Jefferson Flanders

Artificial fiction?

June 10, 2025 / admin

Who can dispute that fiction is a form of artifice? The novelist or short story author creates an artificial world, one that seeks to imitate reality. One of the definitions of “artificial” is that it’s a man-made copy of something natural. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), that definition will need to recognize copies–imitations– made by machine. (More on that, and the implications for fiction-writing, in a moment).

I suspect literary imitation has been around as long as storytelling. Oscar Wilde argued that imitation was mediocrity’s concession to greatness, but that’s too harsh. Is any work of art completely original?

It had been several years since I had read H.E. Bates’ 1944 novel Fair Stood the Wind For France. Bates tells the story of a Wellington bomber pilot in World War II who, once downed over France, must overcome significant challenges in evading German pursuit. The pilot, John Franklin, falls in love with a young Frenchwoman and she helps him escape. What struck me in re-reading the novel was its obvious creative debt to Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was published in 1940.

The similarities are obvious. Bates employs the same flat prose style of Hemingway with its echoes of the King James Version of the Bible. There’s the plot driven by the dangers of operating behind enemy lines. And there’s the romance between the male protagonist and a clever country girl. Imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery, and Bates was (consciously or unconsciously) paying homage to Papa Hemingway. Yet, contra Wilde, the novel is not mediocre.

Judged on its own merits, Fair Stood the Wind For France is an entertaining, if somewhat circumscribed, novel that sacrifices emotional depth for narrative intensity. To his credit, Bates stops short of “full Hemingway,” and so we’re spared the awkward repetitious meanderings of For Whom the Bell Tolls. (For what it’s worth, I’d argue that A Farewell to Arms is Hemingway’s greatest work). Yet to give credit where credit is due, despite some derivative elements Fair Stood the Wind For France can lay claim to its own authenticity: Bates had been commissioned into the Royal Air Force to write stories dramatizing aerial warfare, and he could draw on the experiences of the pilots and air crews flying into combat.

Questions about imitation and authenticity will abound in the Age of AI. Already Amazon is working to choke off so-called AI “scam books,” which include AI-generated biographies, summaries of popular books, and copycat books. Jane Friedman, a writer and publishing industry analyst, interviewed by NPR last year argued the current crop of AI-books had a inhumane, generic quality: “It just feels like a human didn’t write these. Humans would — funnily enough — do a better job being bad.”

But it’s clear it’s only a matter of time before generative AI is employed to create works that pass the literary equivalent of the Turing test. Nonfiction shouldn’t pose much difficulty for large language model (LLM) AI, assuming an ample underlying database with vetted content and some level of human review to spot and eliminate hallucinations and other ghosts in the machine.

Fiction presents more challenges. Screenplays–which are largely made up of dialog and typically have simple plots–are a logical initial AI target. There are clear patterns and archetypes for AI to mimic– the three act structure, and the twelve steps of the Hero’s Journey. Netflix and Amazon have collected vast amounts of viewer data which they feed to AI to help fashion more compelling scenes.

Novels are more complex, but their narrative structure can be copied. Some genres will lend themselves to AI imitation. And certainly AI can copy the distinctive style of a Hemingway (or Jane Austen or Cormac McCarthy) and generate prose that mimics the original.

Could AI produce a novel that mimics Fair Stood the Wind For France in the way Bates borrowed from Hemingway? Could it generate a tense World War II story set behind enemy lines with a young hero helped/saved by a courageous and appealing farm girl? For now, I think the AI engine would still need someone (a human) providing extensive prompts to create a seamlessly executed novel. (Note bene: I won’t be the one experimenting. I’ve kept my distance from AI on both practical and principled grounds). Tomorrow? AI writing fiction autonomously? Who doubts that it is technically possible? Considering recent claims that AI may be learning to shake off human control (the SkyNet threat), we may not have much of a say in the matter.

Where the stories come from

March 30, 2025 / admin

So where do the stories come from?

Are they drawn from a Jungian collective unconscious? Stories from our primal past, of hunting and being hunted, of rivalries within the tribe and without. Stories with a structure, the Hero’s Journey, the monomyth.

The emotional foundation underlying these stories aren’t uniquely human. Take anger or jealousy. If you watch video of an experiment with capuchin monkeys (conducted by the late primatologist Dutch Frans de Waal) you’ll discover that our primate relative are capable of rage and envy if they think they’re being treated unfairly.

So there’s a deep evolutionary reservoir for anyone creating to draw upon. And a psychological one. Although Dr. Freud has fallen out of favor, his insights into human behavior are, in essence, a form of storytelling. (Freud admired William Shakespeare and the Bard had a significant influence on the development of psychoanalytic theory.)

Then, there’s the body of literature waiting to be strip-mined for plots and characters. Writers are literary magpies, always ready to create derivatives. Sometimes their borrowing is overt, sometimes not so (thus, plagiarism scandals).

At a more subconscious level, there’s the impact on an author of every word they’ve ever read. The choice of words, the cadence, the propensity for plain prose or something more Rococo, are influenced by what the mind takes in.

Finally, there’s the creator’s imagination. The story emerges, imagined, through a smelting process that refines these remembered elements into something recognizable, something that appeals to us, that makes us want to learn more, to read on, to turn the page.

Writing what you don’t know

February 27, 2025 / admin

C.S. Lewis,, the English academic , author, and Christian apologist, once offered this advice on writing: “Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, or nothing else.”

I think that’s much better advice than the “write what you know” cliché that many writing instructors typically suggest for beginners. Yes, I get that recommendation is meant to encourage creative authenticity, but it ignores the more important factor of creative enthusiasm.

