Modernizing Kids’ Books–no, no, no, and NO

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Apparently there is a trend now, among publishers, of “updating” old children’s books with the goal of making them more readable and relevant for today’s children. I read about this in an article recently, and all I could think was “No! What an incredible loss for today’s kids!”

When I was a kid in the 1970s, I read a lot of books. Some were contemporary American books, but not all. Some were old American books, such as Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868) or (more recent) All of a Kind Family by Sydney Taylor (1951). Some were British or translated from other languages, such as Black Hearts in Battersea by Joan Aiken (1964), and some were both old and foreign, such as Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfield (1936, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911), and Heidi by Johanna Spyri (1880). Part of the charm of these books was precisely that they took place in a setting unlike mine. They made reference to things that were unfamiliar to me, but which sometimes (not always) became clear from the context.

To give an example, there is a line from An Old-fashioned Girl by Alcott (1869) which stuck in my head after repeating re-reading of the book. I remember it as

She sucked on her orange with a composure that would have scandalized those good ladies of Cranford.*

Who were “those good ladies of Cranford”? I had no idea, but it was clear that sucking on oranges (a curious way to eat them, I thought) was not considered good table manners. I set the matter aside, along with the discovery that in the story’s setting, eating peanuts out of a bag was also considered déclassé.

Many decades later, I was watching a new mini-series, Cranford. The name of the series didn’t stir any memories, until the ladies who were its main characters were faced with the awkward situation of eating oranges together. The oranges were a treat, but at least one lady wished she could eat her orange in a way that wasn’t approved of by another. A third, younger lady, suggested perhaps they could all enjoy their oranges privately, in their rooms.

These were “those good ladies of Cranford”! The mini-series was based on a book from 1853 which must have been popular in Alcott’s time. What a delight to have this mysterious, intriguing line suddenly illuminated!

So one reason against modernizing children’s books is that it robs the reader of the pleasure of experiencing a different world. There is another reason, a pedagogical one, which is that reading is supposed to “expand one’s horizons.” It’s a way of learning more about the world, and you don’t learn more about the world if your books are carefully designed to contain only things that are familiar to you.

These are also reasons against Americanizing foreign books. As someone who read a lot of British children’s books growing up, I have been horrified that publishers are de-Britishizing books. The most egregious example I’ve run across was a middle-grade story set in London, in which all mention of money was in dollars.

DOLLARS. In LONDON.

Seriously, do you really want children to think that everyone in the world uses dollars? Or that everyone eats the same sort of food, or uses the same words for pullovers?

The reasoning behind modernizing (and Americanizing) is that children will find the unfamiliar references off-putting and it will keep them from reading the book. This is probably is true of some children, which is sad, but certainly not of all.

I wonder if this comes down to the difference between those who enjoy genres like science fiction and fantasy, and those who don’t. In both science fiction and fantasy, reading about an unfamiliar setting is part of the pleasure. Readers expect to run into words they don’t understand (“hraka”, “silflay”), and references that are mysterious to them (“mighty Frith”, “at fu-Inlé”). They either figure them out from context or anticipate that the meaning will become clear later on.

Things are slightly different in the case of old books. The author thought the reference was obvious and so won’t have made a point of clarifying it later. Still, readers can ask someone older or consult Google if they are curious. Or they can simply move on without understanding the reference, as I did with those good ladies of Cranford.

So please, let’s leave the books as they are.**

Till next post.

* The actual line is

‘How does the new book come on?’ asked Polly, sucking her orange in public with a composure which would have scandalized the good ladies of ‘Cranford’.

** I am not discussing the removal of extremely offensive terms from stories where they play no role in the plot and serve only to reflect prejudices of the time. That’s a different issue. I would suggest, though, that if that is done, there should be a short explanatory note at the back of the book, for two reasons. One, because it is educational to know about prejudice existing at the time the book was written, and two, so adults who read an early edition of the book as children don’t start doubting their memory. (Me, re-reading “How the Leopard Got His Spots.”)

Most kids will stop reading at “The End” anyway, but the information will be there for those who look.

What Will Unvaccinated Children Choose?–speculations on vaccination choices as adults

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This is not another post on whether you should vaccinate your children, nor is it about the consequences of increasing numbers of unvaccinated children. At least, it isn’t about the consequences for children as children.

We are all familiar with the controversy and its history. Once upon a time, kids tended to get certain diseases when they were young, the so-called “childhood diseases.” Over the years, we developed vaccines for those diseases and made those vaccines available and, in fact, largely compulsory. The result was a decrease in the incidence of measles, polio, pertussis, mumps, and chickenpox, among others. Recently, some people have become concerned about the risks of the vaccines and are not vaccinating their children. The incidence of those diseases is increasing, but there are still many children who manage to avoid them even without being vaccinated.

What will those children choose to do once they are eighteen and in charge of their own medical decisions?

