Something has been happening for decades. Regional dialects are morphing into a California monotone. I first noticed this in Atlanta decades ago. The southern drawl was being tempered by the flat dialect found in Hollywood movies and television programs. When I traveled outside of Atlanta, the local dialect was still present. In the state capital, it was fading.
When I visited Texas decades ago, the people's unique speech pattern was prevalent. Last year, I attended the Austin Film Festival. Granted, there were many people from across the country there, yet it was the speech of the local residents that amazed me. They sounded like TV actors with the flat, California pattern that tempered the drawl.
Television and movies are a major influence. The children of immigrants from non-English speaking countries drop their parents accents and adopt the television dialect.
A new force has risen that is changing more than speech patterns. It's influencing written language, decision making, research and values. That force is artificial intelligence.
In only a few years, AI has invaded the education system with students using it to write university entrance applications as well as essays and exams. Employers are inundated with resumes that all read the same making it difficult to distinguish candidates. In business, memos, reports and proposals written by AI sound the same. Individual voices are being rolled into the same delivery. The material comes from programs loaded with vast amounts of written, visual and audio data and a software designed to guess the next most likely word, pixel or sound. The process points to the same answers once the data points are shuffled.
People are feeding prompts into chatbots to produce AI written books. Only a year ago, such stories were generalized and flat. Advances in the software now deliver far more complex works. People have produced AI derived fake film trailers that computers wrote, created the visuals for and added the audio. Unlike earlier attempts to create AI images, these contain photorealistic images comparable to CGI effects in modern films with story lines that were hard to distinguish from Hollywood productions. This will be accelerated as people stop creating and start prompting to get a meat grinder version of values and prose out of chatbots.
At the moment, there are five major players in the artificial intelligence landscape, OpenAI, Alphabet (Google), Anthropic, XAI and Meta (Facebook). Everyone of these companies is losing millions of dollars a month because the expenses are overwhelming and their target markets can't afford the prices. One by one, these companies will merge until there is only one to collect all the revenue and control what people see and ultimately think.
Few will notice the homogenization at first. Comfort and convenience are addictive. Then, it will become the norm.
In his epic fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien describes an inscription on the ruling ring that can make slaves of everyone in the world. “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.”
You may have heard people say the first ten pages of your book are the most important. In truth, it’s the first five. When submitting to literary agents and editors, this is where they’ll stop reading if you can’t draw them into the characters and story with well-crafted prose. Not just agents, readers who leaf through your book in a store or online have to be wowed or they won’t buy.
Authors must write for their time. In the 19th century, novels could begin with pages of description and setting. Both are important, but readers today want to be immersed in characters and action from the beginning.
Here’s how I began the first draft of the opening of Half Awakened Dreams, the second volume of The Carandir Saga trilogy. I was just getting ideas out and exploring how I wanted to present the characters and story, Here are the first four paragraphs.
The wind rarely stopped blowing fine dust across the high desert plain on the North Continent east of the Carandir border. It was caught in the brambly branches of the low thorn bushes, parched now in the summer heat. It had been two months since the flash floods of a short spring had temporarily filled the dry washes and ravines to overflowing, bringing with them a surge of life as dormant plants sprang into bloom for a few weeks in a colorful display of flowering spectacle. Insects waking from hibernation pollinated blossoms that dropped their seeds on the barren soil to wait for the rains of the next season.
Shara rode in one of the seven wagons the Dharam exiles had been given. She suckled her infant son, Dhamar, unknown and illegitimate son of Ryckair, now King of Carandir and the Western realms.
The exiles from Dharam, headed by the deposed king, Masalta, had been given nine wagons filled with grain, dried meats and barrels of water. After a year, they had nearly run out. Shara’s body was leaner than before, yet she was allotted extra provisions to produce enough milk for the baby to suckle.
The relentless wind blew against the wooden sides of the wagon as she remembered her fine rooms in the palace at Kackar when she was a princess of the Dharam and where she had first entertained then Prince Ryckair. He had arrived like the answer to a wish, a strong leader, still unsure of himself, who she could molded to oppose her father, Masalta, and give her the Dharam throne as queen. Even the frozen wastes of the Fadella camp where she had seduced Ryckair and taken his seed after her father had discovered her plot was better than the broiling desert that stretched on forever.
