We were sitting on a porch in the middle of Mozambique, sharing a bottle of whiskey.

“The trouble with you Anglo-Saxons,” my Portuguese friend, Joao, said, “is that you only know one way of being.”

Portuguese has two verbs to be – ser, to be permanently, and estar, to be temporarily. Joao argued that understanding this difference affects how you are in the world. The ability to name something carries with it the power to recognise it, to feel it, to explore it. Words don’t just communicate meaning, they create meaning.

I was reminded of this conversation this week, when by chance I read three different articles about words. Tiffany Watt Smith writes in New Scientist about the way words may rewire our brains. The BBC website covers the achievements of the Historical Thesaurus of Scots. And I am in the middle of reading Helen Macdonald’s magnificent H is for Hawk, which is filled with the ancient and arcane vocabulary of falconry.

Tiffany Watt Smith, writing in New Scientist, argues that if we don’t have a word for a thing or an emotion, we may not recognise it. She speculates that the Machiguenga people of Peru, who have no word for “worry”, may not feel the emotion. Equally, she says, English speakers lack a word for awumbuk. This word from the Baining people of Papua New Guinea, describes the empty feeling after visitors depart. They believe departing visitors shed a heaviness into the air in order to be able to travel lightly. This heaviness lingers for three days and creates an inertia that prevents the hosts’ ability to tend to their home and crops. The Baining deal with this by filling a bowl with water to absorb the miasma overnight. Early next morning they throw the water into the trees, and normal life resumes.

Watt Smith suggests that language and culture influence what we see and feel by allowing us to link our sensations to a network of other associations, making it easier to seek out experiences which are consistent with this, and to filter out those which aren’t.

An old favourite example of my own is the Portuguese word saudade. This had no precise equivalent in English, and describes the pleasure of feeling sad. So well recognised is this emotion in Portugal that it has spawned a whole culture of music, fado, which you listen to in fado cafes so as to experience saudade. I wrote this description in an attempt to capture the emotion.

The evening air held onto the warmth of the day, but the light had a dying mellowness, full of shadows. It had a softness that contrasted with the harsh angularities of noon. I sipped gently. The wine’s tart greenness contrasted with the dark wood of the tavern, polished by an antique cargo of a hundred thousand nights of convivial transgression. The guitarist took his seat and tuned his strings, while the fadista, her eyes fixed on some spot beyond our prosaic gaze, composed herself. As the plaintive call of the fado rose, shrill and bright, other patrons drifted in from the sun-warmed cobbled lanes of the Bairro Alto, like leaves collected by an autumn breeze.

Strangers, we sat, communing together through the mournful power of the music. The air was suddenly crisper, the wine more piquant, my heart fuller as she sang of the doomed love between a Count and a street girl. I thought of home. When she finished, there was a moment’s pause, and then an outburst of applause. Most of us clapped, but the man at the table next to me coughed, the traditional form of appreciation in the Coimbra school of fado. The Portuguese have a word, saudade. It means the pleasure of feeling sad. I savoured, for the first time, the pleasure of feeling sad.

Music and dance may be the languages in which we communicate concepts and emotions for which we have no words. It’s also worth remembering that the ancient Greeks distinguished between six different kinds of love, where in English we have only the one inadequate word. Precisely distinguishing varieties of things is important when you live on the edge of survival. It turns out from the Historical Thesaurus of Scots that Scots has 421 different words for snow. In a country where weather can be swift and treacherous, being able to communicate precisely about conditions had survival value. Even today, when British trains in winter are halted by “the wrong kind of snow”, this precision may be important.

Some of the 421 words for snow
Pre-snow conditions (Gramshoch)
To begin to snow (frog)
To snow or sleet lightly (scowder, skiff, sneesl)
To snow heavily (onding)
A swirl of snow (feefle)
Snowflake (flicht)
Large snowflake (flukra, skelf)
Slush/ sleet (snaw-bree, slibber, grue)
A sprinkling of snow (skirvin, glaister)
A slight fall of snow (skirlin, flaffin)
A heavy fall of snow (hog-reek, ondingin)
Snow driven by wind/ movement of snow (spindrift, hurl)
Slippery snow (shurl)
A cover of snow (goor, straik)

Words are talismans – they have the power to summon. At the whim of the writer, they may summon demons or angels. Nothing illustrates this more powerfully than Helen Macdonald’s searing memoir, H is for Hawk, in which she describes with stark honesty how she coped with the grief of her father’s death by training the most dangerous of raptors, a Goshawk. Her hawk, Mabel, is “thirty ounces of death in a feathered jacket”. Her use of language is superb, rendering her grief, the “manning” of Mabel, and the minute details of nature with a unique mixture of poetry and science. Her prose offers the rare pleasure of words that make me go to the dictionary. And then there is the arcane language of falconry. There is the equipment of jesses and creances. When Mabel beats her wings and attempts to escape the perch, this is bating. When she enters the state of murderous desire to hunt, she is in yarak. I have already appropriated these words for my own.

Words give us more than one way of being. That is the writer’s craft.

The obvious, though sci-fi, answer is yes. Unless you believe in some immaterial human essence, human brains write books. Human brains are built of linked neurons in massively complex arrays. When we can emulate this complexity, whether the emulation is built of car tyres, tin cans or software routines, the same thing will happen. Conscious minds will emerge with thoughts, feelings and creativity. They will be able to tell stories and write books. Though some scientists think artificial intelligences may need bodies as well to be fully aware.

