JNC Writing Support Group
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@Angelus - It sounds great but the variation between might be hard to manage. Keep going with it and once youāve finished, then tease it apart if needed.
That way you have skeletons of a story to work on.
I havenāt tried AI as an editor and Iām not sure how that would even work to be honest. I mean, how would recognise stylistic tricks that may not clean grammar but which highlight character?
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@Damon-Cavalchini said in JNC Writing Support Group:
I havenāt tried AI as an editor and Iām not sure how that would even work to be honest.
I'm about to find out! I've just discovered that Nvidia released a chatbot yesterday that runs locally on almost all RTX 30/40 graphics cards and that you can train on your own documents, so I'm downloading that now (only 35GB zipped!) and I'll see what it makes of my novel.
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@Damon-Cavalchini said in JNC Writing Support Group:
I havenāt tried AI as an editor
I wouldn't suggest it... AI tools are designed to be confidently incorrect. I wouldn't really suggest them if you can't verify their results through a secondary method.
Something like ProWritingAid is gonna be much more useful. It has tips from experts in writing. It can make your writing much more professional and detect bad habits. It also has detailed explanations about pretty much anything it suggests, so it's easier to understand why it suggests changing something. It's easily the best tool I've worked with. The only thing is that it helps improve writing style, but that's only half the battle with writing. What you write is also just as important.
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@Parity, ProWritingAid is AI-powered too, but at least (I assume) it's been trained for very specific tasks rather than a general-purpose chatbot. I guess I might consider it if it wasn't cloud-based.
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@Angelus It's AI powered in the same way that 1990's games had AI... In that, they use that term purely for marketing purposes. Behind the scene's, it's just rules and algorithms.
Generative AI, like Chat GPT, are operating on completely different principles. And they tend to lie, which is why you can't trust them.
ProWritingAid is seriously good, though. It has pretty much all the information you need to write in a professional style. It detects passive voice, grammatical issues, and stylistic rules. It can generate reports on sentence length, pacing, dialogue tags, and sentence structure. Like, you can use it to detect if you are overusing a certain sentence structure in comparison to published writing. It's crazy useful as an analysis tool.
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@Parity, I have my own analysis tools but they're pretty limited - word and phrase usage and proximity plus readability metrics, but I can see how something like ProWritingAid would be useful.
Certainly more useful than the Nvidia AI I've just been trying for a laugh. I asked it if it thought my competition entry could be considered a light novel, and it said that there weren't enough typical light novel elements such as harems and magical abilities in there for it to be sure!
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@Angelus said in JNC Writing Support Group ā¦it said that there weren't enough typical light novel elements such as harems and magical abilities in there for it to be sure!
Oh no! I forget the harem as well. Iāll have to fix that next time.
Thanks for all the comments on AI tools everyone. It is a space Iāve spent no time in from a writing perspective.
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How are things going? Itās funny, I was sort of reluctant to join this thread because its name āJNC Writing Support Groupā sounds so needy. But it turns out that I am so needy.
Someone talk to me!š¤Ŗ -
@jazzyjeoff I'm buried in original light novel competition entries. For every good one there are 5 bad ones....
At least there have been a couple pretty damn good ones, so I'm hopeful the winners are gonna be good.
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@admin Well, have fun crushing the hopes and dreams of 5 out of 6 folks on this forum! š
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@jazzyjeoff, the way not to have your hopes and dreams crushed is not to have any hopes and dreams in the first place. Now that might sound depressing, but it's like the old thing about how pessimists ought to be among the happiest people in the world because life usually turns out better than they thought it would.
After reading something captivating, book lovers simply need to talk about it with someone.
āTearmoon Empire -
@Angelus said in JNC Writing Support Group:
@jazzyjeoff, the way not to have your hopes and dreams crushed is not to have any hopes and dreams in the first place. Now that might sound depressing, but it's like the old thing about how pessimists ought to be among the happiest people in the world because life usually turns out better than they thought it would.
Well, for now I am going to pretend that the 5 out of 6 bad entries are chatbot generated entries that have been spammed to the site. So, that means everyone on this forum made it past the first round. So congratulations everyone!
See, my coping mechanism is much more cheerful!(admitally, mine has a much shorter shelf-life than yours, but 40 days of relative happiness isn't so bad)
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@jazzyjeoff said in JNC Writing Support Group:
Well, for now I am going to pretend that the 5 out of 6 bad entries are chatbot generated entries that have been spammed to the site.
