Every other week writes a letter to me on Substack, and in the inbetween weeks I write to her.

Here is Rebecca’s most recent one:

Dear Reader, I'm lost

214. ✒️ A letter to Terry: #25-07

In which Rebecca reminds herself that silence is golden and heeds the warning on an advert for detergent pods…

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a year ago · 13 likes · 18 comments · Rebecca Holden

And here is my reply: Letter to Rebecca #25-08.

Every so often I take a deep dive behind the scenes. It’s one of the benefits of being a paid subscriber.

This time, I thought I’d delve into my process for writing these letters. OK, here’s the inside scoop.

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In which Terry describes the steps he’s taken, and the apps he’s used, while preparing for a course he is teaching very soon.

On the 8th June I’ll be teaching a course called Creative Writing with Constraints. Note the word “constraints”, not “restraints”. I mean, nobody is going to be handcuffed or tied to a chair or anything. It’s about — well, you ca…

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A couple of days ago I wrote an article for the Soaring Twenties Social Club called Automated Writing: Should writers be worried about AI? I sent it to at 15:29, and he published it at 18:00. But here’s the sordid truth: at 10:00 that day I didn’t have a clue what I was going to write. Even worse, at 14:00 I still was none the wiser.

Gotcha! You say. So the great prolificist had run out of ideas, eh? Well actually no: I had the opposite problem. I’d had so many ideas and corresponding false starts that I was floundering in a sea of ideas. (I like that phrase so much I’m going to use it again: I was floundering in a sea of ideas.)

So what do I mean by “false starts”? For each idea, I either did the research, or wrote a few paragraphs, or both. However, one or both of the following things then happened:

• I lost interest in the idea. Perhaps I’ve listened to too much Enya in my time, but I really do believe that if the writer finds an article boring to write, it’s pretty certain that readers will find it boring to read. If that’s how it is, cut your losses, outsource the work to ChatGPT and be done with it. And make sure you tell readers that’s what you’ve done, unless honesty isn’t very important to you.

• I wrote one or two paragraphs and then ran out of things to say. Now, I’m all in favour of short pieces: there’s a whole art to writing short. See, for further elucidation, How to write short, with a specific focus on book reviews, and my review of Short form creative writing. However, if I set out with the intention of writing long, it’s a bit of a jolt if the thing suddenly just ends.

This was rather problematic, because I was right up against the deadline. However, I have three quick hacks that bail me out every time. Here they are.

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Sunflowers always fill me with a sense of joy. They always look so vibrant and happy! That’s why I’ve chosen my sunflowers photo to illustrate this article. Success also fills me with a sense of joy, hence the connection!

However, while many of us strive or wish for more subscribers and perhaps more earnings, I thought it wor…

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Going viral seems to be the flavour of the month at the moment (unless I’ve just missed it until now). For example…

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Last year I had a crisis of conscience. A relative had told us that he’d spent several weeks cataloging all his books, entering all the details into a spreadsheet. Had he mentioned it earlier I’d have told him not to waste his time, but telling someone they’d wasted their time after they’d done so seemed a tad cruel. So I listened to my conscience and didn’t. Mind you, I was tempted. I think Philip Roth expressed this dilemma very well in Portnoy’s Complaint:

Doctor, I am torn by desires that are repugnant to my conscience, and a conscience repugnant to my desires.

Well exactly, though not in the same context I should emphasise.

Anyway, to tackle the second question in the subtitle to this post, I don’t know why the title is so long. It just seemed right, somehow.

And as for the first question, here goes.

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There’s a lot to be said for cutting out extraneous words, which is why a lot of people say it.

I’ve started to view words as employees: they need to earn their keep. If they’re just loafing around adding nothing to the narrative, why am I keeping them on?

But determining which words are superfluous, that’s the tricky part. Getting rid of most, if not all, adjectives and adverbs is often a safe bet I’ve found. But there is one adverb in particular that I take exception to.

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Five huge bags of rubbish, over twenty broken up cardboard boxes, and umpteen bags of recycling later, not to mention four huge boxes of stationery and other stuff I took to a charity shop, and I can finally see not only my desk, but also the whole of my office and even some empty space on bookshelves. I can even see most of the floor.

Yes, here at Freedman Towers I’ve been scanning documents that I’ve been holding onto for years, and then getting rid of the paper originals.

