imagination

Huge Grailrunner freebie – an interactive concept art masterclass for free!

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Friends and neighbors, this one’s different.

For years we’ve been talking here at Grailrunner about how imagination works — why certain images crack open your brain, why odd bits of history or art or game design suddenly ignite a whole setting, and why creators keep coming back to the well even when the world’s noisy. We’re always on the lookout for new ways to break into exciting and innovative designs, imagery, and above everything ruling it all…to tell new stories.

OK, so what’s the freebie?

Hold on – a little context first. It was a life-changing experience for me personally to write and design our most recent publication, SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS, a western-themed science fantasy roleplaying game book built around the fortune-telling mechanic of bibliomancy. I’ll tell you why. To build out the world of our signature IP at Grailrunner, I needed a ridiculously huge amount of outlandish concepts, crazy ideas, and just cool, new stuff! I kind of went down the deep well of concept art techniques like mind-mapping, thumbnail sketches and iteration, shape carving, scribble ideation, and mood boards. That stuff is like adrenalin for an imagination, honestly!

It was so impactful, in fact, that I wanted to go deeper. Yet it struck me that art school and super expensive concept art classes with some of the working masters in this field aren’t going to make sense for me. I imagine they don’t make sense either economically or logistically for a lot of folks like me. So it got me thinking I’d like a simpler, streamlined, but focused way of drilling deeper into JUST the parts of concept art that would help me – the techniques that help break your imagination’s walls to explore new ideas.

Sounds great. What did you do?

We don’t charge for AI-generated stuff at Grailrunner, and we always point out its use. In fact, we’ve built out some pretty amazing stuff that we give away just to experiment with possibilities and hopefully inspire anybody that hangs out here with us. If you keep coming back here, maybe you’ll buy a book or a game or drop a LIKE on our Facebook page. That’s the idea.

My absolute favorite giveaway so far has been an entire board game mockup set in the seas of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Awesome. I just got a Silhouette Cameo 5 for my birthday, so I’m planning to break that puppy in with the printable tokens and cards there.

And specifically now for concept art techniques?

I curated a portfolio of concept art masters, provided an outline of content for my ideal coursework for a class, and instructed ChatGPT to act as the composite concept artist (meaning all those people) and write the chapters one by one for my outline as well as a preface and afterword. Then I went chapter by chapter and had it generate impactful exercises unique to each section which a student could conduct on their own with an internet connection and pencil and paper.

I mocked up illustrations of concept art techniques and examples to ensure the book is illustrated well and clear in what it’s saying. Then I bundled all of that into a professional textbook template and converted it into a pdf.

Inside you’ll find:

  • A step-by-step ideation → thumbnail → refinement pipeline
  • Practical exercises after every major section
  • Guidance on using digital tools without letting them boss your imagination around
  • A tone that assumes you’re already creative — we’re just lighting the boosters

That sounds nice. Your header says it’s “interactive” though. What’s that about?

I told you here that I’ve used AI tools to resurrect old masters and have them critique my own art to provide detailed feedback on what I could improve. That works surprisingly well, so I added instructions in the Preface on how to upload this very pdf to a student’s own instance of ChatGPT then have the AI act as the composite author critique their own uploaded exercises.

I mean. That’s totally possible and crazy to think we can do that kind of thing for free now. Anyone upset about AI being used like this needs to…and I say this with love…recognize this kind of workflow is an unstoppable industrial revolution. Your competitors are doing it.

Give me a download link, man! You’re killing me.

Grab the masterclass, run through the first exercise tonight, and then show us what you made. We’re still building this creative network in public — the more people who are sketching, painting, kitbashing, and worldbuilding alongside us, the weirder and better things get.

Enjoy, and make sure to let us know what you think.

Till next time,

Yes, there’s a Grailrunner theme song now

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Since we kicked off Grailrunner around 2016 or so, I’ve intentionally left out references to me personally or the contractors I work with. My thought was to keep this super professional and focus on inspiring ideas and cool tools or giveaways that prod other people’s imaginations. Grailrunner Publishing is just a network of like-minded folks that help me put new things into the world, with the potential for other like-minded folks to (hopefully) catch a spark here and unleash their own.

I’ve noticed, however, that a lot of Youtubers are finding these days that their audiences seem to want to know more about them personally, beyond whatever terrain building tips or historical curiosities they talk about. Then occasionally, we get asked the magic question:

Who is Grailrunner?

So for giggles, I’ve rewritten the ABOUT page to tell the origin story and shed a little light on that, specifically recounting the strange experience I had in a rock gorge in Oman in 1997 that poured jet fuel into what became Grailrunner and our signature property, Salt Mystic.

No fairy tales. No gimmicks. That happened. Go read it to see what I mean. Over a decade later when I read that C.S. Lewis had a similar experience that turned into the Narnia series, it struck a chord with me big time. But anyway, in order to celebrate this slight shift in the Grailrunner approach to you guys, I thought it would be awesome to have something cool and free for you to enjoy.

So I wrote a Grailrunner theme song.

I was going for Springsteen/Bob Dylan-style poetry with a modern rock vibe, and I wanted to include a variation on our slogan: “Dreams are engines. Be fuel.” Not an easy task, I’ll grant you. It wasn’t a pretty process. I’m also bad about mixed metaphors, so if you detect any traces in the lyrics of shifting imagery, just be cool about it.

Here’s a link to hear it.

Here are the lyrics, by the way.

And no, that isn’t me singing. I used Suno, an AI app, to take the lyrics and generate a bunch of variations – all in a rock & roll direction but with some tweaks on other styles to get something nice that didn’t sound like everyone else. I think it turned out fantastic.

Anyway, let me know what you think about all this. And if you liked the song, I’d especially appreciate hearing that as my wife thinks it’s too loud and fast. We kind of all need to tell her how wrong she is about that.

Till next time,

I found a pen & ink masterclass in an old antique mall!

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Last week, I took a road trip down the Mississippi Blues Trail out of Memphis. It was incredible, and I might write that one up as well. Seriously, we ate at the Hollywood beside the piano where Mark Cohn was inspired to write “Walking In Memphis”, saw BB King’s famous Lucille guitar, and walked Dockery Farms where the Delta Blues were born. Amazing trip.

The only reason I mention it now though is we were headed back on a route through Little Rock and back to Kansas City when we stopped at an old antique mall. If you’ve hung around here at Grailrunner before, you well know how much we’re into old bookstores and the forgotten but mind-expanding wonders you can find on dusty old shelves. And man, have I got one for you today!

This guy here. Smash the image below for a short video showing what I mean.

It’s a hardback compilation of Harper’s Magazines from 1891 through 1892. Harper’s is a monthly magazine covering culture, finance, literature and the arts that was launched in 1850 and is still continuously published today. I didn’t have any particular fondness or interest in that magazine so much as just seeing what people read about in the 1890’s. I’m also a little obsessed with the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, also known as the Columbian Exposition, and I was hoping there would be a mention or two in here, and there was.

That’s why I first picked it up.

