292. When Life Imitates Art with Bryan VanDyke

Author and digital strategist Bryan VanDyke discusses what it's like when real life resembles plot, how that can change readers' perceptions of the story, and details his own experiences of life imitating art in his book In Our Likeness.

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Check out Bryan's website:
https://www.bryanvandyke.com/

Grab a copy of In Our Likeness:
https://www.amazon.com/Our-Likeness-Bryan-VanDyke/dp/1662522606/

Read Bryan's essay on AI and loss:
Nothing’s Ever Lost: Can AI Help Us Remember Our Departed Loved Ones? ‹ Literary Hub

Transcript

Jennia: Hello, I'm Jennia D'Lima. Welcome to Writing and Editing, the author-focused podcast that takes a whole person approach to everything related to both writing and editing. Sometimes, as we're writing, we might see that real-life events are beginning to have an uncanny resemblance to the plot of our novel. So how should this be handled? Should the work be adapted to fit what is now reality? And if it is, can this change how readers view the piece? Writer and digital strategist Bryan VanDyke had this exact experience while writing his novel, In Our Likeness, and is here to share his insights into this topic. This is, "When Life Imitates Art."

Jennia: Well, welcome to the show. Glad to have you here!

Bryan VanDyke: Thank you for having me!

Jennia: I'd love to first have you share a little bit about your book and explain exactly what happened, just so listeners get an idea of what went on.

Bryan VanDyke: Sure, absolutely. So my novel, In Our Likeness, is about a group of technologists who create an algorithm that's meant to detect fake information online. But what they discover in the course of using it is that whatever they put in to the algorithm becomes true in the real world. And the idea for it, when I first drafted it, was somewhat vague. And it involved interactions with a chatbot and an AI interface and character, all of which I really made up (laughs). I drafted it in 2018. I do a lot of work, as you said, in the digital space and a lot of digital strategy work. And so I was very interested in chatbots at the time. They were terrible, though. Playing with them only reinforced the idea that they weren't ready for the world. And so making one of my characters a chatbot was one of those things that you kind of do as a writer when you're like, "Okay, I'm not constrained by anything,"—

Jennia: Right (laughs).

Bryan VanDyke: —"let me just see what happens." And so, I created this character. I drafted this whole story, which is not predicated on reality, as you can tell, because they're, you know, spoiler alert, there is no technology that can change the real world merely through putting it into a digital interface. You know, in creating it and putting it together, I just sort of speculated a little bit, but also tried to keep things grounded and kind of realistic. And what happened—So, that was 2018. But over the course of the next couple of years, as I revised the book, you know, the world at first didn't change too much. But when it came time to really start querying around the end of 2022, a really funny thing happened. I started querying, and people would tell me why, you know, this book is you know, just a very strange book, and I don't know how to put it out in the world.

Jennia: Oh! Interesting.

Bryan VanDyke: A lot of people—you know, a lot of agents who read it felt that it seemed like pretty far-out science fiction kind of stuff. That wasn't my intent. It was just supposed to be sort of a strange story, right? Like, you know, The Picture of Dorian Gray is not speculative fiction. Although you might be able to call it that because you can't explain what happens. It's a world where something else is true—

Jennia: So more of a think piece then looking at that what-if scenario.

Bryan VanDyke: Exactly, right. And so what happened was ChatGPT came out and I wrote a query letter that tied into ChatGPT. An agent wrote me back in ten minutes—

Jennia: Oh my goodness!

Bryan VanDyke: —from the email that I sent out.

Jennia: That might actually be the fastest agent response (laughs)!

Bryan VanDyke: I was shocked! I mean, I had a pile of rejections, you know, and suddenly I had something that was possible to be understood. And so it was odd. And the world kind of seemed to, you know, emulate in some ways, the story. Obviously, you dig deeper into it. Again, it's not meant to be a fully realized piece of technology, but it just feels more legitimate in 2024 than it did in 2018, when I first sat down to write it. It was a joyful kind of experience in some ways. But I'll tell you what, over the last year, I've been really scared that, like, new things would happen that would make this whole notion of a chatbot that you could really converse with seem almost antiquated. And happily, it's still kind of where we are.

Jennia: Yeah. Even just reading those opening conversations that they're having. And a conversation doesn't even feel like the correct word because you can tell, at least in the beginning when you're seeing any, that it's just these spewed-out, programmed phrases, you know, like, "Sorry, I can't help you with that." And you think, "Oh yes," you know, you know you had that experience, you can relate to it. But I do think it's interesting, and this is something I'd wanted to ask later on, but since it's already come up, about how agents and the like will take on that project. So you talked about how in the beginning it almost seemed too farfetched, or maybe not even too farfetched, but just that there wouldn't be enough readers who would understand it and be able to conceptualize this at all. And how that changing technology then worked in your favor. But, I mean, that also seems like really good timing and quite a bit of luck.