That doesn’t really help in answering the question now though. Most experts believe we’re at least 35 years away from being able to build artificial intelligences of this complexity. It’s great fodder for sci-fi writers. It exercises those tasked with considering in advance what rights such beings should have, and also how we should protect ourselves against the a Terminator threat.

So right now, when many jobs are about to be handed over to robots, including some quite skilled jobs, is my job as a writer safe? It’s not such a bizarre question as it might sound, at first hearing. Already, millions of share trading decisions are made by software algorithms, rather than City spivs. Machines are much better than humans at highly skilled tasks involving pattern recognition. Radiographers scanning X-rays for signs of cancer will soon be replaced by software which never gets tired and never has a fight with its partner. Even in the creative field, machines are producing music and images. So why not in writing as well? And if so, would it be any better than the “prolefeed” that George Orwell imagines in Nineteen Eighty Four?

There are any number of formulae offered to us aspiring writers to help us write better and more compelling novels. If you fed these formulae into a computer, could it produce a story?

Many of the plot tools are based more or less on Campbell’s “Monomyth”. Campbell believed that all stories ever told are in essence one archetypal story, and outlined the elements of it in his book Hero With a Thousand Faces. George Lukas followed this archetype faithfully in creating the movie Star Wars. The Novel Factory for example outlines six key elements of plot:

• Goal – your character must have something they either desire or desire to avoid
• Conflict – someone or something stops the protagonist achieving their goal
• Disaster – something happens that not only takes the protagonist further than ever from their goal, but preferably adds on extra layers of peril
• Reaction – following the disaster, the protagonist has an emotional and or physical response
• Dilemma – the hero should have two choices, neither of them good, so the reader can empathise with the hopelessness of their plight
• Decision – the protagonist chooses from the options available – which gives them a new goal… rinse and repeat

There are many other similar formulae, such as the Agile method and the Snowflake method. The Agile method offers a course which claims to get a writer to first draft in six months and says dozens of novels have been written using it.

To see what would happen, I developed a formula based on an amalgam of several methods. I used it to create the story board for my current novel The Golden Illusion, which divides the plot into eight stages:

• Set-up (two stages)
• Discovery and growth (two stages)
• Decline and despair (two stages)
• Climax and dénouement (two stages)

There are also any number of formulae for creating compelling characters. Just go, for example, to the Writers’ Knowledge Base and type into search field something like “compelling characters”.

And then of course there are the algorithms for text and grammar correction such as Pro Writing Aid, which I wrote about in recent posts.

So could a computer programme be written to spew out best-sellers? There are lots of artificial intelligence scientists working on this, but the reassuring answer for all us wordsmiths seems to be “not yet”, as an article by Tom Meltzer shows. Machines don’t yet have any capacity for imagining. They have no means of understanding what a piece of text means. And they have trouble generating the many figurative ways in which people express themselves. Much of what they produce is either bland, or very short.

From the Metaphor Magnet

Consider this story, written by the software routine Scheherazade:

John got into his car with his disguise, gun and note in his knapsack and headed towards the Old Second in the next town over, repeating his rehearsed demands silently over and over in his head.

John watched while a little old lady left the bank and walked to her car and then slipped on his gloves, slipped his gun into his coat pocket, grabbed his mask and strode determinedly to the lobby door and pulled it open.

John looked at his reflection in the glass of the door, gave himself a little smirk and covered his face. John took another deep breath as he wondered if this was really a good idea, and entered the bank.

John looked around the bank, making sure his timing was right.

John spotted a young blond teller, Sally, behind the counter.

John stood behind the lady and toddler and politely waited his turn, noticing the nameplate on the counter … “Sally”.

When it was his turn, John, wearing his Obama mask, approached the counter. Sally saw Obama standing in front of her and she felt her whole body tense up as her worst nightmare seemed to be coming true.

Once Sally began to run, John pulled out the gun and directed it at the bank guard.

John wore a stern stare as he pointed the gun at Sally.

Sally screamed hysterically which alerted other people in the bank.

Pretty mechanical, though adding a grammar editor might have made it harder to distinguish from an extremely poor human effort.

But consider these two very short stories:

When the bank robbers that break into calm vaults hide behind livid masks.

And

Ink and soul cooperate with paper

One is by a human, from a blog I follow, In Noir Velvet and one is from a software project called Metaphor Magnet. Not so easy to tell, and I’m not going to let on.

Undoubtedly software will get better in leaps and bounds at generating stories. But there may be a more profound critique of the formulae.

The formula doesn’t work very well if you follow it religiously. I found in my own experiment with a formula in The Golden Illusion, that the plot rapidly spilled over the boundaries of the boxes. Characters began to do things I hadn’t expected or planned. I also found that there were creative problems I had to solve, about plot, sequence, causality and voice for which the formula provided no help. I moved the “call to action” (which was plotted to come to in Chapter 3) right up to beginning of Chapter 1, so there was a “hook” into the action.

Following formulae will produce similar stories. Campbell argued there was only one story – a universal narrative archetype. Critics of Campbell’s Monomyth argue that the similarity in the stories he analysed don’t express an archetype. Rather they reflect the fact that all the stories were created in similar conditions – namely by story tellers to please their rich and powerful aristocratic patrons. Women writers have pointed out similarly that Campbell’s stories were all told by men and don’t include the stories mothers tell their children.

It may not be that hard to invent a story, but it’s considerably harder to write a good story.