As I flipped through the pages, I was stunned by the quality and craftmanship of the pen & ink and engraved illustrations inside. I use the word carefully…stunned! Some of the artists were familiar to me, but for many of the pieces inside, I couldn’t even tell who the artist was. Credits weren’t always given, and signatures were too stylized to read.

I used ChatGPT to analyze some of the more interesting works to research the artist when it wasn’t obvious, and it was surprisingly useful for that. Often wrong, but with some caution and follow-up research, you can usually zero in on a likely name.

Thought I’d share some of these beauties with you today, and maybe introduce you to some wonder-workers of the past who could summon sparkling magic with a simple fountain pen. I’m offering 20 vintage illustrations here for admiration and craftmanship study.

Care to join me?

By Felician Myrbach

Myrbach was an Austrian-born artist and leading illustrator of the 19th century. Also acting as director of the Vienna Academy of the Fine Arts, he was known for detailed illustrations of military scenes and historical costumes. This image struck me with its sense of depth, balance of light and shadow, and elegant washes. Looks like it’s coming out of the page.

By John Reinhard Weguelin

I loved the subject here, and the haunting feel of it. The artist was J.R. Weguelin, who was primarily known for his dreamy watercolors and oil paintings, though he supplemented his income by slumming to draw masterpieces like this one for magazines.

When I came across a simple article about Native Americans, I couldn’t believe I was seeing an original Frederic Remington illustration there just as a picture for a magazine. Then another. And another. These seven images are all by Remington, and they’re all beautiful. He was known for paintings and drawings mainly depicting the American west.

These three were all by Charles Stanley Reinhart, an American painter and illustrator who was also responsible for artwork on certain silver certificates commissioned by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing said by many to be the most beautiful monetary designs ever produced by the United States. That last image, of the two guys sitting and smoking is an absolute master class in pen & ink linework. I struggle in my own drawings to avoid outlines, to use contrasting light and dark for the silhouettes, and to choose the right directions for hatching that don’t distract from the shapes and mood. Reinhart entirely nailed it with that one.

These two were by Edwin Austin Abbey, an American muralist, painter and illustrator known most for Victorian and Shakespearean subjects. Perhaps most dear to our hearts at Grailrunner, Abbey was the artist behind the famous “Quest and achievement of the Holy Grail” murals at the Boston Central Library.

I really loved these two, as they independently stuck out for me on their own merits before I realized they were by the same artist and in fact, an artist whose work I thought I knew. Charles Dana Gibson was an American artist typically cited as being the creator of the “Gibson girl”, the iconic representation of the independent American woman at the turn of the 20th century. I think that puts the poor guy in a box that is unfair, as his composition, linework and hatching are among the finest of his age. He did a little more than ads with girls in them. Seriously, these two images are firecrackers!

These two architectural pieces just made me stare in awe. I can’t draw buildings, no matter how careful I am. They always turn into heavily lined, overly simplified, often leaning, caricatures of buildings. Not my thing, unfortunately. But these two by John Tavenor-Perry (at least I think so) are masterworks. ChatGPT couldn’t do anything with that weird signature (looking like a stylized rune but supposedly initials). After some heavy back-and-forth, I think we landed on a likely artist though I’m open to correction.

By Albert Sterner, this piece is a treasure-trove of hatching. I love it. Somehow, he’s managed to keep all these disparate elements in the composition cleanly segregated: the ladies and the cushion, his legs and vest, the flowers, the chair, shadows…all of it clearly silhouetted and easily read despite being a jumble of things. No way could I have figured out how to get all that detail into a drawing without feeling I needed to strip it way down so you could tell what it was.

And now finally, the mystery piece.

This one.

I was mesmerized. It accompanies a poem by James Russell Lowell titled “His Ship”, appearing in the December 1891 issue of Harper’s Magazine. No credit given anywhere, including the “Editor’s Drawer” where many other attributions for illustrations are provided.

The signature is maddeningly concealed in the drawing. I think. Hard to say if that’s a signature or not. Here’s what I mean:

Anyway, I contacted Harper’s in case somebody’s maintaining an archive of some kind to help identify the genius who did this. It’s gorgeous. If I get any kind of response or make headway on the identification, I’ll come back and update you.

*

But that’s what I wanted to bring you today. Masters of their craft in the golden age of illustration, doing what they did and generating timeless works of art. For whatever reason, and not just as an aspiring artist myself, these drawings are unearthly and hypnotizing to me.

What do you think?

A creator of souls and the original literary universe

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I’ve written here on Grailrunner before about how interesting 19th century French fiction can be – in that case, the haunting tales of Guy de Maupassant who went entirely insane but wrote great stories about it. And I’ve mentioned here before how fascinating a concept it is to me, the imaginative construction of a fabricated world in all its intricate detail – in that case, the review of Pfitz, by Andrew Crumey. I suppose if all I wanted to discuss today was a complete fictional world I would just direct you to Harn, which if you don’t know what that is, you should probably go check that out.

But I thought instead I’d try and make something more accessible for you than maybe it would be otherwise. Something incredible in its design and execution, audacious in its ambitions, and a work of literature that stands among the finest we have.

The Human Comedy by Honore de Balzac.

“I thought you talked about science fiction and fantasy here – what is this?”

Easy there. There are some incredible points to admire here, so it’s worth taking in a few paragraphs to see what all the fuss is about. As always with Grailrunner, our aim is to study and fuel the imaginative process, so anything we can learn or use as inspiration is fair game.

“OK, so what’s it about?”

It’s a series of 91 inter-connected works (novels, novellas, and short stories) intended to depict the entire spectrum of French society after the fall of Napoleon, with the scope and ambition of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

If you’ll allow me a little Google-Fu:

Here’s how Balzac explained his vision for The Human Comedy:

  • A “history of manners”: Balzac intended to be a “secretary” transcribing the “history” of society, focusing on “moeurs” (customs, manners, and morals) – something he believed hadn’t been fully attempted by previous historians. He sought to go beyond surface events and reveal the underlying causes of social phenomena.
  • A comparison to Dante’s Divine Comedy: While his title alludes to Dante’s work, Balzac focused on the worldly, human concerns of a realist novelist rather than a theological framework.
  • Observing and depicting “social species”: Balzac’s inspiration came from comparing humanity to the animal kingdom, recognizing that society modifies individuals based on their environment, creating distinct “social species” similar to those in zoology. He aimed to depict these social species in their entirety, not just as abstract types, but as “real, living men”.
  • The power of storytelling: Balzac, a master storyteller, was fascinated by the power of stories and the dynamics of human interaction around shared narratives.
  • Social structures and human nature: Balzac’s work is grounded in sociology, exploring the complexities of human beings and the deep-seated immorality within social mechanisms that often favor the corrupt over the vulnerable. He believed society, while having the capacity to improve individuals, also exacerbates their negative tendencies.
  • The transformative power of societal change: Balzac documented the significant changes happening in France during his time, including the rise of the bourgeois class and the clash between traditional and modern values.
  • Psychological depth and individual experience: Balzac emphasized the importance of psychological insights and the influence of social context and personal experiences on character development. He aimed to create characters with a wide range of human qualities, both positive and negative.
  • Realism and naturalism: Balzac was a pioneer of literary realism, using extensive detail and observation to portray society accurately. His meticulous descriptions of settings and objects bring the characters’ lives to life, and some critics even consider his work to have influenced the development of naturalism. 