Bryan VanDyke: Yes, and a lot—But that was a lot of writing and rewriting, especially around the technology component. So in the book, the narrator doesn't create this algorithm. It's created by a programmer that he has a crush on. This other—this woman. And choosing a narrator who didn't completely understand how things work was a very intentional choice.

Jennia: Ohh, okay.

Bryan VanDyke: Because, in the very first draft, the narrator created it—

Jennia: Interesting!

Bryan VanDyke: —Then as I looked at it and thought, "How am I going to make this work?" You know, my first drafts are coherent but messy, let's say. I thought, "I don't know how long I'm gonna be revising this. I don't know if it's ever gonna find its way in the world. How do I make it future proof a little bit?"

Jennia: Mhm.

Bryan VanDyke: The best way to do it was to make my narrator a little bit naive. And so it became a part of his character, really, to say, you know, "I don't know how to program. I don't know how these things work. My job is just to keep things, you know, on the straight and narrow." And that, as a—from a writing perspective, also is something I would recommend to someone who's creating a character or trying to tell story. If your narrator knows everything and is excellent at everything, you've got an omniscient, third-person narrator that's using the pronoun "I," right? Your narrator should have things that he or she is a little bit not so expert at, and even things that they don't know. And in fact, my narrator is classic unreliable narrator, which becomes clear in the final section of the book. And that has always been part of the turn that I always kind of wanted to have there.

Jennia: I do think Graham works spectacularly well here because he's almost like that fill in for the reader. So then they don't have to know everything because he doesn't know everything, and yet it's still believable. And you can see how you get from point A to point B, and how he follows these steps, and then this happens. And that's really all you need to know, especially now. And this goes back again to, how does the changing world around us fit into, "Can I sell this manuscript or not?"—

Bryan VanDyke: Yeah.

Jennia: —Because we all have enough familiarity with it that we can at least understand the basic idea behind it to grasp it. We don't have to really know about the ins and outs behind it, or the technology, or how they came about it, even though they touch on that a little bit here. But I think it's even one of the first conversations Graham has with the algorithm. He's like, "Uh, I need basic English."

Bryan VanDyke: (both laugh) Yeah, that's right. That's right. I think to your point, you have to find some readers who will help you in the way that you want to or at the level that you want to operate at.

Jennia: Mhm.

Bryan VanDyke: Because now that the book is out in the world, and I'm, you know, so appreciative of some of the feedback and what I've heard from people, it's clear to me that some people operate at different levels, right? And some people say, "I really needed to understand how all the technology worked." And I was quite worried of that. My brother actually is an engineer, and so he has a mentality different from mine. And as I was working on the book, sometimes I would think, you know, "What would a computer scientist, you know, think of this? And how do I make sure that and I don't create something which is so completely an amateur's writing?" And using the narrator, who admits he doesn't know, is a nice trick, but it doesn't quite—It doesn't absolve you from understanding anything at all.

Jennia: Yeah, that whole suspension of disbelief thing. Yeah. As soon as someone finds a critical error, you're done.

Bryan VanDyke: Exactly right. And so having some good readers who operate at your level was really important to me. And it really helped me make sure that it was—you know, I was operating at the level that I wanted. But you can't please absolutely everyone. You know, there will always be someone who comes along and goes, "There's something you didn't think of."

Jennia: Yes.

Bryan VanDyke: —And I think you have to be okay with that too. Especially as a writer. Like, you can't be over indexed on something that absolutely is impenetrable, you know, for somebody to have something missing.

Jennia: Whenever that comes up, I always think about those one-star reviews they have for places like Stonehenge, where it's, like, "Not enough rocks." And I thought you really just (both laugh). There's always going to be someone who hates it for whatever reason!

Bryan VanDyke: Exactly right.

Jennia: —It has nothing to do with you. It has nothing to do with the book.

Bryan VanDyke: Exactly right. I'll have to remember that. Stonehenge: Not enough rocks. I'm going to internalize that as silly feedback that I know is out there.

Jennia: I'm glad I could help with that. But—(laughs) So, as this technology was evolving in real life, did that then make it feel like you had more of a reason to look into this and make sure that it was believable? Because I would think then, you know, more and more people are starting to understand it, and are reading about it on their own. Whereas they might have been completely ignorant of it before. So did that put a little more fire under you to make sure those facts were correct, or at least those quasi facts?

