Grass underneath your bare feet. The tang of biting into a cold strawberry. The sound of laughter. The first few dots of a rain shower on your windshield.
These are small things. But though each impression is small on its own, taken together they comprise much of life’s beauty. Part of your job as a writer is to notice, imagine, and impart these little pleasures to others as imaginary experience.
Attentiveness to detail will not only improve your writing–it’ll improve your life.
This morning I noticed that Youtube now contains an experimental transcription feature. This new option attempts to analyze the audio of any video you watch and create closed captions.
This feature is actually quite advanced and ambitious–but for the time being, it’s clearly a beta. Have you ever typed some English text into Babel Fish, converted the text to Korean, then translated that back into English? What you get back is a hilariously phrased, broken passage of text that barely resembles the original. Every once in a while you get a truly startling and inspiring phrase out of it.
Youtube’s “transcribe audio” feature produces word salad similar to what you can coax out of Babel Fish. Want to see what happens when “transcribe audio BETA” tries to interpret the sounds of Mandarin Chinese as English words?
Click this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX9fFh5O_Lw
Once you’re on the Youtube page, click the option in the menu illustrated here. You’ll find it in the bottom right of the video frame.
Then just sit back and enjoy the madness.
The software is interesting because although it often gets phrases completely wrong, it does seem to be able to actually analyze the context of a sentence somewhat. So what we end up getting is word salad that is crazy and strange, yet it also might contain eerie references and elaborations on ideas presented earlier in the recording.
Please do take a minute to check it out. It’s hilarious, fun, and potentially inspiring.
Hello!
Due to a hard drive crash, I lost this week’s blog posts. I am scrambling behind the scenes to recreate them. Sorry for the delay (back up your data, folks!)
Well, it’s been fun finding a picture every day for the daily Picture Writing Prompts portion of this website, but there are now a month’s worth of prompts in the archives and that seems like a good place to stop for now. It’s time to start posting more substantial prompts and articles here at Bottled Ink.
Rather than post a random collection of prompts over time, I’m going to group the prompts according to the writing muscles they work. Next week, for example, I’ll be posting writing prompts designed to build your powers of description. In future weeks, I’ll cover topics like characterization, dialogue, plot, and more. Eventually I’ll also add writing prompts designed for specific genres like horror, mystery, and fantasy.
In the future I’ll also make sure to include some tips for developing a habit of writing. Over at my songwriting website, The Halted Clock, developing good writing habits has been one of the most popular topics.
I hope you’re all well—thanks for reading so far; I hope you’ll stop by again often to see what’s new!
-Nicholas
Ever wonder what people say about you when you’re not in the room?
Everybody wonders that. And that’s the basis of today’s story writing prompt.
Two people are talking about a third person, who isn’t present.
These three people can have any relationship to one another that you choose. The only rule is that the conversation of the two people talking is mostly focused on discussing the absent third person.
Suggested length for this story writing prompt: 1-5 pages
(or however long it takes to complete the scene).
photo of catty cockatiels by Caza_No_7
I just finished reading Poke the Box by Seth Godin. It’s not what it sounds like, I swear.
While reading, I noticed that the new version of Kindle software for PC underlines any passages that have been frequently highlighted by fellow readers.
This could be an incredibly useful tool for authors, who could learn a lot about their readers by examining the phrases and lines that people found most resonant.
It certainly changes the reader’s experience of a book, too; annotated books from used bookstores are the closest we’ve previously come to being able to see the thoughts of other readers. What’s different is that you’re not seeing one person’s favorite passages marked on the Kindle software; instead you’re seeing the passages that are most popular overall.
It’s just another interesting facet of digital publishing, and another reason why I think it’s an interesting time to be a writer.
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