What makes a great writer? A key element is the right teacher. Belinda Castles reflects on her own guides, as do authors such as Margaret Drabble, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Paul Theroux in a new book.
Researchers had college students and AI take a standardized test in creative thinking, and all of them were scored by trained evaluators who didn’t know in advance that some had been completed by AI.
Handwriting is a learned skill that must be taught through direct, developmentally progressive, consistent and sustained instruction. Teachers will need professional development and resources.
Visual artists draw from visual references, not words, as they imagine their work. So when language is in the driver’s seat of making art, it erects a barrier between the artist and the canvas.
‘Literary couples are a plague,’ wrote Elsa Morante, married to Alberto Moravia. They’re one of the couples in this lively exploration of what happens when two writers share loves and lives.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author was always willing to experiment with his prose, pacing and narration, crafting an oeuvre that varied wildly in style and structure.
ChatGPT threatens to change writing as we know it. But the Mesopotamians, who lived 4,000 years ago in modern-day Iraq, went through this kind of seismic change before us, when they invented writing.
The technology’s focus on the framing of the artistic task amounts to the fetishization of the creative moment – and devalues the journey that waters the seed of an idea to its fruition.