Latest news with #writing
UAE Moments
a day ago
- UAE Moments
How Writers Can Survive the AI Storm: Employer Advice
There's no doubt that AI has become the new norm that everyone needs to adapt to—even writers, as ironic as that sounds! Everyone needs to realize AI is here to help and not to take your job from you. But that is still possible if you don't know how to adapt. As someone who still works with and hires writers, I hope this article helps you stay on top of your writing game! Understanding your Platform Being a writer can't be narrowed down to one field of content or work. It's a wide range of fields, and that means you need to understand the tools and platforms of your field. This might be a given fact, but being proficient with the necessary tools will make everyone's lives easier. For example, if you use the WordPress dashboard for your work, your employer (or say, your editor-in-chief) shouldn't have to waste time fixing avoidable issues when reviewing your content. Remember, writing is not just the words you put together, but also the tools that come with it. And this couldn't be more true today with AI capabilities to produce the raw content. Imagine your employer's situation when they see your content badly edited in WordPress. Put yourself in their shoes and you'll surely understand the importance of having these basic skills today. If this obvious tip surprises you, you might be more surprised to learn that I still face these issues today! Sometimes I come across bad SEO content, grammar issues, or poor editing skills. Other times I deal with writers not having the time to review our content structure policy, which makes their end content completely different than what we need. Keep in mind these are good writers, and sometimes amazing ones too! But these issues create unnecessary difficulties for everyone involved. Don't take the risk—avoid common problems, keep yourself equipped with the right skills, and trust me, your company won't have it easy to replace you with AI! Welcome the Change, and Don't Try to Hide the Elephant in the Room I noticed on some occasions, writers feel the need to rush a 'NO' when they are asked about using AI. From my perspective, if I asked about this, it doesn't have to mean you are being questioned if you are using AI-generated content in your work. A question like this can simply aim to hear your experience with AI. That's why it doesn't make sense nowadays to shy away from admitting AI existence. Which is why I believe if you are asked about AI, prepare a more creative answer. Don't act like AI is not there, but do the opposite: Tell your employer you don't use AI for work (if you actually don't) but that you have experience with AI and always test its new features. The reality is, on most occasions, companies are not yet ready to move completely from human to machine. Human skill is still fundamental and necessary. But the harsh truth is: AI won't replace you, but someone who knows how to use it will. So don't mind being flexible and widening your experience with AI. It can be a great tool for your work, and it can help you double your productivity without adding more working hours. Let's ask AI! I know this may sound funny, but sometimes the best approach is to hear what your competitor has to say, and in this case, it's AI itself! I asked ChatGPT how writers can still be successful, and this is what it says: Writers can thrive amidst the AI-generated content storm by focusing on their unique strengths—creativity, emotional intelligence, and complex storytelling. While AI can handle data-driven tasks and repetitive content, it lacks the human touch needed for deep, engaging narratives, nuanced perspectives, and the ability to connect on an emotional level with readers. Successful writers will need to adapt by leveraging AI as a tool rather than a competitor—using it to streamline research, enhance productivity, and support their creative processes. Those who continue to develop their voice, expertise, and ability to engage readers authentically will always remain valuable, regardless of how advanced AI becomes. You can also consider this as an example of how you can keep thriving at your job as a writer. Asking AI for help to tweak and build your skills can be a nice way to flip the table on the situation. I'm not saying that things will be easy, but being fast to adapt and understanding the trends and the reality of the situation can turn the feeling of a dangerous storm into a gold mine of opportunities.
