Marc Nobbs: Blog

There are days when I sit down to write a blog post and I know exactly what I want to write about and, indeed, exactly what I want to write. Then there are days when I sit staring at a blank screen with a blank mind and have no clue how to even start.

Today is one of those second types of days. There’s nothing I need to write about. A few things I’d like to write about. But nothing that really leaps out at me. So sometimes you just have to start writing and see which path your ever-elusive muse leads you down.

For example, there’s a post on the StoriesOnline forums that’s been hanging around for about a month, which crept back to the top of the feed this week when some people replied to it about “Coming of Age” stories. The Paul Robertson Saga is very much a “Coming of Age” tale, so maybe a response to that post in a bit more detail than the forum allows might be something to tackle. Right now, as I start to write, I have nothing planned. No particular insight I feel the need to impart. So I’m just going to write and see where this post takes me.

The OP in the thread says…

However, I almost always give up on the longer stories around here because they get too over the top with the conscience of the teens actions. It gets too polite and thoughtful, it eliminates the whole trial and error thing of being a teenager.

I could go on regarding many stories like this, they have great ideas but they feel so out of touch of how real teenagers act, EVEN the most polite ones.

So, I guess what I want to discuss here is, “Does this apply to Paul?” Is he too polite? Does he seem out of touch with “real” teenagers?

Reading through the thread, the overarching theme seems to be that middle-aged authors find it difficult to write teenage characters because they’ve forgotten what it was like to be a teenager. It’s not just the language they use when speaking that people see as unrealistic; it’s the attitudes and even the skills they have.

“No teenager speaks like this; he sounds like he’s in his forties” is a valid criticism. But if you wrote the dialogue in the way that teenagers actually speak, it would be rightly criticised as bad dialogue because the reader would struggle to understand it. You can get away with the odd “Erm…” or “Well, it, like, so…” but fill all your characters’ mouths with it for a whole book, and it would very quickly become annoying and unreadable.

I have a character who first appeared in “Eternally & Evermore” whose “teenage speak” I exaggerated to make her stand out from the adults in the story. She’s making a reappearance in “A Healing Love” and still speaks noticeably differently from Paul and his peers despite the age difference being about five years or so. It’s a deliberate choice to make her stand out, and she’s a lot of fun to write. But she’s also exhausting to write and to read back. There’s simply no way you could fill a whole book with people speaking like that.

The same applies to slang. Actually, slang is worse because it changes so quickly. Writing a book in 2024 that’s set in 2014? Any idea what words the kids were using ten years ago to describe something they like? Or dislike?

No, me neither. And trust me on this, the internet is not all that helpful in this regard either.

The same goes for skills. How many teenagers are fabulous cooks? Not many. Some will be, and if you’ve got a character who is a good (not great) cook and, crucially, can explain why they are in the story’s context, that one thing. But if all your teenage cast are whipping up culinary delights all the time, that’s unrealistic.

The same goes for sex. How many teenage boys are good at sex? Hell, how many teenage boys don’t come in their kegs when a pretty girl even looks at them the wrong way? (Or the right way.)

But if you are writing an erotic Coming of Age story, then having your main character be a bumbling, sexually incompetent nerd, the like of which we saw in the wonderful The Inbetweeners, wouldn’t make for a great story. It was hilarious to see Will attempting to have sex with Charlotte, but it wasn’t the least bit “sexy”.

Yes, teenagers are dumb and incompetent and make one mistake after the other. But unless you’re writing a comedy, no one wants to read about a character like that. One respondent in the thread on SOL even comments that he gets more comments from readers asking how his character can be so dumb after he’s done something dumb that a teenager might do, than he does after his teenager pulls off some middle-age wonder skill that he really shouldn’t be capable of.

Teenagers are a breed unto themselves, and writing teenagers is to walk a fine line between realism that’s either unreadable or just not enjoyable to read and making your character talk and behave in a way that is beyond their years.