And what are these documents, I hear you ask. All sorts of stuff, but I’ve mostly been focusing on clippings, magazine articles I’ve had published. I’ve been storing them in ring binders, lever arch files and box files.

My first commissioned and paid for article was published in 1990, and I was quite successful in getting more published. I say this not to boast, but simply to help you understand how many articles I must have been storing in paper form for over thirty years. Just to give you an idea — and bear in mind that I’ve slowed down a bit recently — this year alone, that is in the twelve months between the end of November 2022 and the end the end of November 2023 I’ve written around 410 articles. Those are here in Substack, other websites, a few magazines and some newsletters. If I kept them in print form I wouldn’t be able to move. As it is, I’m only about a third of the way through the box files that are crowding our loft.

As much as I imagined I would look lovingly on the magazine and newspaper clippings every so often, the truth is I’ve not looked at them at all — except accidentally when I’ve been looking for something else.

So as I say, I’ve been scanning these documents into a searchable pdf format, and storing the files in the cloud. Many of them are years, even decades, out of date, but they can be reused or repurposed, and that’s quite useful, as we’ll see.

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Greetings!

I’ve been putting several free (up to a point) AI tools through their paces. They cover image creation and research — both ideal resources for writers. I think this post has taken me over four hours to research, so I hope you find it useful, otherwise I’ll cry.

Let’s dive in.

Ideogram

Put in a prompt, and then select the styles you want to apply. If you like the result but it’s not quite what you’re after, you can remix it, applying more styles or different ones. That’s what I did with the pix below, the one on the left being the original result.

https://ideogram.ai/

See art

This produces great images, but seems to have a mind of its own. I prompted it to draw a picture of a teacher in the form of a superhero, and it came up with a couple that seemed to be based on the image of Supergirl. So I asked it again, specifying it had to be male. Here are a couple of the results, first attempt and second attempt:

I’m not that impressed to be honest. The images are of photographic quality, but neither the girl nor the man looks like a teacher. And look at the blackboards: they haven’t been in classrooms in most schools for at least 30 years.

Mind you, my first attempt was asking See Art to draw a school inspector in the style of Monet. Here are the results:

Again, neither of these people look like a school inspector. The only Monet-ish aspect, almost, is the water in the second one, who by the way looks more like a schoolgirl than a school inspector. Also, the first woman is cross-eyed.

Now, I have to admit that I didn’t spend much time on the prompts, and what these results prove to me is that you have be very specific about what you want. You also need to keep on refining it.

See art

Bing image creator

This uses Dall-e, which is now available only to paying subscribers to ChatGPT. You’ll need a Microsoft Office account to use it, but the results aren’t bad. Mind you, they’re not fantastic either. I asked it to draw a picture of a classroom with engaged kids and teacher in the style of Roy Lichtenstein, and it came up with four pictures. Here’s one of them:

Much as I think that’s a nice image, there’s nothing of Lichtenstein in it, unless you count the bright colours. And even then, Lichtenstein used primary colours.

On the other hand, I asked it to draw faces that looked like photos:

Not bad, eh?

Bing Image Creator

Animated drawings

This one turns a still drawing or photo into an animated one. My first go was done using a drawing of a cat:

This was the result:

So much for not reading instructions, because it’s turned into a cat doing a version of backstroke! My next effort was rather more successful I think. I used this photo:

And here’s the animated version:

Animated drawings

Playground

This was the result of a prompt for a drawing of a schoolteacher by Roy Litchtenstein. The drawing is OK, but doesn’t fulfill the brief.

I’ve tried other prompts with similar results, that is interesting pictures that didn’t meet the requirements. Still, there are various visual prompts to select from. I tried a very sf one, and this is what was created for me:

I think, therefore, that Playground probably works best as a way of generating illustrations that can compliment a story or stimulate one’s imagination.

Playground

Leiapix

This is a program that can transform a still image into a 3d animated one. I tried it on this:

and got this:

I’m not terribly impressed, to be honest, but play around with it yourself. I think it probably does brilliant things with photos or drawings that are pretty dynamic to start with.

Leiapix

Better images of AI

This is a website with free AI-generated images that purport to be different from the usual clichés. I have to say that the ones I’ve seen so far are pretty good, such as this one denoting word taxonomy:

There’s an explanation of this image, and what it was created with, here.

