
How to Begin a Novel - sohkamyung
https://aiweirdness.com/post/189170306297/how-to-begin-a-novel
======
AnimalMuppet
Some of those sound like something I'd actually like to read.

> I am, or was.

> There was once a man who lived for a very long time; perhaps three thousand
> years, or perhaps a thousand million years, maybe a trillion or so,
> depending on how the scientists look at it.

> “I am Eilie, and I am here to kill the world.”

> I have just been informed, that the debate over the question ‘is it right or
> wrong to have immortal souls’ has been finally brought to a conclusion.

> The purple-haired woman came to the clearing in the plain, and without
> looking up from her book, said, “It’s too late to be thinking about baby
> names.”

> The village of Pembrokeshire, in the county of Mersey, lies on a wide, happy
> plain, which, in a few years, was to become known as the “Land of the
> Endless Mountains.”

> I was playing with my dog, Mark the brown Labrador, and I had forgotten that
> I was also playing with a dead man.

> The black stone was aching from the rain.

> How many times have I had the misfortune to die?

> The first day I met my future self, I was aboard the old dirigible that lay
> in wait for me on the far side of the moon.

I could see a fascinating story starting with most of those lines.

~~~
mrob
> How many times have I had the misfortune to die?

That's basically the plot to Planescape: Torment.

[https://www.mobygames.com/game/planescape-
torment](https://www.mobygames.com/game/planescape-torment)

~~~
renjimen
And the awesome The Edge of Tomorrow / All You Need Is Kill!

------
Apocryphon
> There was once a land of sand, and sand, sand sand sand sand sand sand sand
> sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand
> sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand
> sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand
> sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand
> sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand
> sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand
> sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand

ah, a Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson production

~~~
daosyn
or the woman in the dunes

------
DrScump
Most of this strikes me as mundane word salad, none of which can compare with
human-composed entries to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest[0]. It seeks "an
atrocious opening sentence to a hypothetical bad novel."

This year's winner:

"Space Fleet Commander Brad Brad sat in silence, surrounded by a slowly
dissipating cloud of smoke, maintaining the same forlorn frown that had been
fixed upon his face since he’d accidentally destroyed the phenomenon known as
time, thirteen inches ago."

[0] [https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2019](https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2019)

~~~
shantly
Don't forget the Lyttle Lytton! Same thing, lower word limit.

[http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html](http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html)

The earlier ones are better IMO but the "found" category is always good for a
laugh.

------
amayne
I’m an Edgar Finalist, Wall Street Journal best-selling author, blah, blah,
and I can confidently say that...I’m doomed.

GPT-2 is amazing without even grasping deeper context. Once NN’s start to
grasp arc and continuity (which is understanding changes over time) I’ll be
looking for a new job.

~~~
lordgrenville
Can't disagree with this enough.

GPT-2 is good at generating coherent original sentences based on a given
corpus, but they don't really mean anything, which rapidly becomes clearer
with each extra sentence. Ask it for an essay and you get a string of
sentences with zero underlying point. The distance from here to writing
original novels is very, very far. (Experimental poets, however, might need to
worry!)

~~~
amayne
> Can't disagree with this enough.

I'm not sure if you're actually disagreeing with me.

My point is once some _future_ neural network starts to grasp continuity and
context (something GPT-2 does not do) I think writing won't be safe from AI.

I couldn't speculate when that would be, but I've seen some unpublished
efforts that make me think it's sooner than many people might think.

But between here and there will be the opportunity for AI-assistive writing
that could facilitate what my developmental editors and beta-readers do.

~~~
notahacker
I don't think it's at all guaranteed that future neural networks will grab
continuity and context [in a meaningful sense, as opposed to basics like the
character and place names being consistent and the context continuing to
involve a murder and detectives] still less actually plot well. More
importantly, for actual publishable writing as opposed to spam content AI has
to do more than just _start_ to grasp continuity and context, because every
unpublishable human writer reaches that level, and most of them understand the
much higher level of narrative arcs, characterisation and twists too. I don't
think the cost of cash advances for no-name writers or lack of half decent
unsolicited submissions to choose from is a big problem for publishers, is it?
Surely 'time to fix not- _irredeemably_ -flawed texts up enough to make them
marketable' is in shorter supply...

Agreed that AI-assistive writing is pretty close to the point where it can
save you the hassle of thinking up interesting ways of describing minor
characters and locations, but of course when it reaches that level there are
massive areas of content creation for AI companies which are more lucrative
than novel writing and don't require further technological advances...

