Outsourcing writing skills

Some incipient research from Microsoft that aims to transform prose written by authors and writers helping them choose between alternative ways to express textual ideas.
I was wondering when will they come up with automated fiction writing? Or better still, a software tool that analyzes brain patterns amongst the random thoughts occurring inside a writers head and then cobbling together a work of fiction or non-fiction? All a budding author needs to do is to sit back and think up something and presto, comes a story.

In suggesting that writers replace content words, we thus take a great deal of risk: a poor choice can dramatically alter the meaning of a sentence - or provoke unintended hilarity. The project goal is not to improve the work of poets, professional novelists, or anyone else who considers their writing art. We’re focused primarily on helping users who are writing to achieve a more pragmatic goal – say a project report, a term paper, or an email – and who would like a little assistance in order to find the right words. ..The tool can even attempt to rewrite an entire sentence, selecting among different combinations of word and phrase replacements to choose the contextually most plausible set of all substitutions proposed by the models.

Text with drawing of Tower of Babel. (1400-1499). From the renaissance and medieval manuscripts collection of the New York Public Library

Dabbling versus specialization

Recently an uptown gallery in NYC (Anita Shapolsky gallery) held a very special show – an exhibit that showcased the work of writers who in their part time became artists and went ahead and created some very compelling pieces of art. Comments on some online forums covering this event seemed to deride this as a wannabe attempt by non-artists at producing art and hinted at the fact that writers should stick to what they do best – writing. They also gave the example where exactly zero publishers would flock to publish a novel if written by a major artist (which I very much doubt). Though not related, take the recent example of moviemaking by Julian Schnabel as a supposed exception.

In a short piece for Art and Perception due to be published later today, I hope to delve deeper into this perception that we are live and breathe in a specialized society so much so that one must not stray too much from ones roots. In the odd case of such hucksterism, transgressions may be met by the threat of being proclaimed as second rate.

Hmm, coming to think about it, I have an engineering background…

Also, I take this opportunity to let you review the work of a writer Patrick Woodroffe, one of whose oil paintings are depicted below.