The first paragraph is poetic, in the way many 19th century novels begin, but who’s point of view do we see the wind through? The omniscient narrator is telling readers about it rather than having it shown through a character’s experience.
A character isn’t introduced in a scene until the second paragraph. We know Shara and her fellow Dharam are exiled to a desert, but not what she wants or what the stakes are. All readers see is the situation as it might appear in a news story.
Extraneous descriptions of the desert weather and vegetation, along with exposition detailing the past, may be interesting, but they can stop the story. These details can be bled in once the characters and their problems are established. It also took up 302 words.
Here’s the opening of the published novel.
Shara cut her red hair short in an attempt to find relief from the heat of the eastern desert on the North Continent. She rode in one of the wagons of the exiled Dharam. Her father, Masalta, still claimed the title King of Dharam, though his subjects now numbered less than two hundred former officers, ministers, courtiers and supporters.
She suckled her eight-month-old infant son, Dhamar, the unknown and illegitimate son of Ryckair Avar, now King of Carandir. Her breasts were once gorged with milk, before the provisions they were sent into exile with ran out. The infant’s name was drawn from the tongue Shara’s ancestors spoke before they adopted the Carandirian language. It meant, “The people’s leader.”
The babe began to cry. Shara took him from her breast and rocked him. “Hush, my darling. You are the heir to Carandir, both the north and south continents. You will wear the dragon-crested crown one day, my dear one, but first, you will kill your father.”
The book starts in a scene with a visual image and action. The setting is still there, yet woven into the story. Readers know immediately who is present, what they want and what the stakes are. They see the wagon and a description of Shara with enough background to understand the characters’ plight, all in the first four paragraphs and 165 words.
People who extort or decry artificial intelligence paint rosy or doomsday scenarios but don't take into account the most powerfully driver of change, human nature. They see things through a transactional filter and forget what makes us human, compassion, community and unity. This is what holds people together and when these qualities diminish, a society denigrates into chaos and falls apart. It's happened to empire after empire for millennia and each generation is convinced it can't happen to them, and discover it can and does.
There have been tools on the market to assist with the story telling process. Before writing was invented, tales were memorized and presented aurally by poets and bards who could recite tens of thousands of words. When writing was developed, stories could be written on papyrus, animal hides, stone columns and clay tablets. This was a major advancement in recording ideas for future generations, high tech for the time.
Charles Dickens wrote every book with a quill pen on paper. Those were, once more, breakthroughs in technology.
With the advent of the typewriter, authors began to create stories at a keyboard. Audio recording equipment allowed the option to dictate books and have someone else type it up. Word processors added the ability to easily make edits and corrections, store files electronically, print them and later transmit them electrically to agents and publishers.
Word processors also offered spell checking. At first, this was a file with a list of words the program would compare against a manuscript. Any words not in the electronic list were flagged and the author had to make corrections manually. Grammar checkers were added to catch double words, mismatches in tense and other simple problems. Later advancements presented possible replacement words, yet it was always up to the author to make the corrections or ignore the warning if they didn’t match their style.
Technology has enhanced the ability of authors to share concepts in more efficient ways.
With the widespread acceptance of the personal computer, other tools appeared that didn’t just flag possible errors in spelling and grammar, they corrected them automatically. These offered a teaching opportunity. Writers could see examples of how to improve their communication and employ these lessons in future work.
They also carried disadvantages. People can continue to write poorly and rely on these tools to fix errors. As in any profession, practitioners must learn the craft by heart and take off the training wheels.
It is in the act of writing where we form our ideas, concepts, arguments, observations and have the opportunity to explore subjects to understand them more fully. In some cases we may change our own perceptions as we discover new facts and consider previously held convictions.
Good writing doesn’t require a degree in English. Everyone can learn how to write well with some instruction and reference material. A great resource for clear writing is Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. This little book of and writing style.
Today, a new tool gives great promise and carries a dangerous threat; artificial intelligence, AI. When people use it to write sentences, paragraphs or whole books, the words produced are not the authors. They are drawn from a massive database of written material drawn from Internet posts and published works taken by AI companies, often with no compensation to the creators.