The pictures on the site are free to use as long as you do so within the terms specified. At the moment there aren’t very many on the site, and there’s no search button, but I guess it’s early days.

Better images of AI

Perplexity

This is an alternative to ChatGPT. It’s not bad at all, not least because it can search the web. I said to it: tell me about the UK writer Terry Freedman, and here’s what it came up with:

One of the videos it came up with had nothing to do with me, but apart from that I’m rather impressed.

Perplexity

SciSpace

This is like ChatGPT but concerned only with searching scientific PDFs and websites. It interprets “scientific” more broadly than you might imagine. I asked it to conduct a literature review of Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. While it served up a few irrelevant results about winter nights, it also gave me several learned papers about the book. Moreover, you can ask it to summarise the paper for you and draw out its key points. You can upload PDFs to it as well. There’s a handy Chrome browser extension too, so you can have this resource at your fingertips.

SciSpace

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If you enjoyed this deep dive and found it useful, you may also like others on this website, such as:

Refer a friend

I hope you find this post useful. If you’re a paid subscriber, thanks! If not, please see me afterwards1.

But enough of this persiflage! On with the article, in which I cover:

1. How I write

2. A book for writers

3. Google Docs Travails

Terry

How I write

After a hugely complimentary comment2 in Substack’s Office Hours, asked me some interesting questions. Anu writes the newsletter, which deals with the more spiritual aspects of life from an Indian perspective. As someone who has been meditating for donkeys’ years and has a deep and abiding interest in such things, I find Anu’s posts both interesting and refreshing. Hopeful too in these dark times.

Anyway, Anu asked me some pertinent questions and I thought I’d attempt to answer them here.

As someone who is at times struggling to find tine to post weekly, I was wondering how many hours a day do you dedicate to writing? Do you have pipeline of posts you plan in advance and then publish them at a certain cadence?

Here are my answers, which I hope will prove both interesting and useful.

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I’d like to talk about effective writing.

Or perhaps I should start from the standpoint of ineffective writing. For the purposes of this mini essay, I’m defining that as writing that gets in the way.

Let me illustrate what I mean with an example. A Substack post popped up in my inbox this morning that was embellished, so rich — not in a good way but like a cream cake that has way too much cream — that I read half of it just to see how bad it could get. And boy, did it get bad. Once sentence, for example, contained three different metaphors. And it wasn’t even that long a sentence.

As a result, I was so focused on the awful writing that I was unable to pay attention to the actual content. Mind you, I’m not even sure there was any content. I had the impression that the writer was so in love with the way he expresses things that he didn’t think it mattered if he had nothing to express.

Perhaps a good analogy is really bad acting. You become aware that the actor is acting. You know that they too know they’re acting (as opposed to being so immersed in the part that they are really living it, not just pretending to). At that point the game is up, the spell is broken. You can almost hear the actor saying to himself, “I will now look over the top of my glasses because that’s what a person in this situation would do.” And yes, they would. But there’s a difference between doing it because for a couple of hours you are that person and doing it because you’re just pretending to be that person. If you can’t fool yourself, you can’t expect to fool an audience1.

Here are three ways of making the same point, and I invite you to say which you prefer, and why. They are numbered for ease of reference, and are in no particular order.

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When it comes to reading, most people approach the material in the same way they approach a packet of cornflakes. In an age of information overload, that just isn’t good enough. You have a job to do: not only to keep up-to-date for your own sake, but to do so in order to keep your supervisor and others informed1. How will you do it? The follow…

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If you don't have an editor breathing down your neck, try imposing that sort of constraint yourself and see how you get on,

Because you don't have the luxury of being able to go into depth, you have to make every word count. Let's consider the following sentence:

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You may recognise my allusion to Calvino’s How I Wrote One Of My Books1. Within an archive, latterly digitised, are my notes, drawings and printouts for a book about a particular area of education.

I knew that that sort of volume I had in mind would be unlikely to make the Sunday Times bestseller shortlist, and anyone in education would not have been mistaken had they declared that there are already more books on the subject that we probably need. However, my book was going to be aimed at a very niche audience, and would have benefitted from the following:

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The first part of this newsletter comprises a rather long article about good beginnings to articles. Then there are a couple of articles about tools I use. In one case it was to extract the text from a fifty year-old stencilled magazine. In the other it’s how I organise the resources for this newsletter and other blogs/newsletters I publish. As you know, I write and publish a lot; I need to be organised or it will all fall apart.

