counterparts in the other, but are forbidden by law from doing so. From childhood, they are trained to “unsee” the residents and buildings in their sister city, on penalty of being disappeared by a secretive organization known as the Breach. Miéville recreates the eeriness of his setting, describing what his narrator sees and shouldn’t see and unsees, before he introduces the concept of the blended cities. Thus the reader is left to figure out what’s happening. It’s incredibly disorienting and takes time to get accustomed to. In effect, by dropping the reader into the story world without explaining how it functions, Miéville trains the reader to see the world in the same way its citizens are trained to see only their part of it.

Miéville also uses description in an interesting way in The Last Days of New Paris, an alt-history novel in which Paris is still occupied by the Nazis in 1950. Along with guns and hand grenades, weapons of war include living Exquisite Corpses, real-world manifestations of surrealist art. Exquisite Corpse was a parlor game in which images were created by multiple players – usually artists, because of course – each contributing an element in sequence, based on agreed-upon rules. Here’s a classic example.

Want to experience creative brain-freeze? Imagine coming into a novel cold and reading a detailed description of the above and trying to imagine it as a living creature attacking a band of French resistance fighters. The description makes no sense, even upon multiple readings. You might wonder if your copy of the novel is missing some words or if perhaps you’ve had a mild stroke.

When I say that most writing advice isn’t structured to encourage risk-taking and authenticity, this is the kind of work I have in mind. Presented with The City and the City and The Last Days of New Paris in draft, the average writing guru would have argued for more context clues or backstory in the early scenes. While Don’t Confuse the Reader is great advice for novices, when that rule is set in stone, we risk losing our ability to surprise, challenge, and delight the reader as well.

Most of us will not rise to the occasion as well as China Miéville or my next inspiration, Alan Moore, whose personality, talents, intellect, and interests are uniquely suited to creative puzzles and complex plots and themes. However, if we’re going to learn, we might as well look to some of the best.

In his short story collection, Voice of the Fire, Moore creates 12 fantasy stories set in the same geographical location in England over the course of multiple centuries, beginning at the end of the Stone Age and continuing through medieval, Victorian, and modern times. Linked by geography, theme, and imagery, the stories are told through the points of view of various characters, including one that presents quite a challenge for the reader.

In “Hob’s Hog”, set in 4000 BC, the narrator is a stone age halfwit who is chased away by his tribe after the death of the mother who protected him. Whether Hob is developmentally challenged or merely an evolutionary left-behind we can’t know, but his vocabulary is extremely limited by modern times. Moore has said that he restricted himself to using some 1,200-1,400 words for the entire 45 page story, which required some creative combinations and permutations to convey what Hob sees and experiences in a way that a modern reader can grasp. Here’s how the story begins:

“A-hind of hill, ways off to sun-set-down, is sky come like as fire, and walk I up in way of this, all hard of breath, where is grass colding on I’s feet and wetting they.

There is not grass on high of hill. There is but dirt, all in a round, that hill is as like to a no-hair man, he’s head. Stands I, and turn I’s face to wind for sniff, and yet is no sniff come for far ways off. I’s belly hurts, in middle of I. Belly-air come up in mouth, and lick of it is like to lick of no thing. Dry-up blood lump is come black on knee, and is with itch. Scratch I, where is yet more blood come.”

You can see that Hob’s ability to describe himself and his world is constrained. He has no words for behind, atop, smell, stomach, taste, or scab, or even the self-referential me, my, or myself.

Try that on for 45 pages.

It’s not easy to read and there’s certainly no skimming any of its pages, not if you want to follow the whole story. It took me as long to read the first story as it did the remaining twelve. While the story was challenging, the reward was worth it, and I imagine Moore felt the same when he finished writing it.

Few of us will master our craft to the point where we can create a sense of disorientation in our readers or box in their worldview with a limited vocabulary, but we can be bold in our own ways and it never hurts to challenge ourselves. You don’t have to confess a dirty secret to put a lot of yourself on the page.

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Another thought from Lynda Barry’s Syllabus, her memoir about teaching her college-level creativity course.

To loosen her students’ creativity, Barry uses a handful of repetitive drawing exercises that on the surface may seem juvenile. For example, she has her students fill a page in their composition books with a giant spiral in pen, instructing them to keep the lines as close as possible without allowing them to touch. While they draw the spiral, she has them listen to a short recording about creativity. Barry believes that the repetitive motion helps her students loosen up their minds and their muscles, freeing them to be more relaxed and spontaneous when they draw.

She also has her students color pages from coloring books or other simple black and white printed illustrations, using crayons. As you might expect, some of the students question this exercise and suggest they would be embarrassed to be caught coloring in a coloring book as homework. But again, as with memory work in writing, Barry wanted her students to practice the physicality of making art more than she wanted them to create an original piece of work, at least right away. She wants her students to lose their inhibitions and judgments about their drawing ability, and instead focus on simple building blocks. I suppose if you spent the day coloring in coloring books, drawing a stick man doodle would seem like classical art in comparison.

Barry’s instructions included filling in as much of the white space on the page as possible with color. Anyone who has colored with crayon knows how hard it is to cover all the white. It takes repetitive strokes and heavy hand pressure to get those layers.

Initially, Barry told her students what to do but not how, and they generally accepted the assignment. In later classes, however, she provided a shortcut, letting students know in advance that they would have to press down hard with their crayons to achieve the desired effect. In contrast to the earlier classes, these students complained about the coloring assignment. They hated it, and Barry realized that the shortcut had taken the pleasure out of discovery. Instead of finding their own method through trial and error, and the pleasure of accomplishment that comes with it, the students experienced the exercise as mere drudgery. Worse, the resentment prevented them from getting into the spontaneous mindset that Barry sought to create.

Writers face this same conundrum. Though we may want someone to tell us how to write well, our teachers can only point us in the right direction. I struggle with plot and often wished I could ask someone what should happen next at a certain point in my story, but it doesn’t work that way. I could ask, I suppose. I might get an answer. I might even get a good answer. But it wouldn’t be my answer and I would never learn what I must if I relied too much on creative handholding.

You can find a lot of good advice and helpful tips for working through craft problems, but ultimately, the work is yours. No one can – or should – tell you how or what to write. Unraveling story knots can be as difficult as covering white paper with crayon. It takes effort and patience. You have to cover the same spots over and over and over. You hand might start to hurt. But when you figure out the solution, you’ll have gained more from the exercise than if someone had given you the cheat code.