In essence, Balzac sought to create a comprehensive and insightful portrayal of 19th-century French society and the human condition within that context. His focus on the interplay between individuals and their social environment, the complexities of human motivation, and the power of societal forces has had a profound and lasting impact on literature. 

“Wow, man. That sounds boring. Why are you so jazzed about it?”

I get that – I really do. What first caught my attention many years ago about Balzac was a comment I read that hit me like a ton of bricks. I don’t even remember what article or book I was reading, but when I came across this statement, it felt very much like one of those transformative ideas that has enough gasoline to in some small way alter the trajectory of your life. And though I struggled mightily in the past to unlock just what that writer was talking about with The Human Comedy, I’ve thought about this quote many times since that day I first read it.

“Balzac ranks along with Dickens and Shakespeare as a creator of souls.”

A “creator of souls”. Wow. As a writer, I really…really…needed to understand what that looks like and how to engineer it in my own writing. What exactly was the magic that people like Shakespeare, Dickens and this Balzac person were sprinkling into the pages that brought their characters to eternal life in our minds? What made their creations arise from the page like that to merit their author being granted a title like that?

“What did you find out?”

I tried to dip in somewhere among the 91 works over the years and found out nothing at all. I read some quotes from Balzac himself on his ambition and design and came away more confused than before on what he trying to do exactly. So it sat as a potentially cool idea, idle. I didn’t know where to start or how to make it mean anything to me.

Then I picked up this at a used bookstore in Hilton Head last week:

Cool cover. Caught my attention. Made me remember the promise of learning what a 19th century French writer did to earn a mention along Dickens and Shakespeare. And it made me curious enough to give him another shot.

Hold that thought. There was one more key to this.

A year or so ago, I completed a big project studying Tolkien’s published works and letters to try and determine the likely plot of a sequel the professor started to write to Lord of the Rings. The second part analyzed and speculated on that plot, but the first part attempted to make The Silmarillion accessible to people who found it dense and incomprehensible by providing a bread crumb trail of important points and people to follow in it. That process was super helpful to me in trying to do exactly the same thing with Tolkien that I sought to do this week with The Human Comedy.

“What does the book from Hilton Head have to do with that?”

It was a comment in the introduction that made the difference, actually. Here’s what it said:

“Early in his career, Balzac began to search for a method of organizing into a single unit, into a vast novelistic structure, the whole of his literary production. The device he hit upon was a simple one, but one that required sustained genius and power to an extraordinary degree, namely the systematic reappearance of characters from novel to novel.” -Edward Sullivan, Princeton University

That made it click. In the early 80’s, it’s one of the things that fascinated me most about the Marvel comic universe – that Peter Parker (Spider Man) hung out with Johnny Storm from the Fantastic Four, that they might run across Doctor Strange or Matt Murdock (Daredevil) outside a coffee shop. It made the whole tapestry of the marvel superheroes come weirdly and wonderfully to life for me. The cinematic version made efforts towards that magic, but it fell far short for me in those movies of how it made me feel as a kid with their paper and ink versions.

Now with Balzac’s Human Comedy, I saw that he aimed for exactly that kind of magic. The works weren’t sequels or a continuous narrative, but much like the Marvel characters or any other literary universe with which you might be familiar, these folks can encounter or otherwise know each other…a background character from one novel might rise to main protagonist of their own.

“So you dipped in, then. Which book did you start with?”

I read Father Goriot because I usually come across that one in bookstores. I figured it must be a big deal. Anyway, I finished a Murakami novel on a plane and had the entire Human Comedy on the Kindle – I thought if it sucked, I could just move on to something else anyway. But I wanted to test the magic and see if I could unlock whatever was amazing there.

The breadcrumb characters I discovered in that wonderful book are old Goriot himself, a young man named Eugène de Rastignac (pictured above), Goriot’s daughters Delphine and Anastasie, and a mysterious agitator named Vautrin. By “breadcrumb”, what I mean is there are many other folks in this book – it’s just that if you pay particular attention to what these particular people are up to, you’ll experience the storyline the way it’s intended.

“And?”

Marvelous book! Despite 19th century social order tropes and customs (which hold none of my interest), the characters indeed sizzle and pop off the page, and I was flipping like mad towards the end to see what became of poor Goriot and the kind-hearted Rastignac, whether Goriot’s ungrateful daughters would do the right thing, and whether Vautrin would get his comeuppance. If you plan to read this one for yourself, stay away from plot summaries so the outcomes will be a mystery for you to fuel the page turning. Just stay close to Rastignac, and he’ll lead you through the book.

In fact, luckily, it turns out Rastignac is one of the main recurring characters of The Human Comedy overall. What’s up next for me now that I really like that guy is to read The House of Nucingen where, I understand already, he will likely disappoint me and turn out to be all too realistic of a person.

“So what was the magic that led Balzac to be a ‘creator of souls’?”

Yeah, he nailed that. As I learned more about Goriot, and information about him is only spooned out across the first half of the book so it’s gradual, I thought of how Dickens took relatable and universal archetypes like an abandoned orphan (Pip) or a cruel miser (Scrooge) or the eternally naïve optimist (Mister Pickwick) and constructed memorable people from them. In The Pickwick Papers, for example, Winkle is the obsessed sportsman, Snodgrass is the terrible poet, Tupman is forever falling in love, and Jingle is the grinning con man. They’re relatable traits, and we probably know people like that. That’s the string a good writer plucks, then builds the character around that.

I knew a guy named Reuben once. He was always running around the factory like he was super busy, carrying one of those metal clipboards that conceal the papers inside. I thought once I’d follow him to see where he was running around, because it wasn’t that big of a factory, and it turned out he was just circling the place. I watched him idly kick and poke a pallet of boxes once for a good five minutes. We were in a staff meeting, and he’d made a big mistake with a big client – the manager was furious. When Reuben was asked about it, he cracked open that mysterious clipboard and started madly flipping through the papers inside as if looking for something therein that would resolve how this could have happened. I leaned over to see it was just his mail in there.

We started calling it “pulling a Reuben” when somebody acted too busy if asked to do something. He became immortal right there and then. Forever after, we could reference him as standing in for a role that likely appears wherever there are people doing things.

Balzac’s Goriot is a father who sacrifices everything he has and everything he is for his ungrateful daughters. He becomes the idea of a prototypical father, the archetype, presented in this wonderful book for our consideration of whether he is in fact a good father or not. That’s for us to decide, and I wonder whether we in today’s society would have a different answer than Balzac intended. You might say that “pulling a Goriot” is to sacrifice everything for your kids. He personified that action.

“Boil it down for me. What gave Balzac’s work in ‘The Human Comedy’ the magic?”