Bryan VanDyke: Yeah, definitely. And, you know, so if I sort of look back at revisions, what brought me back to the book, sometimes—Because you think you're done and you kind of try to send it on the world, but then maybe you realize you're not completely done. I would go back to it sometimes because I would feel like, "Oh, now I understand better how large language models work." I mean, I don't really understand. Like, I couldn't build one. You do some reading, you understand a concept a little better, and then you go back to it, and, you know, in my way of working on a book, the whole thing kind of lives in my brain. I walk around, and I'm thinking about the whole thing for years, generally. And so, you know, if I would have an experience somewhere or I would read an article about something that would seem to open up a new vista of plausibility—

Jennia: Mhm.

Bryan VanDyke: —I would find myself going back and changing things so that I could incorporate it. And so if you look at the drafts over the three, four years that I was working actively on the—on this book, one could probably plot whether it was, you know, a digital marketing project that I worked on, or maybe someone that I met who worked in the technology space, or a friend of mine who I had a conversation with that brought me back to the texts, and I made it better because of it. And I think that if I'd sold it when I first thought it was ready, it wouldn't have been as good as it became—

Jennia: Ohh.

Bryan VanDyke: —through a year and a half of rejections. Not because the rejections taught me something. In fact, I have many lovely rejections that taught me absolutely nothing, because people are so kind that they just tell you it's great. They just can't figure it out. They don't tell you that there's something in it that's terrible, and if you would just fix it . . . It afforded more time for more external things to happen in the world for the book to be better. In addition, for it to tie in more to real things.

Jennia: Yeah, I think it goes back to something you said, too, about the book is going to be less likely to feel outdated in even a year. You know, I'm just looking at the rate at which this is advancing, because, yeah, if you'd wait—I mean, I feel like we've really seen it take off in the past year or two, compared to even five, six years ago, where it was almost nobody knew about it.

Bryan VanDyke: Yeah.

Jennia: Yeah. And if it had come out then or, you know, if it'd come out, let's say, two years later—

Bryan VanDyke: Yeah.

Jennia: —you know, you'd almost have to start over because it'd be like, "Well, we've passed that already." And I'm thinking about one example, hopefully not spoiling, but the AI created art piece.

Bryan VanDyke: Yes.

Jennia: Like, that's something that we see now. That's not really stretching us beyond the realm of what we believe is possible. And so when we see it in the book, we can easily accept that as reality or fact.

Bryan VanDyke: Yeah. Although I'll tell you, that's a real painting, the one that's in the book. I really went to Christie's Auction House—

Jennia: Oh my gosh! (laughs)

Bryan VanDyke: —in October of 2018 to see the first AI art that they put up for auction. And it was An Ostensible Portrait of Edmond de Belamy. It was one of those things that really sent me moving forward in the book. I was already writing it when I read about this piece of art, but once I read about it, I realized it was something that I really wanted to incorporate into the story. And there were a number of things like that throughout the editing of this book. I will tell you another, more personal thing is that there's a very important subplot, as you know—

Jennia: Mhm.

Bryan VanDyke: —about Graham's mother. I wrote this book in 2018. My mother was still alive. My mother actually got sick and passed away a couple weeks before I sold this book—

Jennia: Oh. I'm so sorry.

Bryan VanDyke: —Thank you. That was about a year and a half ago. And I revised the book through a period of her hospitalization. I was sitting in the hospital room. You know, when she was sleeping, I would think about what I was seeing, and I would then take it back and go back, and I'd be like, "I need to use this somehow. Right?" And, you know, if you're a writer you move through the world understanding things through how you can process it in language. And for me, understanding that experience, processing my own grief, etc., was very much something that was made easier by being able to work through it in the fiction. I didn't write the story—I wrote the story, and my mom read it, and she thought it was a good story, but yet also, it's now—she's kind of wound into it in her own—My own response emotionally to it is something that I was able to pass through to the characters. I will tell you, the relationship between Graham and his mother is 20 times stronger because of what happened throughout my life during that process of the rewriting

Jennia: Ohh, I believe it. I mean, his response is almost visceral. You know, you can just, like, sink in. And you can feel it.

Bryan VanDyke: Yeah. The—

Jennia: So it's, like, even the little things that he thinks about her or remembering—like the sick days and that sort of thing. It's all those little moments and those memories that he's bringing in that just really make it feel like, this is what not quite grief is, but that almost expectation of the grief. that's going to come very soon.