~~~
amayne
Assuming a long enough timeline, I can’t see why they wouldn’t. But that’s
just a subjective guess on my part.

I think AI content creation will affect everything. Publishing will only be
tiny part of that...but a significant part if that’s your industry.

------
marcus_holmes
I remember when it was commonly thought that computer programs could never be
creative. That the "spark" of creativity is impossible for a pure-logic
machine to produce.

Interesting that that turned out to be such a simple problem.

I look forward to reading AI-generated fiction.

~~~
hoseja
This is still monkeys and typewriters, just the keys write entire words and
dynamically change to a set of likely words based on some corpus of
literature. And it's heavily editorialized.

~~~
falcor84
I'm sorry to say that this perfectly describes human written novels.
Particularly the part about heavy editorializing, most people wouldn't believe
the sort of books that come out as self published without an editor.

------
camillomiller
Holy Moly:

"There was once a man who lived for a very long time; perhaps three thousand
years, or perhaps a thousand million years, maybe a trillion or so, depending
on how the scientists look at it."

This is pure Vonnegut

------
Jun8
I absolutely loved the opening “The first day of the world was born in the
year 1985, in an old side of the world, and the air of the old sky of lemon
and waves and berries.”

------
Zobat
Just a tip. Reading these, select your favorite British actors voice and
"hear" them reading it - dramatically. I mostly went for Patric Stewart. It
was great. Try it.

"At the end of the world, where the tides burst upon the drowned, there exists
a land of dragons, of dragons, which is the land of the dragons."

------
BrissyCoder
I really really want to read more about the neighbours and their beast.

------
fargle
"It was a dark and stormy night"

[http://ronaldbrichardson.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/03/Snoo...](http://ronaldbrichardson.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/03/Snoopys-Dark-and-Stormy-Night-Second-Line.jpg)

[http://ronaldbrichardson.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/03/Snoo...](http://ronaldbrichardson.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/03/Snoopy-It-was-a-dark-and-stormy-night.jpg)

~~~
DrScump
More about the Bulwer-Lytton contest here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21591206](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21591206)

------
erikig
I'm intrigued at how this NN plays in the fuzzy line between magical
surrealism and wordy incomprehensibility, it reminds me of the writings of
many great writers...

------
6gvONxR4sf7o
NaNoGenMo is one of my favorite weird things.

[https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2018/11/forget-nanowrimo-read-
the...](https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2018/11/forget-nanowrimo-read-these-mad-
nanogenmo-novels-generated-by-computer-programs/)

I think we'll be hearing more interesting things from it in the coming years.
I'll be excited to see more realistic generation, but sad to see less weird
bonkers shit.

------
mirimir
My favorite is still ...

> As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small
> talk.

from Hannu Rajaniemi's _The Quantum Thief_.

------
sedeki
Is it just me or do most of these begin _in medias res_?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res)

------
musicale
Already covered:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21591206](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21591206)

~~~
musicale
Ah and already posted of course. ;-)

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dicytea
About GPT-2, is there any site like talktotransformer.com that can generate
longer output? The length generated by that site leaves a lot to be desired.

~~~
nickwalton00
Best would be to run it in a colab notebook yourself.
[https://colab.research.google.com/github/ilopezfr/gpt-2/blob...](https://colab.research.google.com/github/ilopezfr/gpt-2/blob/master/gpt-2-playground_.ipynb)

------
Cougher
Looks like neural net writing may catch up to Richard Brautigan.

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LanceH
For the military inclined, "No shit, there I was..."

------
SantoshRocks
How to select topic for the novel!! I mean which gener novels have maximum
craze!!