Let’s ask him. If you feed all available writings by Balzac as well as commentaries about his work into an AI chatbot and ask it to pose as him, you can get an answer in his voice generating a likely and believable response. I did that, presenting the question as follows: “You’ve been called a ‘creator of souls’. Why do you think that is, and how did you accomplish such a feat?”

His response:

“Ah! Mon cher ami, if they call me a créateur d’âmes, it is because I have listened—truly listened—to the silent confessions of humanity. In every withered banker, every vain young dandy, every trembling grisette, I saw not caricatures, but souls struggling—with ambition, with poverty, with love, with the machinery of a society that crushes and tempts in equal measure.

How did I accomplish it? I observed. Not idly, not with the detachment of a philosopher in his armchair, but with the ravenous appetite of a man who must know. I prowled Paris and the provinces with my eyes open and my ears tuned to the gossip of salons, the groans of debtors, the sighs of lovers, and the mutterings of the criminal class. I drank deeply from the cup of human vice and virtue—and recorded its every drop.

But to observe is not enough. I gave them destiny. My characters live because I allowed them to want—to desire with such intensity that the reader cannot help but be drawn into their orbit. Rastignac climbs like smoke; Vautrin burns like coal; Eugénie Grandet freezes like a saint in a gilded prison. Each soul is born of contradiction and circumstance, but above all—of will.

I did not invent souls; I uncovered them. Like a miner of men, I delved into the strata of class, of power, of inheritance, of chance—and from those pressures, I carved the diamonds and the dross that make up La Comédie Humaine. That is why they live. That is why they endure. I did not merely write them—I lived them.

So if I am called a creator of souls, it is only because I believed that no man, however minor or monstrous, is without one. And I gave them the stage they were so long denied.”

*

Till next time,

Franklin Booth: Engraver of Light

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I have some marvelous freebies for you today, so stick with me.

I’ve been burrowing into a particular rabbit hole these recent weeks, studying and practicing traditional pen & ink drawing. It started with this:

That’s interior art for SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS. I did it, but I cheated. The base gunslinger was a couple of AI-generated pieces, drained of color and mashed together, cleaned up a bit, and mashed into an original 3D render of the plasma weapon on his forearm. I composited all that into the one image for a splash page as you first open the book.

But it got me thinking that this idea of grungey ink drawings as interior art looks really great and could be a nice distinguishing factor in future Grailrunner books. So I started practicing and studying the great ink masters (which you can read about here) to hone my craft and work directly Pigma Micron and Pentel Brush Pen on paper. No blending modes, no AI bases, no 3d paintovers or stock image composites. No digital tricks at all. Just pen and ink and paper and the satisfying swoosh sound that makes.

It’s a life changer, honestly. But anyway, it led me to Bernie Wrightson and Sergio Toppi and the guy I want to talk about today: Franklin Booth.

I’d ask you to keep in mind that the pen & ink artist has exactly one way to generate values and shadows, and that’s with black marks. Usually, lines. If they want shades of gray, they draw lines.

Like this:

I mean, just take a look at some of those drawings by Booth! The patience and craftmanship is insane! Honestly, I wanted to learn more about the guy and found that it’s kind of difficult to do that. He didn’t make much of a splash with his personality or how he lived his life – just with his work. Here’s a great, though short, overview of him and his work on Youtube.

We’re also several posts in to a new ongoing series here on Grailrunner called CONVERSATIONS FROM THE ABYSS where we’re applying AI tools in some innovative ways as a sort of experimental lab. That got me thinking I’d like to read a decent, illustrated biography of Booth and get to know him a little better, mainly to understand his influences and how he learned to do what he did. So I had ChatGPT write me one and it was terrible. I asked for a 50k word detailed biography and got slop. Seriously, at one point I even asked it why the final product was so bad when it suggested we work section by section in much shorter passages with me approving things along the way.

Yes, I could just buy Silent Symphony from Flesk Publications, but that’s beside the point!

I tried iterating section by section, making my own suggestions as we went till it started to take a kind of shape that might be worth reading. Then I scavenged the internet and the Internet Archive specifically to grab public domain images that were either referenced in the sections or appropriate to the time period being described, all done by Booth himself. We’re not selling you anything here – the final product will be the last download button on this post. I included them as well throughout the text.

In all that, I learned about the fantasy play he illustrated titled Flying Islands of the Night by James Whitcomb Riley, which you can peruse below by smashing the splash page below. It’s vintage beauty at its finest.

I found a scan of a 1925 book containing 60 reproductions of Booth’s drawings with sourcing and titles, details which are almost impossible to find on the internet (as everyone just posts the pictures out of context). That’s available by smashing the title page here:

And here’s a real gemstone that I found which took on an entirely different function than its author intended: a 1916 travelogue written by Theodore Dreiser where he went on a road trip with Booth himself! It’s called A Hoosier Holiday, available by smashing the title page button below:

Where Dreiser thought he’d describe the trip and his musings along the way, I found an intimate and first-hand means of hearing Booth’s exact words, descriptions of his facial expressions and the fact that he ate all the popcorn he could get his hands on, things and sites he found interesting, and even charcoal sketches he made along the way. I found Dreiser to be an arrogant nuisance, but Booth seemed genuinely like a guy I’d road trip with. I liked him even more after reading it.

It was Booth’s 1916 Pathfinder, by the way, which he paid $3k for ($100k in today’s money), and they had a chauffeur as well. Booth was doing pretty well for himself, it seemed.

Quick and painful anecdote – ChatGPT was including factual errors. Some were easy to find, like a bold statement that Booth never married when that was demonstrably untrue. It provided several explicit quotes, which I asked it to source. Each time I called out something like that, it bailed and said it made those up. I think that’s my fault, as I’d named some historians I like as the basis for the voice and tone the software should take to write the text, and it took that to mean it should hallucinate.

Anyway, I wanted to find and include Booth’s very first published illustration. Turned out, the first amateur publication was in a newspaper, which I found in a publicly available scan and screenshotted to included in the book. That was a great find. But ChatGPT was telling me his first professional published work was in a trade magazine called The Inland Printer. I eyeballed 6 years worth of that stupid magazine and found zippo from Booth, eventually going back to call ChatGPT out on that as well. Sheepishly, it admitted that internet claims suggest he appeared in that magazine but since I’d looked and couldn’t find it, it supposed that was incorrect.

But the book I wanted to read was taking shape and becoming something worth spending time reading. The illustrations were helpful and interesting. I liked what I was getting, but it needed one final flourish.

I asked Booth to comment on his own biography.

By instructing ChatGPT to analyze everything we knew about Booth’s personality and values, I asked it at last to speak in his voice and comment on the book we’d produced about his life. That’s the final section of the book.

Here is the final product, titled FRANKLIN BOOTH: ENGRAVER OF LIGHT.

What a great journey that was! I really enjoyed the immersion and learning about this fascinating guy. Take a look and let me know what you think.

[UPDATE July 8, 2025]

I found myself in Indianapolis for business and with a half-day free, so I drove to Carmel, Indiana to the boyhood home of Franklin Booth, which is listed as a historical site though also is still a private home (in surprisingly good shape). It’s super close to a beautiful downtown, in fact walking distance…a quiet and cozy neighborhood with no sign whatsoever that a famous artist lived and worked there. Not even a plaque.