Which brings me back to Paul.

The first thing to remember here is that Paul is narrating this story from his memories in future. 2048, to be exact. And the story he’s telling you starts in 2010. That’s 38 years earlier. Yes, the narration seems to be in “the present”, but the truth is Paul isn’t a reliable narrator. He’s not exactly unreliable in the strict literary sense, but he’s certainly offering you his version of events, and doing so from the distant future. Doesn’t it stand to reason that the middle-aged narrator is going to be economical with his interpretation of what happened, what was said and how it was said?

That said, Paul does narrate some of the dumb things he does. He questions his choices, but, remember, he’s doing so of the position of an old man describing his younger self. He knows, for example, that getting in his car angry and drunk and driving away was a dumb thing to do, and he doesn’t shy away from that. But he also doesn’t think he flashes his cash around when it’s clear from what some of his friends say, that he does.

The big one here though is Paul’s skills in the bedroom. In A Tortured Soul, he depicts himself as something of a sex god. But is he? Could he be? After all, at this point, he’s only nineteen at the start of the book and twenty by the end. Could he really be that good at sex?

Well, you need to remember that by this point he’s had a lot of experience. He travelled around America sleeping with women in every town he visited. Or, at least, he tells us he did. The only actual evidence is his dairy, since Paul chooses to skip over the whole trip in his narration. So I think it is believable that Paul’s sex skills are going to be a cut above his university peers—which ultimately is all that matters when it comes to his campus reputation.

As I said, I think writing teenage characters is a delicate balance. You want them to be believable as teenagers, but you also need them to be interesting and not act the way typical teenagers act because, frankly, it would be annoying and not that interesting. And with Paul, I’d like to think that I’ve pulled it off.
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This post was originally published on my Ream Stories page on 25/10 and on my website the next day.

It’s a glorious feeling when you can see the finish line of the book you’re writing.

I’d imagine it’s the same feeling you get if you’re running the London Marathon when you pass underneath Blackfriar’s Bridge onto the Victoria Embankment—you know you’re only about a mile from the finish. After twenty-three gruelling miles, your legs hurt, and you’re low on energy. But now you’re running along the north bank of the Thames. You know all you need to do is turn right at Westminister Bridge, run up Birdcage Walk alongside St. James Park, turn right again at Buckingham Palace, and you’re done. You get your last wind—that extra boost of energy you need to complete the course.

Okay, so knowing how your book is going to end and what events you need to write on the way there probably isn’t the same as running the Marathon.

But it’s close.

Okay, it’s not even close.

But it’s where I am now.

I have a calendar on which I track the events within the Westmouthshire universe. It’s an Excel spreadsheet rather than an online calendar or something, but it works for me. I’ve got a tab for the overall timeline, which shows the months & years, and then colour-coded blocks which show when each novel, novella and short story takes place.

You can see an example of this on my Website.

After that, I have a tab for each year from 2007 to 2014, a typical “grid” layout for a yearly planner – months across the page, days down the page. Within each tab, I have colour-coded blocks that detail the specific events in each novel, novella, and short story. It makes it quite colourful when events from different books happen on the same day, which happened a couple of times in 2013 & 2014.

There is an example of this on my Website too.

I started doing this when I was writing The Truths We Live because I really needed to plan out the exact timeline of that story, including when Bobby filmed scenes and when those scenes got released. And me being me, I then had to fill in all the other details for every other event in the universe.

I actually find it really helps planning out stories, including things like working out when a school/university term starts and ends or when bank holidays are that I need to write around.

In one case, it even helped me to determine if there was a full moon one night for a scene in a story. And so it’s proved again. I’ve now pencilled in on the calendar the major events that will bring A Healing Love to a close. So I now have a rough framework for the rest of the book. In a sense, I’ve just passed beneath Blackfriar’s Bridge onto Victoria Embankment. Only, I’m strolling casually rather than pushing myself for a personal best time. Nevertheless, I know I’m only about a mile from the end.