New York Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Haunted by the Ghost of Her 16-Year-Old Self, a Writer Returns to 1983
GIRL, 1983, by Linn Ullmann; translated by Martin Aitken How do you write about a part of your life you can't remember? For the narrator of the Norwegian writer Linn Ullmann's autofictional novel 'Girl, 1983,' the not-remembering has become so urgent that it demands articulation. In 2019, the unnamed writer is in her mid-50s when a half memory resurfaces to haunt her: In the winter of 1983, when she was 16, she insisted on traveling alone from her mother's home in New York to Paris at the request of a much older, famous photographer. As the memory floods back, the narrator feels like she is floating several inches above the ground while walking the dog; she lies on the bathroom floor, unable to bring herself to shower. She seeks out a psychiatrist, but he is of little use. She tells people she is 'hard at work' on a book about the girl she was in 1983, but this is a lie; she can't find the words. And then, as the ghost of her former self sits beside her, she begins to write through the fog. 'Be accurate. I can't. Be specific. I don't know how,' Ullmann writes. 'Precision is the minimum requirement. Not just for writers and artists, but also for girls who claim they're old enough to travel across the Atlantic by themselves and have their picture taken.' But there is no precision in 'Girl, 1983.' The book is endlessly recursive, as shapeless as water. It pools, eddies, evaporates. A blue coat and a red hat, worn on that trip to Paris, reappear and reappear and reappear. Little else ever comes into focus. The narrative flips vertiginously between past and present, mimicking the movements of a mind circling trauma, repeating itself, reaching the threshold of a memory then darting away. The line breaks and white spaces threaten to overtake the type. The older woman's present timeline is as vague as the past she tries to grasp. Dialogue exists only in fragments, scene hardly at all. The reader is often lost, with no authorial hand to steady us. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
RNZ News
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
Bookmarks with author Gina Butson
author interview books 2:30 pm today Gina Butson worked as a lawyer for many years but seems to have always harboured a love for fiction writing. She's had short stories published in a variety of local outlets, she's won the Salient Creative Writing competition, and last year was named Highly Commended in running for the Sargeson Prize. Gina has released her debut novel. It's called 'The Stars Are A Million Glittering Worlds'. She shares her picks for books, films, music and podcasts with Jesse.
Washington Post
3 days ago
- General
- Washington Post
What the heck would you put in a time capsule to describe life in 2025?
The most incisive comment I ever heard about writing is 'Writing is easy. I just sit down and write what occurs to me. It's the occurring that's hard.' The hardest occurring that has occurred for me in recent years has involved the assignment to write messages for time capsules, packages to be sealed away for examination on some far-distant date. Deciding what to say wasn't always quite so difficult. Contributors to a 1924 time capsule — unveiled in September in centennial celebrations of the Memorial Union at Purdue University, where I worked — anticipated correctly that it would be opened on its due date by people like them, at an institution they would recognize, in a country called the United States. When the request came to prepare its replacement, aimed at an opening a century hence, any such assumptions gave reason to pause. I got off easy with a capsule request not too long ago, because the year was 2020. It seemed both historically appropriate and safe to focus on the unique events of that pandemic year, which are likely to be remembered as significant even decades from now. Likewise with the artifacts we selected for the capsule: covid test kits, wellness kits containing thermometers, masks and hand wipes, and the pledges required of students and staff as we kept the university open and on schedule during those uncertain, risk-balancing times. Performing the task last year offered no easy out. There is a long list of topics to exclude, at least if the goal is to avoid appearing hopelessly naive or shortsighted. One obvious guideline is to avoid predictions. In 1900, Detroit Mayor William Maybury solicited entries for a 'Century Box' to be opened a hundred years later. Local worthies forecast 2.5 million inhabitants, less crime than the low levels the police reported for their times, and the annexation of Canada. They missed the first number by 60 percent, crime skyrocketed rather than declined, and Canada was still an independent country (although the idea is still around). The Detroit contributors weren't oblivious to the impact of technology. The mayor queried the future holder of his office whether telephony had advanced to the point where people could actually talk to one another in foreign lands. Given changes already afoot, writing today to what is assumed to be a university