How a Generative AI Defines You and Your Work As a Writer
As it happens, I’ve been using different Ai’s lately when I perform searches on topics that are relevant to a project I’m working on. I might enter a search query on a particular historical figure, a period that interests me, a scientific discovery that I need to understand. Generative Ai’s (Large Language Models) are clever, indeed. They scrape the Internet for content, combine and re-combine what they’ve found, and produce a synthesis that’s derived from their quest.
The process, if I understand it, is similar to how our pre-frontal cortex works when we’re thinking or want to solve a problem. An idea traverses a kind of learning tree and comes up with the best possible outcome for what’s been queried.
My favorite AI right now is perplexity.ai. It’s really good, in my humble opinion. And it performed some nifty tricks of synthesis and interpretation, as if it were impersonating a literary critic who’s read one of my books and wants to comment on it, when I queried it about my most recent novel, I, MICHELANGELO.
Answer
Tom Maremaa's novel "I, Michelangelo" is his latest work and represents an unexpected creative direction for the author. Here are some key details about the novel:
Plot and Themes
The story follows a middle school teacher who loses his job and pregnant wife in a hit-and-run accident. To support his young son and rebuild his life, he becomes involved in criminal activities. The novel explores themes of loss, family, and moral compromise.
Writing Process
Maremaa describes the novel as coming to him suddenly while working on another project. He felt compelled to give voice to the characters and allow the story to unfold organically. The author notes that "passion always dictates form" and this novel took on an original voice and storytelling approach.
Narrative Technique
"I, Michelangelo" employs multiple points of view, a technique Maremaa had not used in his previous works. This allowed him to tell the story from various perspectives, adding depth and complexity to the narrative.
Historical Elements
While set in contemporary times, the novel incorporates historical elements related to the Renaissance artist Michelangelo. It draws parallels between the protagonist's struggles and those of the famous sculptor and painter, particularly regarding father-son relationships and conflicts with authority.
Author's Background
Tom Maremaa is an accomplished author with 18 novels and novellas to his credit. He balances his writing career with work as a software engineer in Silicon Valley, bringing both technical and creative perspectives to his work.
The novel "I, Michelangelo" represents a new creative direction for Maremaa, blending contemporary and historical elements in an original narrative structure.
For me, these are interesting insights and analyses of the novel in question. If they had been written by a “real” critic, that is, a real person, I would have no problem accepting them in regard to my work. The insights and interpretations are good, in my view, although I don’t write consciously with these themes and techniques in mind. I allow the work to come to me as it wants it come, without me imposing formal elements on a narrative structure. That said, I’m thinking that in the future it’s good to have an AI generate these kinds of interpretations for readers who are curious about a writer’s entire body of work. A scholar I once knew told me that he didn’t really know “what a writer was up to,” until he got to read that writer’s third work. In my case, with 18 novels and novellas, it may take an AI to figure out all the various themes, storytelling techniques, characters, settings, and so on, and how they fit together into a pattern that may help readers better understand my work as an author.
Unlike European readers, we’re conditioned not to think of reading a particular author (usually over a lifetime) but rather of reading that author’s isolated work, one book at a time that stands out, hell with the rest. For many bestselling authors, that means producing the same work over and over again, until the author burns out with repetition in a desperate attempt to please the demands of his or her publisher. My work varies dramatically from book to book, in style, voice, storytelling, and character. My hope, which the AI seems to encourage, is that readers will read me, as an author, with curiosity as what I’ll do next, not as a repeat of what I’ve done before.