But enough of this persiflage! Let’s get to it.

Terry

Introduction

I have row upon row of books about writing. I have read all of them, sometimes only in part, but I have opened all of them and consulted them. I have reviewed a lot of books about writing. I have read a lot — a lot — of articles about writing. I have been on many — and I mean many — courses on creative writing.

I didn’t like that opening paragraph: too derivative (as you will see further on). So I am going to try again. Here goes…

Perhaps I’ve been reading the wrong articles, or the wrong writers of articles, but in my experience many nonfiction pieces open in such a boring manner that I have to force myself to read them. And only then if I feel I really ought to. I know I’m right. How many times do you see a magazine piece that cites great opening lines for nonfiction articles? How many times do you see a blogger or newsletter writer — such as here on Substack — ask their readers what their favourite nonfiction opening lines are? Exactly. I rest my case.

Article structure

Look, one wishes to be fair. When it comes to news reports, writers don’t really have an awful lot of choice. The busy worker on their commute, or wolfing down breakfast before starting the day’s work, doesn’t have time for waffle and persiflage. They want the facts, and they want them now. That’s why newspaper news articles (as opposed to feature articles) tend to employ the inverted pyramid approach, which looks like this:

As you can see, all the meat of the piece is in the first paragraph. For example:

Fred Bloggs, the Housing Minister, has announced that a £1bn building programme will start in the new year.

That paragraph contains the bare bones, which is enough to enable you to decide whether or not you want or need to know more. In fact, if a newspaper is well-written you could obtain a reasonably good overview of the day’s news simply by reading all the first paragraphs1. As you go down the article, more and more fine details are revealed.

But feature articles are, or should be, different. They should make the reader want to read on — otherwise, what’s the point of writing them? Here are some examples of great beginnings, and why I think they’re great2.

Examples of beginnings

Panic at United as Mourinho gets his Trump cards ready

Giles Smith Saturday November 12 2016, 12.01am, The Times

This article appeared at the end of the week in which Donald Trump had won the Presidential election, and Jose Mourinho started as Manchester United Football Club’s manager.

The world awoke this week to discover the levers of power in the hands of a man with perceived demagogic tendencies and to find significant decisions about the future resting on the whim of an acknowledged egotist who has threatened to undo everything his predecessor has put in place. Little wonder Manchester United fans are worried.

I love that because, despite the fact that the article appeared in the Sports section of The Times, and the headline clearly names Mourinho, we’ve been led to believe, or the writer has allowed us to believe, that he’s referring to Trump. So the last sentence comes as a ‘Gotcha!’ which makes you laugh and makes you want to read on, if only to discover if the new manager can really be that bad.

It’s also humorous because of the hidden hyperbole: was the world really concerned about who’s taken over as the manager at Manchester United? Most people in England, let alone the world, couldn’t have cared less!

History, totally destroyed

By Crispin Sartwell, New York Times, Nov 11th, 2017

Like many top intellectuals the world over, I’ve been thinking about the shape of history itself.

This is a wonderful opening sentence because it’s obvious that unless the writer has an ego so large it has to be transported around in a shopping trolley, he is joking. It’s a good way of signposting to the reader what sort of article this is likely to be: humorous, though perhaps with a hint of truth, by someone who doesn’t take himself too seriously, or perhaps is having a subtle dig at those who do. As a man who spends a lot of time solving the world’s problems (while doing the shopping or feeding the feline layabouts who occupy our home) I just had to read the rest! (The writer’s theory is that rather than history being determined and driven by “great men”, a more likely candidate for progress would be the Jackass Theory or The Colossal Bungler Hypothesis. Sounds about right to me.)

To the Innards of the Earth: Review of Underland: A Deep Time Journey By Robert Macfarlane

By Jonathan Meades

If I were a shrink, I’d worry about Robert Macfarlane – his dicing with eschatology, his claustrophilia, his recklessness, some of the company he keeps (sewer punks, cavist ultras, grotto mystics). But I’m not: I’m merely a repeatedly delighted fan of a true original. Macfarlane is a poet with the instincts of a thriller writer, an autodidact in botany, mycology, geology and palaeontology, an ambulatory encyclopedia – save that much of the time (a dodgy word in this context) Macfarlane does not ambulate but hauls himself feet first through tunnels the circumference of a child’s bicycle wheel in absolute darkness where day, night, maps and GPS do not exist.