Measles, mumps, chickenpox, and polio tend to be more severe in adulthood. There’s a lot of focus right now on the risks of these diseases to children–the risks for the very young are particularly high–but not so much being said about the risks to adults. This is probably because most of today’s adults were vaccinated as kids.

Will the unvaccinated young adults reevaluate the risks and decide that it’s time to get vaccinated? After all, they have perhaps another sixty years in which to be exposed to the diseases. If they have unvaccinated kids of their own, exposure is even more likely. And if they manage to avoid the disease during their child-bearing years, then they will be susceptible to them when they become grandparents. I suspect getting measles in one’s sixties is even worse than getting it at age twenty.

To some extent, their reevaluation may depend on why their parents decided not to vaccinate them. If their parents’ main concern was the persistent rumor about vaccines and autism, or concerns about too many vaccines at once, maybe they will decide it’s time to get vaccinated. If their parents had other worries, then even warnings about the increased severity of the disease may not be persuasive.

It will be interesting (that’s one word for it) to see what happens. But there is one group that has an additional reason to consider getting vaccinated upon reaching adulthood. I hope that young women who plan to have children someday will take into account the added risks of getting certain diseases during pregnancy. In particular, I hope they will be open to vaccination for rubella (German measles) while they still have time.

Till next post.

What Would Effective Fiction-writing With A.I. Look Like?

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The problem that Large Language Model A.I. poses for book publishing isn’t really a new one, but one that is as old as publishing itself. A lot of people want to get their books published even when the books just aren’t good.

Early in the history of publishing, this fact meant that publishers had to wade through piles of unsolicited submissions–the “slush pile”–to find the few good manuscripts they’d received. Then word processing made typing so much easier that anyone with an idea could type up a novel, and publishers effectively handed off some of the slush by insisting on agented submissions only. More recently, when Amazon made self-publishing easy and free, Kindle Unlimited became a slush pile. Now, with the assistance of A.I., that pile is growing at an incredible rate.

I’m not going to address the problem of dealing with slush. Maybe A.I. can be trained to weed out some forms of bad writing by looking for proxies of it–but I suspect that’s a “build a better mousetrap” kind of problem. Rather, I want to ask whether A.I. can play a useful role in writing good fiction.

So what are the current strengths and weaknesses of A.I.?

A.I. can generate large amounts of text, relatively quickly, based on the writing that it was trained on. Given an appropriate prompt and context, it can identify popular tropes of various genres and incorporate them into its writing, along with some random elements.* Apparently, it can also maintain continuity in its writing, which amazes me. However, A.I. cannot respond to writing as a human does, because it isn’t human. It cannot evaluate a piece of writing and say “This is intriguing!” or “I love the way this is written,” or “I was rolling on the floor laughing.”

I think the inability to respond in a human way to a piece of writing is crucial, and this inability creates a further limitation that I’d like to point out. A.I. cannot adjust its writing to changing times (and times are always changing) except through a diet of new, human-written material expressing the varied human responses to those changes. For example, if self-driven cars become ubiquitous, people will have to write about their experiences with them, and AI will have to be trained on that writing, for it to be able to incorporate that change.

Now let’s look at an example of a writer’s process. She starts with an idea–she’ll combine some tropes popular with her young daughter and wrote a story about a girl who is secretly a princess (but doesn’t know it), who takes care of her little brother and sister when their parents are lost/kidnapped/killed, who is accompanied by a large, friendly predator (say, a white wolf with green eyes,) and who has several items of magic jewelry. But that isn’t enough. To have a story, something’s got to happen. Our writer decides the heroine must rescue her parents (they were kidnapped) from the clutches of an evil king/wizard.

Now the writer needs to work out some backstory. Why doesn’t the girl know she’s a princess? How did she come to have a wolf-friend? Why did the villain take her parents, and how?

If the author is a pantser, she starts writing and answers these questions as she goes. New ideas come to her as she types. Maybe one of the magic items is a necklace that can light up the dark forest or a dark tunnel as the children travel in search of their parents. Maybe the parents were kidnapped because, being royal, they know some secret that only the royal family knows. Maybe there is both an evil king and an evil wizard, and since they don’t entirely trust each other, our heroine can set them against each other.

If the author is a plotter, on the other hand, she will work out most of these details before she spends a lot of time typing. Once she knows with sufficient detail what’s meant to happen, she’ll set about writing it in an interesting way.

Either way, the result is a rough draft. Now it’s time to revise. The author is also a reader of books, and she uses this to evaluate what she’s written. How can it be made more interesting? Does it drag in the middle? Is the ending cliched? How can she end it differently?

She changes her word-choices, making paragraphs and sentences sharper, or funnier, or more dramatic. Again, she measures this by her own, human reaction to them. She also checks for mistakes and problems in continuity. How many horses would you typically need to pull a carriage? Could the peddler have made it all the way to the place they meet him on foot? Are there conflicting explanations of the queen’s background?

Now she has a second draft. But she isn’t the only target audience for her story. So she persuades some other humans to read it and evaluate it, pointing out problems she has missed and noting where the story fails to satisfy them as readers. Then she revises again.

