How Do You Explain Narrative Drive to a Computer?
I read about a computer that is programmed to write poetry. The headline of the piece on LitHub talked about the fact that it was bad poetry — but I actually thought it was pretty good. The piece compares computer-generated poems to poems by luminaries such as Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost, so in some ways it’s not a fair test. I kept thinking that if I were given a test featuring poems I was not familiar with and had to choose — human poet or computer? — I might not get 100%. This would be especially true if the AI programmers get better and better at what they do — which I think we can all agree is entirely likely.
So as I was thinking about the AI robots learning to write acceptable poetry, I started thinking about the things I have heard from time to time about computers writing novels (see this piece from the Atlantic and this one from a literary agency talking about NaNoGenMo, which is a computer-derived novel writing event — crazy, right?). I am not a programmer and I do not know how to code, but I know enough about the process to know that the computer has to have input from which to draw on. In the Atlantic piece, above, it’s a clock, a microphone, and a camera. In the NaNoGenMo novels, it’s dialogue pulled from Twitter or, uh, cat sounds.
Narrative Drive is the Engine That Propels a Reader Through the Book
That got me thinking about the idea of narrative drive — this very abstract thing that I actually spend a ton of time talking to my fiction and nonfiction writers about. Narrative drive is the engine that propels a reader through the book, keeps them turning pages, keeps them thinking and wondering and guessing and engaging. It’s both delicate and fragile (in that it can be broken with one clunky scene or paragraph) and strong as steel (in that it can hold up the entire architecture of a story or argument). Without narrative drive, a book gets very wobbly.
But how do you program narrative drive? How do you teach a computer what it is or how to create it?
A writer works on the concept of narrative drive when she is thinking about the very raw pieces of her idea — what the story is, where it starts, where it goes. She is thinking about it when she plots or outlines, when she drafts, when she revises. It’s there at chapter beginnings and endings, and in the middle places when they get muddy.
When I say that I spend a lot of time talking to my writers about it, I mean that we have long, deep, and detailed discussions. These conversations tend toward religion and philosophy, our personal histories and current events, the way people often lie or tell themselves stories to get through a regular day or the worst day of their lives, the way we yearn to be our best selves. All of that gets translated into prose that has the power to attract a reader, engage them, and carry them forward. Narrative drive feels like magic when you are experiencing it as a reader, but it’s the result of a writer doing many of the things that humans do best.
I just can’t see a computer ever figuring out narrative drive.
This got me thinking about a cascade of other things that a book writer is processing while she works, including:
- All the input that a novelist of memoir writer or nonfiction writer puts into her work — things like a lifetime of experiences, a lifetime of reading, all the movies and songs and pictures we have seen and heard, all the friendships we have made and lost, all the successes and joys and disappointments.
- All the layers of meaning she is building into her work — things like structure, form, logic, point of view, the passage of time, a sense of place.
- All the discrete moments of discernment she has to make — where to start and where to end, what to leave in and what to leave out, when to end a chapter or a scene, what to highlight or diminish in a paragraph.
- All the choices that go into capturing human emotion through the words we use — every description and bit of dialogue, every argument and piece of analysis.
- And all the words — so many words! Hundreds of thousands of words! A writer has to choose each one, weigh each one, deploy it in the correct place in a powerful way, time after time after time.
I finally came to realize that computers might be able to write acceptable poetry because poetry usually depends so much on form and rhythm and meter — input that a computer can learn to master because there are rules you can follow to achieve those things.
But a novel or a memoir that moves us to tears? A nonfiction book that inspires us to change or grow?
I just can’t see a computer ever figuring it out.
Which means that it’s up to the writers to keep doing our work.
