Jody Lynn Nye continued her tradition of giving Writers’ Workshop alumni the privilege of returning each year to hear guest speakers for further education in the mysteries of writing. On Thursday afternoon in Hyatt Kennesaw, as a former student of Nye, I enjoyed this perk and attended presentations by the irrepressible Courtney Sarnow Lytle, Atlanta intellectual property attorney, and by A.J. Hartley, author, professor emeritus, and Shakespearean scholar.
I had the privilege of hearing Lytle last year and reporting in the Daily Dragonabout her recap of intellectual property law relevant to authors, limited to copyright and trademark law. This year she added a new twist, the challenges facing all authors and publishers by the arrival of intellectual property AI, including ChatGPT and other similar programs and applications.
She cautioned that whatever AI creates is not copyrightable. That is not because AI might lift other copyrighted work from internet sources, potentially infringing on other writers’ hard-earned copyrights, but because only human authors are eligible for copyright protection. (To the best of this reporter’s knowledge, sentient beings are not yet legal “persons,” despite inferences to the contrary suggested by the 1999 science fiction film Bicentennial Man, based on works by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg.)
Lytle warned that a lot of lawsuits are moving through the courts on issues relating to the use of AI. (Reporter to writers: caution advised!)
Nye described yet more difficulties facing writers: “Though the publishing landscape has become more diverse, representing characters and cultures other than your own is fraught with risks and challenges. Drawing on his own experience, AJ Hartley . . . discuss[ed] the issues and some strategies for navigating them.” Hartley warned that writing about cultures and characters that are not your own present various pitfalls.
He described his own history with his first novel. Although described by one non-acquiring editor as obviously written by a New England college student, the novel was based on the experiences of a college seminarian in northern England similar to Hartley’s own. This judgment was made in spite of the fact that Hartley is originally from that region.
Hartley, a New York Times best-selling author, published The Mask of Atreus in 2006. This archaeological thriller featured a Jewish woman as its main character. His editor at the time was also a Jewish woman and had no difficulty with his choice of protagonist. (The Mask of Atreus was my first introduction to Hartley’s novels.)
He described finding an access point that can connect an author to a character rather than trying to define a fictional person. If you decide to write about that connection, the character is less likely to become a stereotype for a particular group or background. In this vein, he discussed the difficulties that writing about another gender sometimes presents.
Hartley discussed the history of the publishing markets being flooded with “diverse” material that was not being produced by the people described in the works. He also questioned creating “slots” for works by people of color and the absurd belief that books representing diverse characters were for a particular readership only. He recommended the 2023 film American Fiction, based on the 2001 book Erasure: A Novel by Percival Everett, for another view of these issues.
Hartley described his own diverse family and their collaborations, including Hideki Smith, Demon Queller, Falstaff Books, 2023. (I bought a hard copy for my nephew who has Japanese and American parents. He was delighted to receive “a book about me.”) Hideki Smith was nominated for a 2024 Dragon Con award.