Bryan VanDyke: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. You know, that was a lot of work on a lot of those passages. But—And I think that, again, to the question of, you know, art imitating life, imitating art imitating life, it's all over this book for me. It's part of what makes it work.

Jennia: I think that's probably true for a lot of authors, at least on some level. Or there might be one character or one event. It's just this feels like it was such a grand scale. Not just the personal component, which is done beautifully in here, but the plot itself. And then with AI. And you've already mentioned a few times, you know, how you've had to revise or adapt as a result of that, which has become so clear. But do you think there are ever scenarios where an author might have a similar experience where their work does touch on something that has just occurred, where they might want to then pull back, or maybe even shelf that project for a little while?

Bryan VanDyke: You know, I remember quite clearly now, 23 years ago, around 9/11, a number of books that came out or were—that were coming out. And the decision by some publishing houses to delay or to defer on them. And I, in fact, had a 9/11 novel that I wrote as a response (Jennia gasps). So it wasn't even a book that, you know, I wrote that was prescient somehow. It was truly a response, something that kind of used it because I live in New York City—

Jennia: Mmm.

Bryan VanDyke: —it was kind of real experience for me. And I remember the response to that when I was trying to find people to work on it, and I was submitting it in 2004. So three years later and already—and still people were saying, "It's too soon. I don't even want to read this." And I remember being frustrated by it. But the learning there, for me, is, yes, you're response to something as an individual and as an artist might be legitimate and it might be interesting and true, but it doesn't mean that commercially, you're going to be able to find someone who says, "With my limited time and my limited availability or my limited shelf space, that I'm going to give it over to you." And I think that's the hardest part as an artist, to try to balance. You are drawn to the things that you're drawn to, and you have the stories that you're excited to tell. And then there's the external circumstance. Sometimes you get lucky and the ChatGPT comes out and the world's interested in your weird chatbot story.

Jennia: Right (laughs).

Bryan VanDyke: And other times it doesn't, and then it's just one more for your hard drive, right? I've got a lot of novels that are never going to see the light of day because they were what I wanted to write. And they were important to get to here. But that's all they were.

Jennia: That's a really nice way of putting it too. Because it's one of those things, also, if we think about writing as a craft and not just, "Oh, no one wants this novel from me," that we are going to be improving considerably between book one and, say, book 10 or book 15, just because we've had that extra practice, we found those additional ways to do something, or we now understand how to do this with finesse. Whereas before it may have been just kind of plotting along. And so I think it might help to look at it that way too. Which is exactly what (laughs)—

Bryan VanDyke: Yeah, I mean, I sure hope it's true, right? You know, you do something a few times, let's hope you're getting better—

Jennia: That's the goal (laughs).

Bryan VanDyke: It's definitely the goal.

Jennia: So if we look at this book in particular, from a marketing standpoint, did your marketing ideas or who you envisioned as your audience change at all from when you were drafting it? Or maybe when you had that first completed version versus when it actually came out?

Bryan VanDyke: Something interesting that has happened over the course of the last month or so since it was first available as a digital book, is getting categorized based on how people are buying it a little bit. I've started to see it referred to as doing really well on the dystopian fiction—

Jennia: Yes, I saw that! Number one in dystopian sci-fi (laughs).

Bryan VanDyke: Yes! And dystopian science fiction and science fiction adventure. Those were the categories that got kicked back to me. And first of all, let me say how wonderful that people are interested in the book. To be clear, I love it. But I was surprised to see it categorized in that way. If you'd asked me who I was writing the book for, I wouldn't have started with those categories. I wouldn't have said, "Oh, I'm writing a piece of dystopian fiction." Now, I look at it afterwards, I go, "It is kind of—this is pretty dystopian." I probably should have known, but that's not what—that's not what I had in mind, you know. To my mind, it was far more of a piece of literary fiction. It's about a man who really can't accept his mother's illness—

Jennia: Yeah.

Bryan VanDyke: —and his own lot in life. And he's unwilling to accept it, but he's—but here's the important part that makes him different from many other stories in my mind: He's unwilling to take action to change it. And that's, like, that's a real personality. I know lots of people like that. I feel like I've had phases in my life where I'm like that. Where I'm unhappy, but I'm unwilling to change. And that's really stressful. That's a moment that I was trying to capture. And, in addition, I really wanted to capture our absurd relationship with technology. For example, it's very strange that I feel like I'm sitting here, you know, talking to you and we have a video conference so we can see each other. But I don't see you. I'm sitting in my apartment. We're not looking at each other, right?—

Jennia: Right.

