thread: 2010-06-14 : A Bit of Hardcore
On 2010-06-18, Rafael wrote:
Paul T.: Your points are well taken. I guess my skepticism and that of my friends arises from having a reliable "Bob"... but to be fair, I have, in my entire life, only found one such "Bob"!
I have a quibble, though:
Most creative artists (whether authors, composers, or visual artists) struggle with "writer's block" or similar problems. They get "stuck" doing the same thing over and over again, or maybe they run out of ideas, period. Many, many good writers use some kind of procedures to break through that: they may draw random words out of a dictionary, pull a story out of a random newspaper, or even roll dice (there are whole schools of "aleatoric composition", for example, in the classical music world).
There is a world of difference between occasionally using an oblique strategy to break writers block and randomly generating your entire plot. The former is no doubt common, but not what we're discussing here. The latter is fringe (see comment #36); not even my New Music buff friends listen to aleatoric music all or even most of the time.