I've made an announcement regarding early access to the 4th Paul Robertson book on my author website. You can find the link to the post on my Facebook page, which you can get to from my SOL author page.

The version of this post on my website contains an image referred to in the post. SOL doesn't (as far as I'm aware) allow images in blog posts, otherwise I'd post it here too.

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When I was uploading my work to my Ream Stories page, I noticed there was a question that no other site has asked before when uploading work.

"Was Generative AI used to write this story?”

It’s a “required” answer, and I can understand why it’s being asked; I really can. But it did spark a question in my head—Is “using” AI cheating? And the answer to myself was a resounding—well, I guess it depends on what you mean by “using”.

Let me explain.

I “use” three AI Tools—Grammarly, Copilot and WordTune. And I use each one of those in different ways, for different purposes and in different frequencies.

Grammarly is, to all intents and purposes, a very, very sophisticated version of the spell check and grammar check that’s been a part of Microsoft Word and other word processors for decades, but rather than just highlighting where you’ve made a “mistake”, and offering a simple solution like adding or deleting a comma, it can restructure whole sentences or even whole paragraphs. I have it turned on in Word (or Google Docs—I use both) and, for the most part, I ignore the red lines it produces while I write. Then, every so often, I’ll go through those red lines and make a decision as a writer which I want to accept and which I reject.

And that’s the key with all AI tools, really. How are you using it? Do you follow the suggestions blindly, or do you make informed choices about the suggestions the tools make based on your personal writing style and preferences? I’d suggest that one of these is the “correct” way to use AI and the other… well…

Copilot is a completely different tool and a far more “dangerous” one in terms of “cheating”. And I don’t actually use it for writing at all, even though it is absolutely capable of generating entire articles that read well and make sense. It can even generate complete, simple stories with a beginning, middle and ending.

My personal use tends to be for image generation. I regularly ask Copilot to generate a featured image for a blog post or to illustrate a scene I’ve written.

This second use is proving to be really useful for me. It gives me an idea if the picture I’m painting with words matches the image I have in my head as I write. Let me give you an example.

I asked Copilot to illustrate this paragraph from “A Wounded Heart”…

“She was walking along the train station platform at as brisk a pace as her high heels and the heavy suitcase she was dragging behind her on its wheels would allow. She was at least smiling though. She was dressed casually, in three-quarter-length faded blue jeans, a white t-shirt with some branded logo on that I didn’t recognise and a light jacket that reflected that it was still quite warm even though it was now September. Her long blonde hair was in a ponytail that bounced behind her as she walked.”

One of the images it generated can be seen on my website version of this post. It is very much the kind of picture I had in my head when I wrote that scene and every time I read it.

Link to Image here

I’ve also, on occasions, asked Copilot to write a blog post on a particular topic. I’ve never used the text generated as an actual blog post, but I have used it as a writing prompt to write my own post. Doing this gives me a rough structure to work with and ensures I don’t miss out a potentially important point.

There is one other situation I’ve used Copilot for, and that’s song lyrics. I was writing a scene that required a song to be sung, and the lyrics of the song were important to the scene. But I’m no songwriter and could easily have wasted many hours trying to develop some lyrics. But Copilot has a plug-in for Suno, the AI music generator, and I asked it to write me a song. I then used the lyrics of that song as a basis for the one in the scene. I changed a large proportion of the words but kept the structure and the rhyming couplets. So, what’s in my manuscript isn’t AI-generated, but it is based on something that was.

Is that cheating?

Again, the key here is not just taking what the AI has generated and using it verbatim but instead using it as an inspiration to create something yourself.

And that’s how I’ve used the last tool, too. WordTune describes itself as “…an AI-powered reading and writing companion capable of fixing grammatical errors, understanding context and meaning, suggesting paraphrases or alternative writing tones, and generating written text based on context.”