and its community calls for special caution. Will young people a century from now still 'go to school,' or will all useful knowledge be downloaded through an electrode or ingested in a tablet? If a successor Purdue president is still around to open the box, will she or he be a centenarian undergoing a midlife crisis? Will ruminations about the sacred mission of 'searching for truth' still have meaning if reality has become so fully virtual that 'truth' has lost its historical meaning? Will the reader live in the leading, unified, sovereign nation we know or a subjugated vassal of a foreign power? Or maybe in one of the pieces of a fractured, formerly United States? Matters of politics and public policy are especially risky. Our virulent debates about what we call social issues will likely seem as quaint to 22nd-century readers as Prohibition does to us today. What is certain is that those readers will, based on societal changes we cannot foresee, regard today's mores as amusingly backward. Long before the capsule's opening, our political class's mindless profligacy will have produced a debt implosion of one kind or another. The ways they have chosen to deal with a changing climate, spending trillions without moving, or any real prospect of moving, the world's thermometer, will engender more 'What were they thinking?' headshaking. If warming continues and its consequences are as serious as the doomsayers forecast, our descendants will have devised smarter ways of managing them. But the murkiest question involves not what one should write about but to whom one is writing. With the architects of artificial intelligence telling us that human-surpassing artificial general intelligence, or AGI, might be only a thousand days away, how can capsule contributors be sure that, a hundred years off, their words of wisdom will be read by a human being, or seem any wiser than the sounds of a lower primate seem to us today? My 2020 entry ran seven paragraphs and filled a page of letterhead. By 2024, caution and uncertainty limited me to barely 100 words, most of them acknowledging the possibility that 'the human species as the Earth has known it will no longer remain' and that 'universities like Purdue will have been transformed, perhaps unrecognizably.' All I ventured of any substance was the hope that some enumerated values for which universities like Purdue have always stood — high standards and excellence, complete freedom of inquiry, commitment to the preparation of young people for lives of productive citizenship — will still be at its core. I addressed myself to 'who, or what, may be reading these words.' Cowardly, you might be thinking. Lame and unimaginative. I can't disagree. But before reaching a final judgment, try this particular writing assignment yourself. You might find the occurring a bit difficult. Post Opinions wants to know: What would you add to a time capsule to represent America today? Share your response, and it might be published as a letter to the editor.
New York Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
What Happens in Vegas … Is Grim, Hopeless and Lonely
VEGAS: A Memoir of a Dark Season, by John Gregory Dunne Like many a Joan Didion devotee, I've periodically found myself in the literary company of John Gregory Dunne, a flawed but fascinating writer whose reputation has seemingly fallen in direct proportion to the rise of his wife's since his death in 2003. Didion and Dunne's careers were famously intertwined — they collaborated on screenplays, traveled together for reporting trips, chronicled (coyly, cryptically) their marital troubles in essays and novels. When Dunne died of a heart attack at the dining room table, Didion went ahead and did what he surely would have wanted her to do: make a best-selling book out of it. Their literary entanglement has continued after her death with this year's publication of 'Notes to John,' a collection of Didion's reflections, addressed to Dunne, on the deteriorating physical and mental health of their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne. (The book is, despite many intelligent critical protestations, a work of emotional grace and severity that in no way diminishes her legacy Despite the overlap in life experience and subject matter, Dunne's voice on the page is worlds away from Didion's — gregarious where she is laconic, coarse where she is prim, insecure where she is miles above worrying about the opinions of other humans. Compare her legendary response to an aggrieved letter to the editor — 'Oh, wow' — to Dunne's many-thousand-word essay 'Critical,' recounting various slights in print against him and Didion. Dunne is often at his most evocative when writing about his Irish Catholic upbringing in West Hartford, Conn., a place that seems as psychically far from Didion's pioneer-Protestant Sacramento as possible. There's more than a little bit of John O'Hara's status anxiety running through Dunne's work, despite, as he often mentions, being the son of a surgeon and graduating from Princeton. In her perceptive introduction to a new edition of Dunne's 1974 book 'Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season,' Stephanie