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Letters From Alex
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In Praise of People

The thing that makes Gotham Gotham is you—the endlessly fascinating people who populate our community.

That’s why we don’t allow AI-generated writing in our classes: for projects, assignments, or critiques. There are many great uses for AI, but in a creative writing class it’ll prevent you from writing stuff that only you can produce, not to mention prevent you from learning how to write better.

Yes, we can detect if something was written by AI, and we’ll remove it, with a polite request to submit something else.

AI doesn’t think or feel. It merely processes information. If you ask AI to create a piece of writing for you, it will quickly comb through all the writing it can find (infringing on the copyright of writers) and toss together bits and bytes that are facsimiles of what you might want.

AI is, literally, bloodless.

You, on the other hand, are the proud owner of blood, brain, body, and (most mysteriously) soul. The power of your writing—however imperfect, flawed, messy—will be found there and nowhere else.  

You’re free to use AI on your own all you like. And you can use it to aid your work for classes, through such things as fact-finding, outlining, and grammar. But there’s just very little point to submitting AI-generated work with your name on it in a Gotham class.

I believe Ada Lovelace would agree. (That’s her in the painting.) She was a 19th century mathematician, the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, who helped conceptualize the world’s first computer—the Analytical Engine— realizing that such machines would eventually have capabilities beyond calculations with numbers. She found poetry in science, saying:

      The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard-

      loom weaves flowers and leaves.

While also realizing the limitations of computers, saying:

      The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything.

      It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.

Ada was a fascinating person: alienated from her parents, obsessed with the mechanics of flying, addicted to gambling on horses, as well as a countess by marriage and mother of three children who was caught up in various sexual scandals.

She was fully human. As are you. Let’s embrace our humanity, not letting anything take that away from us.

Some Gotham courses especially apt for this purpose:

Character1: Creation

Character 2: Action (new)

The Writer’s Mind (newish)

Alex Steele

Gotham President

Letters From Kelly
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The Beautiful Mess Effect

This week, I heard for the first time the phrase “vulnerability hangover.”

AndI know—I’m late! I’m soooo late!

Apparently, the author Brené Brown coined it about 20 years ago. One of my students even told me it’s been in the lexicon so long, bad actors are already weaponizing it.

I am fascinated.

A vulnerability hangover describes the feeling people often have after sharing something deeply personal—they get swamped with a kind of buyer’s remorse, but more intimate. They’re embarrassed, worried they’ve made their audience uncomfortable, or worse, that they’ve alienated them.

It really is a perfect expression. It describes what every writing teacher sees in their inbox about ten minutes after writers post their stories for workshop. I’m now convinced it’s the reason Gotham’s tech support team gets so many emails from students who want to delete and re-upload their Booths, just so they can fix one typo.

The next time someone tells you that all the really great expressions are borrowed from languages other than English, you can retort “Oh, yeah? What about ‘vulnerability hangover’?”

Even more fascinating: Once Brown identified the vulnerability hangover, researchers started exploring it, and they discovered a related phenomenon, which they named, perfectly, the “beautiful mess effect.” It describes the audience, the people who hear the deeply personal confession. Overwhelmingly, they tend to view the person who made the disclosure as strong. They admire them for having the courage to share something so raw. And the flaws at the heart of the story they shared? They see them as part of the beauty of being human.

Basically, just your average night in a Gotham workshop.

I want you to picture it: A classroom above Eighth Avenue in NYC, raised voices, car horns, and the smell of pizza wafting in through the open window. At one end of the table sits a writer, bracing themselves for the class to start discussing their story, their face scarlet, their breathing shallow. Maybe their arms are protectively crossing their chests, maybe they’re kneading their hands between their knees, maybe they’re massaging their temples.

The vulnerability hangover is pounding.

But around them, their classmates are buoyant, chirping with excitement.They can’t wait to tell their fellow writer why their words resonated with them, what they love about the pages, how they hope when it’s their turn, they can be just as brave.

They’re drinking in the beautiful mess.

In every scene, the real action simmers beneath the surface. In every scene, all the characters see the same action in wildly different, often polar opposite, ways, while also cluelessly believing everyone sees it as they do.

Every scene is a beautiful mess.

And so are you, writers. Keep that in mind next time you hyperventilate after you pour your heart into your story, and show it to someone else.

Don’t take my word for it. It’s science.*

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

*OK, I haven’t reported out the research on this, so I’m like 85 percent but not 100 percent sure it’s science, just take my word for it, and whatever you do, don’t tell Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Letters From Alex
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How to Catch a Book Deal

Yes, I know lots of writers, but it’s not every day someone you see almost every day is publishing a novel. And that’s what’s happening now: Stuart Pennebaker, Gotham’s Director of Publishing Guidance, will release her debut novel Ghost Fish this August.

Since I know many of you would love to publish a book, I asked Stuart some questions to help us get some insight…

Is Ghost Fish your actual first novel?

No. I am a classic type A neurotic older sister and made myself start and finish a novel before I applied to MFA programs for creative writing. It’s a horrible little novel and nobody will ever read it.

What’s the elevator pitch for Ghost Fish?

It’s about a young woman haunted by her sister’s death who starts to believe that her sibling has returned to her in the form of a fish.


What gave you the idea for the story?

I wanted to write a novel focused on a restaurant, but then Alison, the protagonist, became so much more interesting to me than the setting. Once I realized she was running from something she needed to let go of, the story took shape quickly. She’s a host in a restaurant, that’s a big part of the plot, but throughout the first draft it became more about her relationship with her sister and the people she meets in her new city than her workplace.

Was it fun to write?

So much fun. I finished the first draft pretty quickly, in about a summer, most of it in a small, hot apartment in Marseille. I would write as much as I could stand in the mornings and then swim and read in the sun in the afternoons. All I did for about a month was think about this story—it was intense and heady and I’m very lucky I got to do that. Revising this novel, on the other hand…


Why do you think your novel was picked by both an agent and publishing house?

A combination of really good luck and writing something just weird enough. I am not the most talented writer I know by a long, long shot but I am obsessive about meeting deadlines and try very hard to be nice to people—I’ve worked in enough restaurants to understand that you can be the most brilliant, fabulous person in the world, but nobody wants to sit with an asshole. I think that helped, too.

xxx

If you hope to publish a novel, someday or soon, consider attending Gotham’s Fiction Conference, mostly on Zoom, October 4 and 5—which is run by Stuart Pennebaker.

Alex Steele
Gotham President