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This is just an advanced madlibs generator. As a copywriter who dabbles in creative writing I see nothing here that would help me. It's just too "dumb".

by jawon 11y ago

wwwdonohue 11y ago
Which is the whole point, really: it doesn't facilitate the actual "writing" so much as the "thinking," at which stage you're still developing ideas and seeing how they fit together. Several generations of writers (and other artists) have found great results cutting their work up and rearranging it to find deeper insights into the work they might still produce: Burroughs, Bowie, and others! Anxious for the day I can give this thing a spin.
- jawon 11y ago
  Aleatoric processes are more interesting than the results, in my opinion. Too easy and too disconnected from the human to resonate (beyond the isolated snippets that get trotted out, like photos of parking meters that look like faces). And that disconnection is why software like this doesn't interest me. If you know what you want to write you don't need this. If you don't know, there are better, richer, more fulfilling ways to come up with ideas than randomly permuting text.
  - wwwdonohue 11y ago
    That's fair. Part of anyone's acceptance of the method would have to do with their acceptance of this tenet: Producing a work of written art requires constant discovery and guessing—because all works of art are works of exploration and discovery. Thus InkWell merely seems (to me) like it would be useful as a kind of servant--a tool to show you other plausible variants of your text, and thus spur the creative process. But if you already know what you're going to write and how, then godspeed--you're in a much better situation than most writers :)
innocentoldguy 11y ago
As a creative writer, I don't see much here to interest me either. For me, reading variations does nothing to get my thinking going. Only the process of writing itself gets my brain in gear. Everyone is different, of course, and this may be useful to some, but for me it doesn't seem like it would be beneficial at all.

This is just an advanced madlibs generator. As a copywriter who dabbles in creative writing I see nothing here that would help me. It's just too "dumb".

by jawon 11y ago

This is just an advanced madlibs generator. As a copywriter who dabbles in creative writing I see nothing here that would help me. It's just too "dumb".

wwwdonohue 11y ago

Which is the whole point, really: it doesn't facilitate the actual "writing" so much as the "thinking," at which stage you're still developing ideas and seeing how they fit together. Several generations of writers (and other artists) have found great results cutting their work up and rearranging it to find deeper insights into the work they might still produce: Burroughs, Bowie, and others! Anxious for the day I can give this thing a spin.

jawon 11y ago
Aleatoric processes are more interesting than the results, in my opinion. Too easy and too disconnected from the human to resonate (beyond the isolated snippets that get trotted out, like photos of parking meters that look like faces). And that disconnection is why software like this doesn't interest me. If you know what you want to write you don't need this. If you don't know, there are better, richer, more fulfilling ways to come up with ideas than randomly permuting text.
- wwwdonohue 11y ago
  That's fair. Part of anyone's acceptance of the method would have to do with their acceptance of this tenet: Producing a work of written art requires constant discovery and guessing—because all works of art are works of exploration and discovery. Thus InkWell merely seems (to me) like it would be useful as a kind of servant--a tool to show you other plausible variants of your text, and thus spur the creative process. But if you already know what you're going to write and how, then godspeed--you're in a much better situation than most writers :)

innocentoldguy 11y ago

As a creative writer, I don't see much here to interest me either. For me, reading variations does nothing to get my thinking going. Only the process of writing itself gets my brain in gear. Everyone is different, of course, and this may be useful to some, but for me it doesn't seem like it would be beneficial at all.