The LAST Word

    Authors have to figure out their characters first before they begin plotting or creating a setting. Sometimes, the characters and setting come at the same time, such as a lady in Regency England. When authors determine the characters, they are able to fit a setting around them. Here are things to consider when writing characters . Sometimes, authors are unsure how many characters are enough for a story. The answer depends on the type of fiction and author's taste. Fantasy authors often use 10 to 12 main characters to build out a world while romance authors can stick to about four or five. Children's authors use one or two. You need interaction, world-building and suspense, but you also do not want to confuse your reader with two many characters. This confusion often shows up in movies when directors pack a movie with characters and fail to develop them. If you are unsure, let someone outside your genre read it to tell you.  The most believable characters have ...

My daughter was working on her computer. She came across artificial intelligence that is writing books for people. She told me about it and said to research it. AI is entering the world of books. Savvy writers should take advantage of it because it could be the future. Also, it could make writing books that much easier. Here is what I learned. Text Sounds Human In the past, machines would collate tweets and articles and compile into a semblance of a book. However, today, new machine-learning models trained on billions of words have given AI the ability to produce text that sounds human. They use human speech patterns and basic structures of grammar. They can generate sentences and paragraphs that are readable. They still don't create intentional meaning in the paragraphs. OpenAI GPT2 was released. It allows users to create specific styles, such as New Yorker or Georgic poetry. More to Come While, at the moment, it can't write a novel, the technol...