Bryan VanDyke: —I'm looking at a screen that is emulating you, and I'm hearing your voice recreated. We're probably a long way away from each other. But technology makes us forget that. It makes us believe that we're really, you know, having interactions that 200 years ago didn't even exist. And so I wanted to write a book that got at how strange all of that is. And so strangeness and absurdness was really baked into it. And it's not my job—Well, it is my job, but it's not my area of expertise to know how to place a book. I only know how to write a book. And I kind of pray that I engage with people and I try to write it as broadly and as fully as I can for people to have a reaction to it and to be interested in it. And then beyond that, you have to take your cues from other people—

Jennia: Mhm.

Bryan VanDyke: —and they're the experts. And by trusting them, I think, actually, I've got a better book than I did before because it can be positioned with people and people know how to interpret it. And you have to know in order to know when you make a decision that will surprise those people. So when I was a student, I had a writing professor who was very adamant about attempting to get away from what he called "received ideas." And to create something truly artistic and original, you got to work around that. And that's true, but have you ever tried to read something that's wholly and completely original? I mean, it's really hard because expectations are what give us that framework to appreciate something, because there's something totally different and new that you don't even know how to grapple with it. And I'm still learning how to do that better. I feel like—Because to me, I really wanted a book that surprised the reader consistently, like a good-plotted book would, but without just being a, you know, plotted—

Jennia: Right. Without doing, like, any of those cheap tricks, you know, it's like a literary version of a jump scare (laughs).

Bryan VanDyke: That's right. Exactly right. And it's not easy, and it opens you up to things not being like people want and for a little element of dissatisfaction. And, you know, you got to decide where do you want to do it and experiment with how to do it. How to leave someone happy, even if they didn't get what they thought.

Jennia: Ahh, yeah. But I think, too, that little bit of dissatisfaction sometimes is what sticks with you the most. And those are the books you think about for the longest, and then you start to sort of internalize what it was really telling you, and then you go back and look at it again now that you've made some sense of it, maybe years later, and it gives you that deeper understanding.

Bryan VanDyke: I think you're so right. But it's a tricky place to be as a writer. Because you want people to just love it. You want them to just be like, "I loved it, it was perfect." But then you also want them to talk more about it than that. So it's a weird place.

Jennia: But going back to you saying that you originally thought of this as being literary, that's sort of one of those things that helps define a book as literary. It's not just that little piece of cotton candy where I'm happy and I enjoyed it, and then five minutes later, you're on to the next thing. I think you need some of that in order to define it that way, just because it does keep you thinking. It's not just easily consumed and then gone.

Bryan VanDyke: Yeah, that's what I'm hoping for. I think it's—Everyone decides what they're looking for. I've been so appreciative of the, you know, the response and some of the things that I've heard from people, and I feel very fortunate.

Jennia: Well, before we end, do you have any new projects or anything upcoming that you can share?

Bryan VanDyke: So I'm working on another novel. I'm actually working on two novels. One of them is in the same space as this one, which I have an impolite term that I use to describe it. I will not use that term here now, but it's the—Let's call it's "mind bending."

Jennia: Ohh, okay! (both laugh)

Bryan VanDyke: It's a bit of a mind bender, and . . . yeah. And so it's also technology adjacent. I don't think of In Our Likeness as a science fiction book, but I accept it in that designation. I think that this also is a book that . . . somebody called it "corporate cyberpunk" or something like that, I forget. Which I think is perfect. I'm like, "Yes. Corporate cyberpunk." I would love to create that category—

Jennia: (laughs) Yes, the sub-genre. Coming soon.

Bryan VanDyke: Yeah, it's another corporate cyberpunk kind of book. And then I have the other book that I'm working on is a little more of a—genre-wise, you can understand it as, like, a coming-of-age book, but it's, like, a supernatural coming-of-age story, because it has a bend to reality as well. Apparently, everything that I work on now is not straight realism, which I'm actually very comfortable with. I did realize at some point in my life that the books that I love the most weren't straight up realism. And then I thought to myself, "Why do I keep writing straight up realism books? Let's do something different!" And so we'll see which one crosses the finish line first, but they're both coming along.

Jennia: All right. Well, I'm intrigued by both already. And thank you again for being here!

Bryan VanDyke: Absolutely! Thank you so much for having me!

Jennia: And thank you for listening! And be sure to check out this show notes for additional information. And then please join me next week when author T.I. Lowe joins us to describe how to write a second-chance romance. Thanks again!