AI can also lead to the homogenization of text where every report, every resume every university entrance letter and every story fall into a predictable format so there is no distinction.
Writing is art, be ita work of fiction, nonfiction, business report or proposal. Art is the expression of the human soul, not in a religious sense, but as it expresses the essence of what it is to be human. In art, creators share themselves with others and help bind communities together.
AI produced materiel does none of this. The large language models (LLM) don’t think. They have no consciousness. They are computer programs that use sophisticated neural network feedback to draw stored data points and guess the most probable word in a sentence given the billions of examples fed into it.
These answers are not hard wired. The neural network design and programs that run them scan the databases and make a guess as to the next word. Humans from around the world, mainly in third world countries where they earn $1 a day, check the answers and mark it correct or incorrect. The computer then seals off incorrect neural network pathways and reinforces correct ones until the AI is trained to select the answer with the highest chance of being correct. How correct? Astrophysicist Niel deGrasse Tyson, director the Hayden Planetarium in New York, asked AI a set of question he already knew the answers to. The machine gave the wrong answer 20% of the time because it always has to respond with something. By design. AI can’t return, “I don’t know.”
Even when correct, a major problem with asking AI to provide an answer is you get a result, but because you didn’t work through the steps to arrive at the answer, you don’t really know what it means because the underlying reasoning is missing. As such, you will find it difficult to extrapolate on the answer to apply it on future questions without asking AI again, perpetuating the trap.
There are people using AI to create entire books they upload to Amazon. They may think they’ll make a lot of money, few self published authors do, or want to pretend they’re authors, but they didn’t write the books and can claim neither ownership nor copyright. This devalues actual books and floods the market, making it difficult for readers to discover actual books.
I challenge you to be a true writers. Don’t use AI or lean on writing tools that correct your work so they become crutches. Learn the skills and practice them. Put the time into thinking about who your characters are and where the story is going. Express your observations, opinions and emotions in prose you create.
Create art as the expression of your humanity to share with the world and bind us together. This is the true power of writing.
Some people express the feeling they're not really writers and are just faking it. They fear readers won't like what they write. If they receive recognition, they may think they don’t deserve it. This can cause anxiety and rob you of any pleasure or feeling of accompaniment.
Here is the truth.
If you've completed a manuscript, whether it's been published or not, you’re not an imposter. Your a writer because you've done what writers do and achieved something many others never have or never will. Bask in that accomplishment.
If you've received a rejections from literary agents, editors or publishers, you're not an imposter. Rejection is a way of life for authors. Some best selling books have had over 100 rejections before they were published by someone. Agent and publishers carry their own prejudices and tastes. A rejection is about the work, not you as a person.
If some people criticize your story, you're not an imposter. Don’t worry about how people receive your work. There will be those who love it and those who condemn it. Write for yourself. The only obligation you have is to be honest and respect the people and places you write about, even yourself.
I've received 1 star reviews with nasty comments and 5 star reviews exalting my work. The best feeling is to have someone at a personal appearance say they enjoyed one of my books. Even if that was the only person who did, it was all worth while because we made contact through the book. If you have faith in yourself and your book, you'll have no regrets.
The surest way not to have your book published and read is to give.
Come join me at the Fantastic Grown-Up Book Fair in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia on Saturday, October 11, 2025. I'll there with my fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, women's fiction
and children's picture books. I hope to see you.
We’re often pushed to achieve perfection. Mistakes are taken by some as a sign of laziness or incompetence. Phrases like failure is not an option can set unrealistic burdens on people and lead to stress, which can result in more failure.
In truth, failure is a great teaching tool. Without the permission to fail, we become complacent and stagnant. This can cause us to repeat the same actions over and over in the fear we’ll overreach and be ruined.
No one is born knowing everything. We have to practice. This is a large part of childhood, testing ourselves and our abilities to understand how to live in the world.
In writing, we often yearn for praise. Criticism stings. Yet, it is in experimenting, failing and trying again that we expand our reach. Because our nature is to seek acceptance in the group, we can berate ourselves for not writing the perfect line of dialogue, struggling to give a character an emotional reaction or not finishing the word count we set for ourselves.
Yet, with each failure, we learn what doesn’t work and are free to experiment and find what does. If you fail, be kind to yourself and look for ways to improve.
