Stone Soup is about human-made literary writing. Whether you are writing a story, a poem, an opinion piece, or an essay, you add expressive power to your work through using beautiful language.
Read aloud, a truly beautiful piece of prose is like a spoken song.
While most creative writing programs focus on abstract ideas, like metaphor and simile, which are ways of describing one thing in terms of another, I think it makes more sense for student writers to focus on how your words sound. Sounds, rhythms, patterns offer you tools to reach your readers with your story through more than pure meaning.
Just as many people are turning writing over to the AI computers, many people are also turning the task of reading over to AI computers. There is no question that there are texts that you can read through an AI summary. Technical manuals, for example. Sciences, like genetics and physics, are about ideas that flow from data. From equations. As a rule, as long as the science paper is clear, it doesn’t matter how it is written. Technical writing and reports of science experiments are about facts, and only about facts. It doesn’t matter how beautiful or not beautiful the writing might be. If the science paper is about genetics then the story is in the DNA, and if it is physics, it is about an equation.
A truly beautiful piece of prose is like a spoken song.
As a writer, I encourage you to read your writing aloud—even essays you write for school. Especially, and always, read your fiction aloud. In the previous section I talked about how writing is a process for the writer. In this section I want to emphasize that reading is a process for the reader.
As a writer, your job is to use words to engage your readers in this imaginary world that you have conjured up out of your imagination. You need to use words that will lock your readers into reading.
As I mentioned in the previous section, writing is a process for writers through which we grow as a person, as well as grow as a writer. Readers engage with the process of reading. A good reader takes the words that you have created and runs them through their body! Readers bring their own life to the text that you create. They create something out of that text that is unique to them.
We at Stone Soup feel strongly that focusing on sound, and rhythm, and imagery are key to getting your readers to engage with your story. Sound, rhythm, imagery—these create layers that are separate from the simple plot. Separate from what might appear in a plot summary.
Let me give you an example of what I mean from music.
Many songs have verses that repeat. Even though the words are the same, every time you hear the repeating chorus you hear them a little differently. Ever so slightly, the same words with the same meaning actually seem to mean something slightly different.
An AI summary of a song with a repeating chorus will tell what the song seems to be about. But the summary can never replace hearing the song, because the song works on more levels than just the meaning of words. And that is the same with literary fiction.
Especially now, as we enter an Age of Machine Intelligence, the challenge for human writers is to write stories that can’t really be summarized by AI because you have created a work of art that goes far beyond the meaning of words.
The mark of literary writing, as opposed to everyday writing, is that the value of the work is greater than the summary. Here is the first paragraph of the opening to the novel, Tale of Two Cities, by the English 19th century novelist, Charles Dickens. As you read this, rock your body back-and-forth in rhythm with the writing. Lean into “It was the best of times,” and rock back on “it was the worst of times.” Listen to the music the words make. Feel the rhythm.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
And now, read this. This is a summary, along with an explanation of what it means, made by an AI program.
The era preceding the French Revolution was characterized by extreme contradictions—simultaneously prosperous and miserable, enlightened and foolish, hopeful and despairing. Contemporary observers insisted on describing it only in superlatives, much as people describe the present day.
This AI summary with explanation is technically perfect. If you were writing a paper about the Tale of Two Cities you could use this to describe the first paragraph and what ti means. But, if that is all you, personally, had ever read, you would have missed out entirely on the sensual depth and pleasure of the actual text in which what is being said and how it is being is what makes this a powerful work of art rather than an essay.
StoneSoup.com is about art. It is about slowing down. It is about rocking back and forth to the rhythm of musical words.