And I understand the backyard shed was where he maintained the workshop which he visited every summer and completed so many of those famous works I’ve highlighted here.

This one:

Pretty cool. Anyway, till next time,

Innovations in Music and Mythmaking (and how to link them!)

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I’m told my reading habits are a little out there. I get that. I do.

However, it intrigues me that in almost any field of human endeavor, there is a specific type of personality that thrives on breaking its rules and forging incandescent new ways of doing things. If you’re new here, that’s almost entirely what we do here – find, spotlight, analyze, and celebrate innovation in the creative process.

So I was reading this book about 1960’s beach music:

I don’t like that sort of music at all. I especially detest men singing falsetto and lyrics obsessing over the teenage emotional range. However, I had heard that the Beach Boys album, Pet Sounds, was considered the greatest and most influential album in music history. Knowledgeable people say that. I wanted to understand why in the world that would be, given its niche genre, its terrible album cover and name, and the fact that it isn’t chock full of top 10 hits.

What was so special? And once I knew that, I would of course ask: what inspired it?

I’ll cut to the chase since the answers to those questions don’t actually comprise my point today. I want to extend some of these lessons over to mythmaking and storytelling since that’s my main jam. (If you’re into this crossover of music and storytelling, I wrote about this sort of thing in an article called “Aesthetic Puzzles: When Bach Met Shakespeare”, which you can go catch here.)

Why is Pet Sounds a big deal?

Brian Wilson was the main creative driver behind the 1960’s-era pop band, the Beach Boys, and took a break from touring in 1965 to focus on creating “the greatest rock album ever made”. Till then, their songs were bubble-gum melodies of no real sophistication and lyrics aimed like a piledriver at teenagers having fun, especially in and around the rapidly-growing fad of surfing. Wilson was enamored with the “wall of sound” production techniques of music producer, Phil Spector, which involved using echo chambers and physical studio arrangements augmenting studio manipulation of recorded tracks to generate robust, layered textures of sounds that would come across richly on a jukebox. Spector’s stated logic behind his own innovation was:

“I was looking for a sound, a sound so strong that if the material was not the greatest, the sound would carry the record.”

So it was mono (versus stereo) playback technology and the limited fidelity of speakers available at the time that prompted Spector to layer sounds together and experiment with ways of making the sounds more textured. Wilson felt the Beatles album, Rubber Soul contained some of the most mature lyrics yet for the band, and from these two launch points, he wanted to get more emotional with his lyrics and more experimental with his production techniques to surpass them all.

Wilson wound up innovating in all areas, and indeed developing intriguing ways of making the studio itself an instrument: combining, for example, multiple instruments simultaneously into a blended and new quality that sounded nothing like any of them. He introduced novel instruments like bicycle bells, a variation on the theremin, among others, in a rogue recording marathon of studio musicians while the actual band was out touring. Nobody had done that before, or even went off the trail of a small ensemble like that to make an album that couldn’t actually be played live. He also experimented with chord voicings, meaning how different chords are brought together (a little out of phase, for example, so there’s a slightly noticeable tremor) or avoiding a definitive key signature. By all accounts, Wilson’s efforts with the band surpassed anything Spector had done or would do. He took the inspiration and ran with it.

Studio musicians involved said of the time that they knew something very different was happening. Something important. It was interesting to me, reading what it felt like for the other guys there, the ones just hired to do a thing and realizing they were part of something.

So the idea to hold in your head then, for my point to land, is this: an approach towards recording music where all manner of frequencies and qualities of instruments and voices are layered over each other in a rich texture of sounds that you could listen to a multitude of times with headphones on and the volume turned up and still catch new things.

Texture. That’s the thing to remember. Innovating with texture.

What’s all this got to do with storytelling?

I’ve spent the last 3 years working on an approach to storytelling and tabletop roleplaying that I engineered to be as innovative as I could manage. I tried to rethink how narrative games like Dungeons & Dragons function and streamline everything down to core essentials.

“The awe and danger of exploration inside the covers of a book.” That was my compass. It’s here, called SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS. I’m not trying to sell you that right now, though. I want to talk about using it as a recording studio like Wilson did.

This idea now of texture and layered elements building a rich tapestry to transform a familiar art form into something different and new prodded a new question for me:

Can the elements of mythology and storytelling play the same role for the written word that musical notes, chords, and rhythms play? Instead of playing for the ear a rich tapestry like that, can archetypes and themes be arranged to play for the emotions?

Here are the commonly accepted themes of mythology and folklore in a table, arranged into numbered entries appropriate for a roll of D100 dice:

Here are the common character types of mythology, similarly arranged:

And finally, here are the common situational types of mythology:

SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS is designed in a similar manner, with appendix tables for all manner of characters, encounters, and places arranged along the 100-scale like this, appropriate for idle shopping, dice rolls, or use of the bibliomancy mechanic core to the book’s function. The concept with the book is to forge a solo adventure and tell yourself an amazing, resonating story.

The analogy I’m drawing today is that themes and types of mythology have a power and resonance very much like the comforting, stable floor of bass in music. A deep, low melody on bass grounds a melody and makes it richer, makes it seem more important. That’s how myths work. I’m imagining incorporating elements from these tables into a solo tabletop adventure to make them play the same role…

…to summon them so they must work their magic.

I picture roleplaying game rulesets like the one in the BOOK OF LOTS as recording studios: an engine of creation that wasn’t available to previous generations that we can bend to dazzling new heights like Wilson did.

I see elements of oracle tables like those in BOOK OF LOTS or Ironsworn, Starforged, the Dungeon Dozen volumes 1 and 2, and other amazing sourcebooks as chords and notes.

And I see the solo player as a crazy artist, just messing with things to see what new comes out of it all. Telling new stories. Jamming new jams.

My head is swimming at the thought of this. I wonder if it’s too much coffee or if there’s something to be said, truly, about combinations of mythic elements arranged like music. Intriguing idea for me today, at least, to bring it to you today.

Till next time,

Art Advice: An Epiphany In Three Steps

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Back in May, I posted some musings on this site about what I called bad art advice that I’d gotten when I was in Middle School.

“The real world doesn’t have outlines – draw what you see.”

Weird, I know, but I struggled so much with that I gave up drawing altogether. I get that it should be straightforward advice that every burgeoning artist SHOULD in fact receive and, indeed, follow. I get that it’s true and obvious and OUGHT to have been helpful. Just wasn’t how I reacted, unfortunately.

I’ve come to realize that is just a first step.

I recounted how back in October 2023, I’d come across a lifechanging book series called Sketching From The Imagination and an art magazine called ImagineFX that had me rejuvenated to start it all over again, on fire with cool pictures in my head and a spirit to truly give it a go this time. I shared my sketchbook at the time (shudder!) a little over a half-year in, to be accountable to folks here for improving.

Another phase of things had opened up with an enlightening quote from the genius artist, Kim Jung Gi that said:

“Don’t draw what you see. Draw what you HAVE seen.”