Danler begins a sentence about his career with the devastating clause 'Though largely unread today …' While true, one imagines this would have particularly stung a writer who depicted himself wondering, early in this account, whether his death would merit a write-up in Time magazine. (Speaking of largely unread today …) Dunne is at his best when overriding his hangups and explaining how things work, whether it be the teeth-grinding process of drafting a Hollywood screenplay, in his book 'Monster,' or his pieces on sports, Los Angeles, politics and much else for The New York Review of Books. Dunne works an awareness of his strengths into the meta-structure of 'Vegas.' The premise of this book — a 'memoir' that he acknowledges 'recalls a time both real and imagined' — is that he is in the midst of a nervous breakdown brought on by a sudden fear of death at age 37, and has become estranged from his wife. (As Danler notes, the conceit contains an echo of, if not a direct response to, Didion's line from 'In the Islands' about being 'on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.') Inspired by a conveniently placed billboard 'with a Delphic absence of apostrophe' reading 'VISIT LAS VEGAS BEFORE YOUR NUMBERS UP,' he leaves Didion and 3-year-old Quintana behind and heads out to the desert in search of 'salvation without commitment.' His hope is that 'through the travail of others I might come to grips with myself, that I might, as it were, find absolution through voyeurism.' Translation from the Catholic: He needs to find something to write about other than himself. Dunne moves into a crummy apartment off the Strip, hangs out with the locals and in the course of six months, discovers … well, mostly what you'd expect, but more of it. His Vegas is a grim, hopeless place where nothing fun or cool ever happens. A hack comic with a nightmarishly unfunny evangelical hillbilly routine plays to empty rooms, desperately hoping Bill Cosby will mention him during his vastly more successful set. A lonely prostitute tries unsuccessfully to avoid getting picked up by the cops while cruising the casino floor at 2 a.m. A severely constipated private eye chases down a patio furniture salesman over minor gambling debts. Dunne is characteristically at his best when he plays it straight, cataloging the minutiae of his subjects' particular hells like an after-hours John McPhee. 'If a girl wanted to make a living,' he explains, channeling his composite sex-worker heroine, Artha, 'she could not tell a good contact in the pits to go take a cold shower every time he hinted around for a freebie.' For the sake of maintaining her business, 'she let a dealer go for a 'quarter,' or $25, a pit boss for a half, or $50. It was a flat hundred for the casino or hotel manager.' Dunne is good on the sordid ins and outs of the bail bonds trade, on the need, apparently necessary to communicate in detail, for the hotel staff to go easy on the anti-Japanese bigotry when the Yamaha International Dealers convention is in town, given the money they bring in. To a contemporary reader, Dunne's lack of a hook — an angle, as the Vegas denizens he encounters might call it — is more striking than the genre agnosticism signaled by having 'memoir' in the subtitle. (A helpful designation for a book that is 'both real and imagined': fiction.) To an impressive degree, Dunne fails to find much in the way of the salvation he's looking for, or even drama, even when he finds himself set up for a sexual encounter with a 19-year-old named Teddi and decides to call his wife for advice. 'It's research,' Didion tells him. 'You're missing the story if you don't meet her.' He meets her, but thanks to his condescension ('You ever read 'Gatsby'?') doesn't get much of a story. 'Vegas' is all drift and repetition, a chronicle of killing time in an ugly, infernally hot place full of desperate liars. Dunne encounters terrible taste of every conceivable variety, from wall-to-wall homophobia and racism — mostly reported, but striking in the volume of what the author deems worthy of passing on — to lousy food, drinks, clothes and people. 'I needed to feed on some fantasies of my own,' Dunne writes in a typical passage, 'anything to erase the grotesqueries of the evening.' It's the best vaccination against 1970s nostalgia I've ever received. Compared with this, 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' reads as a colorful salute to a great American city. Dunne describes a long episode of his early life in New York in which he observes the intimate life of a woman — often naked, often having sex — in an adjacent apartment. When she doesn't come home after a few days, he gets worried; after two weeks, he goes to the super, who finds out she's eloped. What Dunne learns from this episode is that he 'had a gift for voyeurism … and an empathy for those I observed.' The first point is true; the second, I think, not so much. This messy, engrossing book is as good an example as I can recall of a talented writer unable to see himself clearly on the page. I'm so glad it's back in print. VEGAS: A Memoir of a Dark Season | By John Gregory Dunne | McNally Editions | 269 pp. | Paperback, $19