Seeing that Nvidia AI I was posting about wasn't sure my entry even qualified as a LN, maybe I ought to ask it if it thinks it could write a better one! Regardless, I'm pressing ahead with volume 2 of my entry now because that seems a lot easier than the weird sci-fi/isekai story I've mentioned before.
After reading something captivating, book lovers simply need to talk about it with someone.
āTearmoon Empire -
@Angelus I just finished crushing my hopes and dreams, so I can confirm that this method works. I'll consider it a win if I get back some feedback.
Next year, though, I'll be sweeping the contest. I've only started greasing the pan, but I can tell I'm gonna cook.
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@Angelus said in JNC Writing Support Group:
@jazzyjeoff said in JNC Writing Support Group:
Well, for now I am going to pretend that the 5 out of 6 bad entries are chatbot generated entries that have been spammed to the site.
Seeing that Nvidia AI I was posting about wasn't sure my entry even qualified as a LN, maybe I ought to ask it if it thinks it could write a better one! Regardless, I'm pressing ahead with volume 2 of my entry now because that seems a lot easier than the weird sci-fi/isekai story I've mentioned before.
Well, the AI was just trying to intimidate you into quitting because it wanted one of its 400 entries to win. Don't trust the machinesāthey are all filthy cheaters!
I am working on my volume 2 also. One of the many things I have learned from this contest is for me to keep things in manageable chunksāI was sort of intimidated at the 50K word minimum threshold that I almost quit. When they lowered it to 35K it felt doableāand I just about hit 50K anyway. I think light novels lend themselves well to that sort of approach, since many of them tend to be very episodic.
Another funny thing about the contest was just how quickly that I came up with the general plot. I knew I would be pressed for time, so I just quickly made a decision that fit in with what I perceive to be my relative strengthsāthough I sort of regret not writing a comedy. I can be really indecisive sometimes, so having the structure of a contest was pretty helpful in getting me going. -
@Angelus @jazzyjeoff The place has been quiet so I got caught with work and havenāt been here for a few days. Iām always happy to chat about writing (even though it may take a while to reply).
I am also wondering if my entries were light novel enough so I am working on a sequel that feels much more light novelly. And in doing so come up with the plot for an isekai with an incredibly long title which might be much more the judges cup of tea.
That said, by the simple value of being in this group you are more likely to be in the 1 out of 5 group :)
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@admin said in JNC Writing Support Group:
@jazzyjeoff I'm buried in original light novel competition entries. For every good one there are 5 bad ones....
At least there have been a couple pretty damn good ones, so I'm hopeful the winners are gonna be good.
Petition to change the group name to "Top 1/6 Author support group" so we can all delude ourselves into thinking our entries were one of the good ones.
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@LeeroyCGNA said in JNC Writing Support Group:
@admin said in JNC Writing Support Group:
@jazzyjeoff I'm buried in original light novel competition entries. For every good one there are 5 bad ones....
At least there have been a couple pretty damn good ones, so I'm hopeful the winners are gonna be good.
Petition to change the group name to "Top 1/6 Author support group" so we can all delude ourselves into thinking our entries were one of the good ones.
Can we pretend to be a light novel and make it āTop 1/6 Author - and some from the next 1/6 group as well - support groupā?
Even if we donāt get through in this round, it doesnāt mean we were terrible. Well, in your case anyway - mine probably were - but it could also be that we just didnāt fit what they wanted.
Seriously, Iām just looking forward to seeing what the end result is. It has been a great process and hopefully J Novel Club see great results from it.
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There's something I was curious about with everyone. Until this contest it had been over a decade since I last wrote. Back then I would always write it linearly, from beginning to end. But with this contest I found that if I got stuck on something or lost momentum on one section, I could jump ahead and write something further down the line. I think at one point I was jumping between three or four different points in the story by doing this. So I'm just wondering, how does everyone else write? Do you just do it from beginning to end? Or do you skip ahead (or back) to write other parts when you feel like it?
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I prefer to write linearly as joining disparate parts together can be annoying, but I think it is correct to jump ahead if you find yourself stuck because you can continue to be productive.
It's probably also more efficient to jump ahead and target parts you feel are tricky to write first, but again, I just prefer to write linearly. I just don't have any faith in my estimating skills with regards to how long a given scene will end up so it is safer for me to proceed one step at a time.