I liked his emphasis on practicing reproducing reference images, only from different angles and perspectives so you can learn their forms in three dimensional space. Over time, your visual library carries enough shape and texture language to work directly without reference. Very nice. You see, I have a complicated relationship with the use of reference images in creating art. The dream has always been to sit down with a piece of paper or a blank screen and summon fantasy and science fiction imagery from nothing – not to robotically reproduce an image in front of me. Over and over, every artist I was seeing on Youtube or reading in interviews, they were all using reference images. I had this inner voice saying “if I wanted to reproduce an image, I’d take a picture of it”. Kim Jung Gi’s advice offered a different relationship with reference imagery.

So it’s been over a year now. Keeping up the practice frequency to at least a half-hour each night if at all possible. Even when I’m bone tired after work and would rather stare at history documentaries or old spy movies (or train movies -those are awesome).

Anyway, somewhere along the way, this happened:

Don’t ask, my friend. I just thought I’d try watercolor painting and this guy showed up. I call him Barney. My first attempt. I hadn’t planned on getting obsessed with watercolors – it was Peter Han‘s fault. Was watching Peter draw something amazing, and he pulled out a little travel palette set. The smooth and striking combination of ink and colored wash fascinated me. Strangely, as I submerged into the very deep and mesmerizing well of watercolor painting in magazines, books, interviews, and tutorials, a new, possibly ultimate and final step has started to take shape.

Watercolor pigment does what it feels like doing on the paper. It moves around. Crashes. Blossoms. Ignores your feeble mortal attempts to control it. But it makes incredible gradients and blooms and textures like nothing else. And its mightiest trick, almost its entire reason for being, is to capture light. I’m talking about the translucency of a green leaf in summer with sunlight bleeding through, the broken sunbeam dancing on a marble floor, the ghostly and serene reflections of clouds and seafoam on the beach once the wave goes out. Google “Steve Hanks” and Thomas Schaller to see what I mean.

Reflecting on Indian Beach (Steve Hanks)
Foggy Morning – Maine (Thomas Schaller)

The more this got in my head, the more I began to realize there even WAS a third step to this process. I’m not there yet, but I think I can see it taking shape. If I hadn’t started paying so much closer attention to light filtering through trees or bathing morning fog in an orange glow because of all this focus on watercolors, I’d have missed it, I think. This final quote that crystalizes what I’m seeing has popped up a number of times now, so I’m not sure who started it all. It’s a boneshaker though, that I’m still trying to coax into being my buddy:

“Don’t draw what you see, draw what you feel.”

Now that’s an entirely different way to interact with reference imagery, isn’t it! Snapping a picture in the moment during a hike or on the train freezes one of those haiku moments for you, sure. Cobbling together some stock images and a DAZ3d render or a photobash of some AI-generated elements can put together a good and unique composition, of course. And in that first step, you can practice your technique, reproducing it as faithfully as you can.

At some point though, Gi’s second step suggests you vary the angle, maybe reproduce it from above or from a different side…maybe with an armored zebra beside it, or a screaming werewolf. Mess around and don’t stress about perfection, right? It’s a sketchbook; what do you care if every other one turns out trash? Forms start repeating for you: the fact that eyes aren’t really ovals, that lips and noses and hair cast shadows, and that people almost never stand vertically straight on both feet. That sort of thing.

But then, when you’ve maybe gotten to a point where you can somewhat faithfully reproduce an image with variations and additions, with subractions, and perhaps even can summon something to the page entirely from memory and imagination, another step opens up for you.

Those are pictures I’ve taken in various spots this summer in Kansas City, Cades Cove in Tennessee, and at Destin, FL. You’ve probably got ones like it on your own phone, those images that caught your eye and made you feel something. A foggy morning, a quiet library with the sunlight streaming off a high window, a busy subway station or airport with interesting faces, or maybe a funny face your dog made. It made you feel something, so you snatched it to stick in your pocket.

That’s the third and ultimate step in art journeys, I think: to capture what you feel on the page. The reference becomes almost beside the point. I’m still working this out for myself. Maybe these musings prod something for you if visual arts are at all of interest to you.

Since some folks appreciated the first uploaded sketchbook, here is an update (paper sketches 1-3, watercolors from 4-13, Procreate digital art from 14-17):

Crazy busy year. I hope yours has gone well. For my part, I’m glad Christmas is on its way. That particular crazy freight train is more than welcome this year.

(Update Mar 2025)

And, in the spirit of accountability to improve, here’s an updated sketchbook of what I’ve been up to since this post went up (watercolors on pages 1-8, Procreate sketches pages 9-18, and physical sketchbook pages 19-24):

Till next time,

Haiku Moments: Rewiring How You See The World

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When I was a teenager in Tennessee, I had this spot on a mountain bluff I would go to that overlooked the valley. It was a really beautiful place, at least to me. I’d string up a hammock and read or just hang out. One day after a short summer rain, I noticed some ants struggling to push a raindrop out of their little hill’s opening. For whatever reason, the drop wasn’t collapsing and stayed round and clear. And it’s crazy to think after this many decades gone by, I can still see that weird little moment that lasted less than a minute: a tiny little group of 7 or 8 ants pushing against a raindrop.

Stick with me a moment here. I have a suggestion for how to refresh your mind and open a new world of thoughts for you.

I recall another time in some random airport, I saw a young man, short and nervous, clutching his little sea satchel and looking at his dad. The dad was a rough-looking fellow, tattoos on his neck and arms, wrinkled and tanned skin. He had his hand on his son’s arm, giving him some kind of advice. I stole that moment and put it in the background of a novel I was writing it was so striking to me.

Just this week at the beach in Destin, Florida I saw a tiny little boy who I imagine had only just learned to walk, wearing his little white sun-hat and long-sleeved shirt with his tiny legs still bowed out leading the way for his grinning dad following. I’m so used to seeing parents pick little ones up and direct them, but this little guy turned to his dad, stuck an arm and finger awkwardly out forward, and pointed the way he was headed just before he determinedly took off. It was hilarious.

Here’s where I’m headed with this. Go get this book. It’s called Haiku Enlightenment, by Gabriel Rosenstock.

If you sometimes get a little weary of the same old streets, the same old buildings, and if politics or social media circuses are making the world seem just a mean place to you, then there’s a thing I try with myself that might help you too. In my day job as a consultant, I study and manipulate how people view themselves and their work. I’ve studied cult tactics and brainwashing. I’ve studied propaganda and manipulative tactics in media. I’ve worked professionally in change management and the creative process for over 25 years. In many ways, I’ve monetized studying how people think and applying what I’ve learned. What’s the big secret in all that?

Our brains are neuroplastic, meaning we can rewire how we think in a surprisingly short period of time with some effort and the right inputs.

Rosenstock’s book is beautiful, and a nice tool for you to use should it intrigue you – this thought of rewiring how you see the world. I imagine all Gabriel is trying to do with this book is make you see how beautiful haiku moments are and how to write some for yourself. I had no interest in writing poetry, but instead took this as a chance to adjust what information I was paying attention to in my surroundings (and more importantly, what I was NOT).