The process of writing is a solitary one. When I’m writing, all my attention is on the work. In a novel, that means keeping a multitude of threads in my mind to know what came before, how a character acts, what forces push from the outside and so on. I see the world I’m creating in my mind, but that vision doesn’t always come out on the page. Things that seem obvious to me may be confusing to others. Joining a writing group can help you see your material through different eyes.
In my short story “The Hell of It”, published in my anthology Unexpected Consequences, I had a clear theme in mind. When people in my writing group read it, they thought the theme was something else. I had to look at the story and find ways to make my vision clear. Without the members of the writing group, I’d never have known this.
As helpful as writing groups are, you must be careful in choosing one.
A writing group where everyone heaps praise on every work may satisfy you’re ego, but it won’t help you become a better writer. If the group just validates everything, you won’t know what needs to be changed. Find a group of writers who offer solid critiques. Don’t look for approval. Seek comments that help you improve
Yet, avoid groups where members are toxic and make comments to enlarge their own egos or act aggressively.
When giving a critique, only talk about the work, never the writer. Don’t try to psychoanalyze others or tell writers they aren’t qualified to speak on a subject.
Writers can fall into a trap where they begin to think they have to imitate the views of a fellow member or an instructor. Take all criticism in and consider if it can help, but don’t let it overshadow your own vision and voice. At the same time, if a piece of writing confuses too many, examine how you can make your story clearer.
Keep in mind, people in a writing group are trying to help make your story better. We all want to be accepted and praised, but don’t argue about or defend a point. Answer any questions asked. Still, the only thing you should say at the end of a critique is, “Thank you.”
Mark Twain wrote, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
Finding the exact word to describe something, add tension, express joy or communicate sadness can take effort. If you write, “He walked down the stairs”, it conveys a very different image from, “He flew down the stairs.”
The right word can eliminate the need for adverbs, which can make a sentence passive. “He quickly ate the pie,” could be better written as “He devoured the pie.” One word conveys the sense of haste and possession.
You can develop a command of vocabulary by reading. Still, there are times when the exact word eludes us. Then, a thesaurus becomes our friend.
A thesaurus is a collection of related words and phrases, each with subtle differences. You can find on-line thesauruses that give a few dozen examples. More complete guides with greater choices can be found in books, such as Roget’s International Thesaurus. This suggests hundreds of choices to express precisely what you intend.
Every word in a sentence needs to be important, otherwise it has no place. This requires word crafting. This is a process that starts with the first draft and is thoughtfully combed through in subsequent drafts.
Think of the pictures and emotions words convey to readers. Look for action verbs to emphasize the feat.
You could write, “Firefighters ran quickly into the burning building to rescue the child.”
Though this sentence gives a sense of urgency, it’s generic. People run in races and “run to the store” for bread. The adverb quickly could paint different pictures to different readers.
To give a sense of firefighters risking life and limb to save someone, we can look for words that match urgency, danger and dedication. “Desperation consumed the firefighters as they fought through the inferno in hope the the child was still alive.”
Here, the word desperation shows their emotional states. The word consumed serves two purposes. It give the sense of the intensity of the emotion and hints at the flames that could consume them and the child. They don’t just run through the flames, they fight their way through. We again get an emotional reaction in the word hope. Both the danger and the possible failure of their mission is emphasized with the words still alive.
When a sentence conveys more than one thing, a deeper picture is painted and readers become more involved in the story and the lives of the characters.
Scenes can concentrate on a few or even a single character. They can also contain large groups of characters, such as at a sports stadium or in a battle. In both cases, the story has to present people and not just the crowd to engage readers.
In describing a political convention, there will be speeches, cheers and chants. If you only concentrate on these, readers will see an overview but not have a character to anchor their attention to. Imagine the following scene at a political rally.
The delegates waved signs reading “Derrick” and “Bring it On” amidst a low rumble of voices. Smiles and laughter flowed in waves across the convention floor.
Jane’s eyes never strayed from the podium as she squeezed Fred’s hand. “He’ll announce funding for River Park. I just know it.”
A roar of voices blasted from the walls to drown out the band on stage as Governor Derrick stepped up to the podium accompanied by his wife and son. He fired his words in short blasts, emphasizing each with a fist smashed into his palm. “My friends, we will win this election.”