In one sense, it’s a lot like Grammarly, but while Grammarly focuses on grammar and structure, WordTune is capable of adding to what you’ve already written. It has a “continue writing” function which looks back at the context of what you’ve already written and, well, continues it.

This is my least-used AI tool. In fact, I could probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve clicked that “Continue writing” button in the past few months. When I do click on it, it gives me half a dozen ways of continuing the paragraph and what I usually do is cycle through them a couple of times, decide which, if any, I like best and insert it into the text. Then I’ll usually re-write it slightly (or a lot) to sound more like “me”.

Again, it’s not using the tool to write for me, it’s using the tool as inspiration to get me over a tricky spot when the words don’t flow by themselves.

Is that cheating?

I don’t believe it is.

I think that it’s fine to use AI as long as it’s used almost like a “collaborator” or a beta reader if you prefer, the kind that points out the mistakes and missteps you’ve made and helps guide you towards a cleaner, more readable manuscript and maybe also give you a nudge in the right direction when you hit a hurdle you’re having trouble getting over.

I had a human version of this when I was writing The Lies We Lead. I gave a friend access to the Google Doc and permission to comment on it, and comment on it she did. There were times when she was “watching” me write in the sense that she had the document open at the same time as me, and because Docs works in “real-time”, she could see what I was writing as I wrote it. She could even see when I deleted sections I’d written that I wasn’t happy with and replaced them.

And she would make comments in real-time when we both had the document open, too.

In a sense, I was using her intelligence as a tool for my writing. It just wasn’t an artificial intelligence but was, in a sense, just a series of comments on the screen.

Is that really that much different from the current crop of AI tools? Aren’t they best used as real-time collaborators?

That, then, I believe, is how AI should be used. Not to generate great swathes of text and copy & paste it into your manuscript but as a genuine tool—not much different from the spell checkers we’ve all been using for the past thirty years or more or a friend looking over your shoulder and making comments as you write.

Really, it’s the same as it has been for every single piece of new technology that this species of ours has come up with since the first cave dwellers picked up a rock and used it to crack open a dinosaur egg to get to the yolky goodness inside.

In the past, I've always done my writing in Microsoft Word. This goes all the way back to Word 6.0 on my Mac LC when I was at University thirty years ago. I pay for Microsoft 365, which not only includes Office (and so Word) but also comes with 1TB of cloud storage, which I think isn't a bad deal. I have the family edition, shared with my wife, two kids, my parents and my wife's parents. For less than £100 a year. Really not a bad deal at all.

But I've been writing A Healing Love mostly in Google Docs rather than Word. I have my reasons and I won't go into them here, but it's something I've essentially been "forced" to do.

I don't particularly like Docs. It doesn't come anywhere close to the desktop version of Word in terms of features and it's "save after every keystroke" advantage is negated by the desktop version of Word if your file is saved in your OneDrive.

But I found out something else recently that's put me off Docs even more.

It counts words in a document differently to Word.

Seriously. You'd think that counting words would be easy—you just count the words. But apparently not. Word and Docs use different methods and treat different things as "words" so you end up with different word counts. Sometimes wildly different.

Now, for me, that's not really that big of a deal. But it is annoying. I have a spreadsheet with the word count of each chapter of everything I've written in it, and I've been keeping track of the word count of A Healing Love with Docs—but all my other work I did counts for in Word, so that means my comparison with other books is inaccurate. I've had to go back and redo the count for each chapter in Word.

Annoying, but nothing more.

But if you're, for example, a student with a strict word count for an assignment, or a journalist/columnist writing to a word count or entering a fiction writing contest with a word count—yeah, it would be annoying to think you're just on the limit having written in one only to find the other says your over and your submission gets thrown out.

There are some very good explanations of the different methods used bny Docs and Word for counting words. They are fascinating. But you'd think that in 2024, with all the things that corporations could use to set their products apart from the others, they'd at least agree on a method for counting words so that any confusion is avoided.