I’ve written about haiku here on Grailrunner before. Issa is my favorite now – dude went through some stuff and was still funny and poignant and timeless. Rosenstock’s book highlighted several poets that were new to me, which is great. I suggest if any of this resonates with you that you give a think to the sorts of things that are adding stress or negativity to your life and purposefully shoo them away as they pop up and make a very intentional effort to become a hunter of haiku moments – whether you intend to write them down in a poem being irrelevant.

What’s a haiku moment?

It’s a single, striking moment, often seen in nature or among people, where you realize something larger. It’s sometimes beautiful but doesn’t have to be. The point is it’s a tiny little story in an image, a whole vista of insight and wisdom in a single flash.

I promise you – these are everywhere in your life. Pick up Rosenstock’s book or something like it and absorb a little more about what makes for a haiku moment, then start hunting for them. Write them down, even if in prose. Keep a notebook of them so they’re pinned like butterflies for you to admire later.

If you see any cool ones, grab them and send them my way. I’m always interested in bursts of universal insight. You can sell that.

Till next time,

Interesting Shapes: Altered Perceptions Through The Arts

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“Interesting shapes” What in the world does that mean? (I’ll come back to that)

Our passion at Grailrunner is the imaginative process, any and every thing that can unlock new ways of creating mind-melting concepts and experiences with a bent towards speculative and fantasy fiction and images. We experiment with immersive storytelling in wargames, in roleplaying games, through a fusion of art and flash fiction, in novels, and in art prints.

On a personal level, as the guy generating practically all of that, I have to spend a ridiculous amount of time developing new skills. Recently, I’ve broken out the old sketchbook and Faber Castell pencils, bought a Pigma brush pen, and started going deep on Youtube with some modern day masters of the arts to get to a point where I’m not just painting in Photoshop over photobashed composites or renders from Daz Studio or Blender.

What’s the dream?

Because I love the awe and surprise of exploration, of not knowing what lies beyond a turn in the road, I’m hoping to get to a point where I can crack open a sketchbook and not just draw what I see, but generate something in simulated three-dimensional glory dredged from my imagination without knowing what I was going to draw when I sat down. Ideas from there would feed the hopper of more purposeful art images and concepts in the fiction and games. (I did this as a child and filled countless sketchbooks, but it was all 2-dimensional super heroes, heavy outlines, terrible shading, and nothing I’d be excited to show anybody).

Is that dream possible?

This little gem is called Sketching from the Imagination: Sci-Fi, by 3dTotal Publishing, and though it’s a few years old by this point, it will melt your face off if you’re at all into what I’m talking about here. There is some incredible talent in here. They’re doing it.

Also, these guys at ImagineFX (which is free on Kindle Unlimited now, if that works for you). One thing I especially appreciate about this magazine is the artists explain their desk setups, their materials and software, and their thought processes as they create.

What does all this have to do with “altered perceptions”?

It started with Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks, actually. I bought a compilation of them in a used book store in Florida and perusing them, noticing he spent a lot of time talking about the importance of an artist developing their “mental library”. I forget what he called it, but the idea was to look at the world differently and actually notice things like how light falls on an object, how light reflects off the table, where exactly shadows fall. File all that away so you can draw on it in different contexts when you need it.

And there in one of the most influential art instruction books ever written, Creative Illustration by Andrew Loomis, he made the same sort of point. One of the first exercises he suggests is to simplify multiple scenes at random and find the “flow” in them. He saw things in terms of basic curves, ovals, and swirls and something like a person just standing there, to Loomis, was a flowing curved line. It made it easier for him to represent it simply and beautifully on the page. Yet, it’s an entirely different way to see the world, which is my point today.

I’ve written here before about the visual power and intellectual punch of haiku. My hero in that world is an astounding 17th century genius named Matsuo Basho. This guy:

I’m reading (again) his poetry, this time in some translations by Andrew Fitzsimons, finding all kinds of new and striking illuminations there. One particular comment by Andrew caught my eye: he referred to Basho as one of the greatest “noticers” of literature.

“Noticers”

That struck me. Basho noticed things. Here:

The old pond

A frog leaps in

The sound of water

That’s his most famous one. For me, it’s not something I would pay a lot of attention to on my own, but just having him point this out – a little frog plopping in to a murky little pond, making that pleasant BLOP noise on a quiet morning – that’s just a relaxing and pretty thing now that I think about it. Basho points things like that out. He notices them and files them away for future contexts, including how it made him feel to see or experience it.

This past weekend, I was in the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee with my wife and stared longer than I should have at a little mossy tree root that had made its way out into the brook, just thinking about this sort of thing. Today, I noticed the way the sunrise light filtered through a bright orange autumn leaf, making it almost glow. Crazy.

And then I found this guy, Kim Jung Gi. Please google him and watch and listen to a freakishly talented and wonderful human being! There are countless Youtube videos. Enjoy yourself watching him go nuts with a brush pen. Sadly, he passed away last year (and the world has lost something truly amazing).

He talked at length about how he looked at the world, things he noticed and filed away about how they look, how shapes curve, what geometries caught his eye, and the textures. Again, not things I’d pay attention to otherwise without someone pointing at it. We make mental shortcuts all day long – in fact, it’s how our minds work – and artists just focus their attention on things you and I might not because they know they’ll need those things later.

In my day job as a consultant focused on management behaviors and people interactions, that sort of thing plays into our daily lives practically every waking moment. One thing I do to explain that is ask an audience the color of the walls behind them or the pattern of the carpet. Nobody knows, and that’s my point. We’re shortcutting and letting information pass by us that doesn’t matter. We have to.

But what that means is there is untapped capacity to see things differently, to alter our perceptions.

And that leads us to Peter Han. This fellow, you need to meet.

Here’s his Instagram. Here’s his website. Here’s a demonstration of him just riffing on the paper. That’s him, grinning at you in the header image for this article, surrounded by some of his work.

He sees the world like this:

Peter has an inspiring story. He’s been drawing since he was 5, and had an extremely influential teacher when he was studying art (Norm Schureman). Norm apparently impacted him so much that, even with Norm gone now (shot in a senseless and tragic act), Peter has based his life’s work on some of the approaches he learned back then. He’s built a little empire of teaching people like you and me to model any scene at all in terms of basic shapes to get the structure and proportions and silhouettes correct. After that, it’s just shading and texturing, if not also color.

Here’s a sample of a wildly interesting book he’s written and illustrated he calls The Dynamic Bible. But you should really buy yourself the full copy available here.

What are we supposed to take away from all this?

Watch and listen enough to people like those guys highlighted in ImagineFX and Kim Jung Gi and Peter Han, and you’ll hear them talk about “interesting shapes” they encounter in their daily lives. They don’t just see a cricket, they see some fascinating geometry in its belly or legs that has something they appreciate about it. They don’t just see a sunbeam trickling through a dusty window onto a stairway landing, they see its fabric-like ripples and where it fades to one side but gets brighter on the other.