People in the crowd shouted in unison. “Four more years. Four more years.”
Derrick raised his hand for silence. “And when we do, there will be era of prosperity as never seen before. A new factory will rise on that vacant land next to the river to brings jobs and wealth.”
The political signs were thrust into the air as people erupted in applause.
Jane stood in shock. Images of the old oaks being ripped out of the ground engulfed her mind. This couldn’t be happening. He’d sworn the park would be built. She was too shocked to cry, yet her whole body shook.
Like the zoom lens of a camera, we start with an overview on the setting and the introduction of Derrick, but we don’t go into his point-of-view. This is at the grand level with no sense of individual wants and needs.
Then, we zoom in on Jane’s personal point-of-view.
The scene zooms back to Derrik’s announcement and the crowd’s large scale reaction. They’re all of a single mind with no individuality.
The zoom lens returns to Jane to see her shock and disappointment through both her actions and her inner thoughts.
I used this technique with battle scenes in The Carandir Sage where readers see the massing of troops, focus on a skirmish, then go into the point-of-view of a single soldier’s actions, determination and fears.
Some writers try to create suspense by concealing information with the idea readers will be surprised when a character discovers something or an action takes place.
Cliffhanger endings are effective, but keeping details from readers and audiences doesn’t create suspense. It creates frustration. Suspense comes from revealing information a little at a time.
In a script I recently read in my TV writing class, a spec pilot opens with the discovery of a murder. The victim is not revealed.
The script then goes back a week in time and introduces several characters in conflict. Some of them we root for and others we despise.
The pilot ends where the police arrive at the dead body from the opening. The victim is still not revealed.
This writer thought viewers would be intrigued to tune in the next week and discover who was killed. Instead, they created frustration. By hiding the identity of the victim, audiences have no investment in the character. If they knew who was killed, they could feel an emotional connection and care about the deceased.
Consider a scene from a movie where a cloaked figure enters an office from a balcony, places something in a desk drawer and leaves.
A second person enters and sits at the desk.
A third person enters and sits in front of the desk.
They discuss an embezzlement by someone in the company. They don’t know who it is, but are waiting for a courier to being a letter with evidence.
The letter arrives. Before they can open it, they hear a car crash and go out on the balcony to see what happened.
As they leave, a bomb explodes in the desk. When they rush back in, the letter is destroyed.
The bomb explosion is shocking. It destroys the evidence, but the scene has no suspense because we don’t know the people are in the danger.
Imagine a rewrite. The cloaked person places a bomb in a desk drawer.
The other people enter and discuss who might be the embezzler. As they speak, we cut to the bomb where a timer is ticking down.
We move back to the conversation, then back to the bomb. The timer continues to tick down.
The people step out onto the balcony and we cut to the bomb. The timer reaches zero and the bomb explodes.
We now have suspense because we’re involved in the characters’ lives and the action.
I’m sure you’ve read books where scene A is followed by Scene B which is followed by Scene C and so on. For instance:
1. SCENE A: Mary gets in her car and drives to the store.
2. SCENE B: She buys some pasta and sauce.
3. SCENE C: She drives back to her house.
4. SCENE D: Her mother comes over for dinner.
There’s a progression of action that leads to an incident, but the story lacks tension. Consider a rewrite.
1. SCENE A: Mary’s mother calls and says she’s coming over for dinner in two hours.
2. SCENE B: Mary frantically opens her refrigerator and cabinets to find she has no food to cook.
3. SCENE C: Mary charges to her car and drives off for the grocery store.
4. SCENE D: Mary left during rush hour and gets caught in a traffic jam.
5. SCENE E: Mary turns off on a side street and takes a route she knows because she’s a paramedic.
6. SCENE F: This delays Mary and the store is closed.
7. SCENE G: Mary slams on her horn in frustration.
8. SCENE H: This causes a man to come out of a new Chinese buffet she never noticed before.
9. SCENE H: It has take-out but just ran out of containers.
10. SCENE I: Mary grabs two empty containers from the back seat of her car from lunch the day before.
11. SCENE J: Mary charges back into the restaurant and throws food into the containers, making a mess.
12. SCENE K: The owner gets mad and shoves her out the door before she can fill the containers.
13. SCENE L: Mary’s mother will arrive in fifteen minutes so she weaves in and out of traffic.
14. SCENE M: The contents of one container spills out onto the front seat and down to the floor.
15. SCENE N: Mary runs into the house and divides the remaining container’s contents onto two plates just as the doorbell rings.