Isn’t that a great opening? The first part of the first sentence suggests that Meades thinks Macfarlane needs psychiatric help. Then there’s a run of several words that most of us (OK, I) have to look up in the dictionary. Plus the marvellous description of the author as being am ambulatory encyclopedia, which is rather more original than the more familiar “walking encyclopedia, even though the two expressions mean the same thing.

I do have a soft spot for lists, by which I mean words and phrases that roll on and on and thereby have a sort of mesmerising effect on the reader. They carry you along and you don’t want to stop. You’ll see this again in the Foster Wallace example. I also like the fact that Meades makes us sing for our supper: it’s not exactly an easy read, but how much more rewarding than the more prosaic “This is not bad. I’ll give it five3.”

Frank Sinatra Has A Cold

By Gay Talese, May 14th, 2016.

Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke and semidarkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of folk-rock music blaring from the stereo. The two blondes knew, as did Sinatra's four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force conversation upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this first week of November, a month before his fiftieth birthday.

I don’t know about you, but I can see the bar Sinatra and his entourage are in. I can feel the taut atmosphere. I want to know why Sinatra is in a “mood of sullen silence”. I am compelled to read on.

How does Talese achieve this? I think the title of the article does a lot of work. Were I to write an article here called Terry Freedman Has The Sniffles, most people would say (rightly, in my opinion) “so what?”. But for a singer to have a cold could be a pretty devastating event. As Talese goes on to say,

Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel—only worse.

I also think there is the relentless detail, much of which serves to raise more questions than answers: who are these blondes? What friends? Why are we being told all this?

If you do nothing else today, read that article. It’s a seminal piece of journalism, absolutely full of detail4.

Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise

This essay by David Foster Wallace from January 1996 is also known as A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. It’s probably his most well-known nonfiction essay. Here’s how it starts:

I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as "Mon" in three different nations. I have seen 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer-enhanced. I have (very briefly) joined a conga line. I have seen a lot of really big white ships. I have seen schools of little fish with fins that glow. I have seen and smelled all 145 cats inside the Ernest Hemingway residence in Key West, Florida. I now know the difference between straight bingo and Prize-O. I have seen fluorescent luggage and fluorescent sunglasses.

This is compelling, and we can approach it on three levels.

Firstly, the structure. There is the repetition of the phrase “I have…”. This is reminiscent of Georges Perec’s I Remember, which is a relentless list that includes sentences on a widely disparate range of topics5. Again, it carries you along.

Then there are the contents of the list, which one suspects Foster Wallace is less than impressed by. After all, knowing the difference between Bingo and Prize-O does not sound to me like the pinnacle of human knowledge; joining a Conga line is something I have done once, drunk on happiness rather than wine, and which I’m very happy to not do again even though it was reasonably enjoyable at the time.

And finally there is the words “hot flesh”, which has completely different connotations to the word “skin”. Face it: it sounds gross.

Who could not continue reading after that opening?

Concluding remarks

I hope you have found this essay interesting. Have any of these examples appealed more than others? Do you feel encouraged to be more adventurous or imaginative in your own essay openings? Do tell.

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Coming up:

How I extracted the text from a fifty year-old typewritten document. Also, news about a new Experiments in Style Extra section for paid subscribers. Plus one of the ways in which I organise my material for my writing.

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Greetings!

In today’s thrilling issue, I reveal the secret of how I overcame a bad case of writer’s block, give you an Excel template for scheduling posts weeks and even months ahead, and discuss whether or not my friend Greg really exists.

But enough of this persiflage! On with the newsletter.

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I recently constructed a new Substack publishing schedule, which I unveiled to my adoring fans in my recent Experiments in Style post. Here’s a screenshot of it:

There are several noteworthy features in it. I wanted a schedule that would enable me to see at a glance at least one week at a time, and preferably two weeks. Also, that would indicate immediately whether a particular week was too crowded. That schedule ticks all the boxes, so to speak. In case you would be interested in constructing one for yourself, whether for Substack or anything else, I’ve written a step-by-step guide for how to do it.

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