They may not just hear the frog jumping, but experience it more deeply and with more meaning than others.

My point is that’s the sort of untapped perception capacity we can all unleash, with a little focus and determination to do so.

A whole new way to experience the world! That’s what I’m getting at here. Something different and exciting to adventure with.

Cool, huh?

Till next time,

The Battle Of Hernani And The Creative Arms Race With AI

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You likely know if you’ve been here at Grailrunner before that we obsess over the creative process. In fact, the whole point of the company, this site, and essentially anything we’ve produced is to dissect, pick apart, rewire, engineer, and shove ammo clips into the imagination. It’s in the logo, man.

Dreams are engines. Be fuel.

Anyway, there was an interesting riot at a theater on February 25, 1830 in Paris that has a few things to teach us about how to break ground in creative work. And as creators right now, with the looming and worldshaking onset of AI disrupting every outlet of creative work and threatening that age-old security we were all told that computers can’t create, it’s more important than ever that we get really, really good at doing new things.

New things, man. New things. Now AI can’t really do that.

What is the context on this Hernani thing?

Victor Hugo wrote Les Miserables and the Hunchback Of Notre Dame. That’s where you might know him from.

This guy:

He was a playwright too though, and in his day the structure and content and expectations of plays were widely agreed and rigid. You didn’t mess around with these things if you wanted to be treated seriously and not look like a disrespectful clown. After all, Aristotle analyzed storytelling in tragic drama at an almost divine level 2,000 years before in his Poetics and designed the perfect tragedy, defining the unities:

  1. Unity of time: the action of the play must unfold over a single day
  2. Unity of place: the action must take place in a single setting
  3. Unity of action: the play should comprise only one plot

If you abided by these principles with your play, which was the norm for hundreds of years in Europe, then Aristotle’s intense study of impact and memorability and propriety assured you that you had a well-constructed play. Why deviate from that – you think you know better than Aristotle?

Another non-negotiable was the clear definition of genre: comedy or tragedy. More than just branding, this was crucial to the audience’s interpretation of your work. Is it supposed to be funny, and so pratfalls and misunderstandings and goofy idiots abound? Or is it supposed to be sad, and so have larger-than-life people make key mistakes based on their natures and lose it all?

And finally, you didn’t show things that were grotesque, things that were compulsively ugly or distorted. It was just improper and undignified.

Oh no, what did Victor do?

Well, he wrote this. It’s the preface to a play called Cromwell. It pissed a lot of people off and set the stage for the riots to come later. A few tastes of his blasphemy:

“But the age of the epic draws near its end. Like the society that it represents, this form of poetry wears itself out revolving upon itself. Rome reproduces Greece, Virgil copies Homer, and, as if to make a becoming end, epic poetry expires in the last parturition. It was time. Another era is about to begin, for the world and for poetry.”

“…the grotesque is one of the supreme beauties of the drama.“

“‘But,’ the customs-officers of thought will cry, ‘great geniuses have submitted to these rules which you spurn!’ Unfortunately, yes. But what would those admirable men have done if they had been left to themselves? At all events they did not accept your chains without a struggle.”

Victor was saying that the unities of time and place arbitrarily handicapped the dramatic potential. Check pages 15 and 16 for his blast on unity of place – it being silly to think so much important action would happen in this one spot, and what blah-blah is needed to tell the audience what’s going on elsewhere! He continues on pages 16 and 17 destroying unity of time – it being equal nonsense to expect important events all to happen in a day.

And wow, is that one something Hollywood sequel writers should read!

In summary, he felt the rigid genre conventions of comedy and tragedy were limiting his ability to express wide ranges of emotion and experience, the unities were unnecessary constraints that forced silly adjustments, and, most importantly, he didn’t care for the convention of avoiding the grotesque. He called for a new genre to explore the essentials of life, with beauty and ugliness, good guys and monsters, gold-laid parlors and miserable alleys.

“These rules, man! They’re cramping my style!”

What was Hernani then?

Well, Cromwell was too big in scope to even be staged. It’s 400 pages long and at one point needs the British parliament to enter the stage. His next attempt got banned. Then he wrote Hernani, which censors possibly felt was too ridiculous to bother with.

Plot? Two noblemen and a mysterious bandit are in love with the same woman. A conspiracy is in play, and things get dark ending with a wedding and poison.

Rules broken? Well, the story unfolds over 6 months at various settings. That was naughty of him. You weren’t supposed to show death, violence, or intimate scenes. Hernani opens in the lady’s bedroom and closes with three suicides. Equally naughty. You were supposed to adhere strictly to your chosen genre: comedy or tragedy, but he incorporated farcical dialogue and had a king hiding in a wardrobe. Language should have been clean and high-minded, but he included lines like:

“Is this the stable where you keep the broomstick you ride at night?”

You weren’t supposed to let your lines of a sentence from one line of verse to another, but that happened too. Characters were supposed to be one-note caricatures generally who didn’t change, to represent some trait or concept, though he fleshed them out far more than was typical and allowed transformations (such as Don Carlos becoming a good emperor). And he used stage directions like a madman, which was also strange.

So this happened:

Why was there a riot though?

These Parisians had been through revolutions and guillotines, deaths and restorations of kings, and were reading on a daily basis about massive changes in nations such as Italy and Germany where entire systems of government were being born while others faded. France was still in turmoil politically and censorship was a powerful tool to shut down free thinkers and radicals. Breaking rules in art was linked to breaking other rules, perhaps those tied to abiding by norms set by those in charge.

Today in a politically split country we might feel threatened by those who question gender norms or who bend traditional family structures because we fear what a loss of those foundations might mean for the country’s future, what impact it might have on our children. You see how mad everybody gets about that every day on Twitter. Here in Paris, it was perhaps as scary for them.

In fact, many of those same rioters a few months later in July ousted King Charles X and replaced him with  “Citizen King” Louis-Philippe.

Why is this a big deal?

My point today is that it was risky and insightful for Victor Hugo to see these literary conventions as the limiting factors they were and to dare to break them. And when he broke them, it wasn’t for shock value as so many charlatans today offer instead of talent. Victor didn’t break the rules because he was a renegade, he felt they limited his storytelling.

He kept his eye on the point behind what he was doing: telling an impactful story. Maybe Hernani’s plot is nonsense, but that wasn’t what he wanted anybody to take away from it anyway. Read the Cromwell preface. He wanted a new genre free of limits.

Impressive. Impressive to even notice the limits. How many conventions do we abide by and not even notice. Are our prison walls invisible?

What does this have to do with AI ?

AI writing tools like ChatGPT are not going away. They’re seeping into our marketing copy, our kids’ essays, blog and social media posts, even podcast scripts. As creators, there is one important fact behind any AI-based technology like these which can be an asset for us. They are trained on data sets and those data sets include conventions and limitations like those Victor Hugo raged against.

Ask ChatGPT to write you a story about King Arthur or a D&D scenario and it’s painfully generic. We as creators are in an arms race then, as those tools get better. We have to get better.

Let’s go fight our own Hernani then.

Till next time,