16. SCENE O: Mary’s mother comes in and suggests they go out to a Chinese restaurant because there isn’t enough food for the both of them.
The action in each scene drives the action in the next one. In this way, the story creates tension and situational humor that ties each of the different plot elements together.
Science is not just being denied, it is under attack. Some conservative politicians and media constantly deny reality to promote their ideologies of control and mass profits for themselves. The goal of despotic tyrants is to deny anything is wrong to keep people from thinking and asking questioning, such as whether or not the depots should be in power. An uninformed public is easy to manipulate with fear, attacks on those who are different and other lies.
This behavior is not restricted to the United States where people now in power have made false accusations that vaccines are dangerous or cause autism with no evidence to back up these claims, all of which have all been debunked repeatedly. The conservative government of Alberta in Canada, for instance, has just released a report stating vaccines are ineffective against viruses and dangerous with the conclusion no one should take them. Dr. Gary Davidson, a vaccine denier and one of the authors, stated “Science is not a narrative or consensus but thoughtful, public discourse. An ‘international scientific collaboration and consensus’ sounds like a conspiracy, and I stand firmly against conspiracy theories.”
Dr. Davidson is dangerously wrong. Superstition is a consensus of a the public. Science is the methodical examination of the world to understand how it works. As more facts are uncovered and a deeper understanding is reached about the physical world, scientists will alter their conclusions to fit the facts. Despotic politicians and media alter the facts to fit their ideologies.
Science is not an international conspiracy. Science has no ideology, any more than the sun rising in the morning does. It is just reality. There are no alternate facts, only people trying to twist things to their advantage. Yet, reality can conflict with those who seek to take and hold power. The first thing any tyrannical government does is control the message of the media. The Nazis did it. The Soviets did it. Vladimir Putin is doing it. Now, selfish and power mad people in the west are doing it.
Don’t buy into this. Don’t let those who have seized power in certain areas lie to you so they can retain power over everyone. Become informed. Think. Question. Discover the facts and demand those who make statements provide documented, peer reviewed proof, not just assumption. Fact checking is vital. A democracy only works when people do these things. To blindly accept the word of a billionaire or politician with vested interests in taking more is the death of democracy.
I was very impressed with Dune part I but was disappointed my part II. The love story between Paul and Cheney, which is so important to Frank Hubert's book, was lost. She was turned into an angry and confrontation character on the currently held false belief that for a woman to appear strong she must become antagonistic. Paul and Chaney support each other in the book. In the movie she comes off as selfish and rude. At the end of the book, Chaney knows that Pail is marrying the emperor's daughter for political reasons and will never love or sleep with her. Chaney will bear Paul's heir. She will hold that power. She does not run off in a huff and ride a worm.
The movie leaves out the birth of Paul's sister, Alia, a vital part of the plot of the book because she is born aware and is the first to confront the emperor. She is so powerful, she silences the Bene Gesserit who have been manipulating genetic parings for centuries for their own purposes. Alia stops their plans.
Now, I support strong women in literature and cinema. My books are filled with strong, competent women in major roles. In my fantasy trilogy The Carandir Saga, some wield swords. Still, all are female characters, not testosterone filled male characters with female names. Women are powerful as women and in many respects stronger than men, such as in social power and pain endurance. It is true, women have been subjugated for millennia in many cultures, including the one we currently live in, denied opportunities given to men and treated as property to be possessed. Yet to think a woman has to become a man to succeed sets back woman’s’ rights.
Motion pictures are a different media than books and changes must be made to fit that media where there is only sight and sound. Producers, directors and screenwriters who change the temperament and essence of characters or the themes of the author to fit some current idea of social acceptance, which can change in years or even weeks, are creating their own story and should not label it as the book author's work or title.
Dune Part II makes these mistakes. I realize they set things up for a Dune Part III, but I won’t go to see it.