At some point, the author (and her friends) decide that she has done all she can to improve the story, and she starts the process of querying agents. If she does get an agent, there will be yet more revisions in store, and so on, until the story is either published or set aside.

So what parts of this process could A.I. assist with?

First, it could generate plot ideas using tropes and random elements suitable to the desired genre. However, it wouldn’t be able to evaluate these ideas as a human would. (E.g. “That sounds intriguing!” or “I’d like to read that one.”)

So let’s say the human author steps in here, choosing from among the generated ideas the one that most provokes her interest, and then modifying it to make it even more interesting.

Speaking for myself, I don’t have trouble coming up with ideas. However, I do sometimes have trouble coming up with a suitable combination of ideas. For example, after reading an number of fantasy books in which young women living in evil kingdoms are trained to fight and kill, I decided to write a fantasy in which there was a academy where young people were trained to interact non-violently. But I still needed a problem to be solved. A violent foe? Trouble from within the school? Maybe something in the heroine’s personal life? There are lots of ways of generating ideas (roll story dice, ask a friend.) A.I. could be yet another one.

Once we have the idea for the plot, we need to develop the characters, the setting, and the backstory. Can A.I. generate backstory to explain how things came to be the way they are, and why the characters are in their current situations, and do so in a way that serves the plot? I’m skeptical, though I suppose it could suggest some possibilities. The author would still have to decide what worked for the story they want to tell

Now we get to the actual writing. A.I. can certainly generate a lot of text, but I don’t believe it can evaluate that text as it goes to see if the story is developing in an interesting way. The author can do this, BUT–important point–it takes time to read versions of a story. The would-be author could have A.I. churn out multiple versions of a story based on the chosen plot, but then she’d have to read all those versions to see if any of them were good enough to take further. If she could find a good story after reading just ten versions, that would be feasible. If, on the other hand, there was only one really promising story out of every one hundred, that would be inefficient.

That’s the reason agents tend to look at only the first ten pages of a submission, not the whole thing. From those ten pages, agents are deciding whether the author is good at writing and also good at identifying what will interest the reader. From that, plus the brief description in the query letter, the agent can judge whether this particular story seems promising. A good author with a good idea makes it worth reading beyond 10 pages. Otherwise, better to stop and move on. But this shortcut depends on the human author being deeply involved in the writing of the whole submission.

The more the author guides the A.I., the sooner she will get a promising draft. So perhaps she goes chapter by chapter, adding further details to her prompt and more context each time, fleshing out the plot in a way she finds pleasing as a human reader. (This process would probably be easier for a plotter than a pantser.)

Notice that this process is becoming more and more like writing the darn thing herself, except that at this point the writing style is the A.I.’s. Speaking for myself, getting the details sorted out is the hardest part of writing fiction. Writing the actual words is easy. (Though polishing them is another story.)

Finally the author has a promising rough draft. But she isn’t done yet. To have a really good book, she’s going to have to revise it.

Here I think the A.I. will not be very useful. Revising is all about changing the draft in accordance with her human responses to the writing. The A.I. can proofread the spelling and grammar. Maybe it can even apply some rules such as the rule of three, but it can’t respond to the writing as a human would.

In the process of revising the novel, the author’s word choices will start to replace the A.I.’s. The style will become increasingly the author’s own. (Hopefully for the better.) Since I’m assuming an author who is trying to write a good book, by the time she is done, she will have gone over every sentence, either approving it or changing it. It will be largely her own writing.

To summarize: how can the A.I. assist the author? First, it can generate ideas, perhaps ideas based on context that the author provides it, from which the author can take inspiration. I don’t just mean at the beginning–presumably the author could ask it partway through for suggestions on what might happen next.

Second, apparently it can help flag continuity problems, though I don’t have personal experience with this. Honestly, I find this the most exciting of the possible uses. Trying to keep straight everything I’ve said so far about a world, even if I try to make lists of characters, places, etc., is one of the things that gives me a lot of trouble.

Third, it can check spelling and grammar, as well as flag words that may be overused and other stylistic details.

I have assumed in this post that A.I. won’t eventually become capable of predicting (though not feeling) human emotional reactions to text. Given all the developments we’ve seen, I don’t think I can say confidently that this will never happen, but it certainly isn’t the case now.

A.I. isn’t the problem for book publishing. Authors with low or no standards are the problem, and A.I. is making this problem so, so much worse. But for authors who want to write the best books they can, A.I. could become a useful tool, along with the word processor, writing software such as Scrivener, and search engines like Google.

Till next post.

*For a simplified example of such a prompt, “Give me a 2,000 word science-fiction short story about a group of people who live 800+ years (‘the Ancients’) and how studying them provokes discord and eventually ends in violence. Set it in the US and include a protest group, a pharmaceutical company, and a cell biologist.” This is based on a story that I am working on (not with A.I. assistance.)