It typically takes me more than a year to complete a novel, from start to finish. I can’t imagine investing that time and effort without deeply engaging with the story. Why would I write about something that doesn’t move me?

For the most part, prior knowledge is overrated when writing fiction. If you’re caught up in creating a compelling narrative, you can learn what you need to know–and rely on your imagination to fill in any blanks. I’ve written before about how with enough craft and some diligent research, some well-regarded novelists have fashioned a seamless fictional world with little or no first-hand experience:

Experts on life in the Soviet Union raved about the accuracy of Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park, and yet the novelist didn’t speak Russian and spent only two weeks in Moscow before writing his bestseller. Patrick O’Brian, author of the famous maritime series featuring Jack Aubrey, apparently couldn’t sail. Sid Smith’s Something Like a House, a novel about the Cultural Revolution, won Britain’s Whitbread First Novel Award and yet Smith couldn’t read or speak Chinese, and hadn’t worked in or visited China. Creativity, it seems, can trump biography. In fiction, what matters is that the reader believes.

Of course, it is possible to write largely out of one’s experience, and that’s a valuable foundation for any writer. Yet writing what you don’t know but are keenly interested in strikes me as a more creatively rewarding path to follow.

Maurice Walsh: A Celtic romantic

January 16, 2025 / admin

Ah, the Irish and their eloquence, their uncanny ability to find the romantic and lyrical in the commonplace, the poetic in the quotidian!

I’ve recently been enjoying the novels of 20th century Irish author Maurice Walsh, best known for his short story “The Quiet Man” which was later adapted into John Ford’s witty Oscar-winning movie starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. (The film borrowed its narrative framework from Walsh, but the clever and memorable dialog was largely the work of Frank S. Nugent, a prolific screenwriter who often worked with Ford and is best remembered for his script for The Searchers.)

Walsh was influenced by Romantic nationalism–the notion that a nation’s people share not only language and laws, but also a culture and an attachment to the land. Walsh’s fiction reflects this worldview, his work is imbued with “a sense of bogs and woods” in the words of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney and it is unabashedly romantic when it comes to the courting rituals of men and women.

Walsh’s style is decidedly poetic but his prose stops short of affectation, it’s not cloying or florid. (Ernest Hemingway, the master of plain-style writing, was said to be a fan.) Walsh has a remarkable sense of language. Consider this paragraph from his 1926 novel The Key Above the Door, set in the Scottish Highlands after the First World War, where his protagonist and narrator, Thomas King, first meets the character Agnes de Burc and describes her as follows:

She was a tall young woman and slim, and her white–or very light cream–dress had something robe-like about it. She wore an oldish panama hat, and her black hair peeped below it. There was little or no color in her face, which was of that type of beauty that, in a travail of expression, we call proud, magnetic, electric, tragic; somber, I think, is the best word of all, and the quality it attempts to describe is always the beauty of the highest quality: beauty of the calm, lean kind, dark-eyed and serious, proud and self-willed, fateful and unafraid, and made for love and desolation since Troy fell: beauty that fate plays with for it own ends, and that man has been thrall to since passion’s first stir.

King offers us a spare physical description: she is tall, young, slim, with black hair and a pale face and then, more vaguely, that Agnes is beautiful. But then he goes further, imagining an emotional depth, a sadness. It’s clear that he’s smitten with her, that he has experienced what the French call a coup de foudre. King likens Agnes to Helen of Troy–a legendary beauty fought over by men–in a foreshadowing of what lies ahead in the novel. Walsh, who often writes lovingly about Highlands fly fishing, has set the hook for the reader. There’s a mystery here (what makes her beauty tragic, somber?), one we want to solve.

Walsh’s romantic worldview fell out of favor in the second half of the century and, not surprisingly, his books fell out of print. His novels may seem old-fashioned and overly sentimental today, but Maurice Walsh knows how to tell a compelling love story. And does that ever grow old? I’d say not.

Why 1800? Some thoughts on historical storytelling

March 28, 2024 / admin

My latest novel, The Shipwright, is set in 1800 London and Philadelphia. It tells the intertwined stories of Declan Fitzpatrick, an Irish-American shipwright, and Caroline Fairbanks, a lovely young woman from a small village in Oxfordshire. When Declan intervenes in a violent quarrel involving Caroline at a society party, he becomes her reluctant protector, and that changes their futures in a way neither could ever have imagined.

Why did I choose to write a novel set in the late 18th century? Why that specific historical period? Why have I gravitated to to it?

The answer is simple: I’ve long been fascinated by the history of the last decades of the 18th century. It was a time filled with conflict over the political and social systems people were going to live under—including the establishment of the American republic and the debate over the Peculiar Institution of chattel slavery; the revolution in France and the Continental war in its aftermath; the failed Rising of 1798 in Ireland against British rule; and the emerging resistance in India and China to English imperial ambitions .

For a novelist, the time period offers an ideal backdrop for the more personal struggles of my fictional characters.

Recognizing the historical richness, I’ve set three novels at the turn of the 18th century: The Republic of Virtue; The Boston Trader; and The Northwest Country. All of them, including The Shipwright, touch upon themes of independence, liberty, and autonomy—both political and individual.

At the same time, I would never want to sacrifice storytelling to thematic interests. One of the challenges in writing historical fiction is balancing narrative and historical reality. Too much story and the history gets lost; too many historical facts and the story can drag. I’d like to think that, for the most part, I’ve achieved that balance in The Shipwright—but, in the end, that’s for my readers to say.

Artificial fiction?

Where the stories come from

Writing what you don’t know

Maurice Walsh: A Celtic romantic

Why 1800? Some thoughts on historical storytelling

Recent Posts

Categories

Meta