What makes a good drama? What advantages do human storytellers have over their AI counterparts? Where do ideas come from? And what do spiritual beliefs share with artists' faith in the creative process?
Andrew Klavan is the author of such internationally bestselling crime novels as True Crime, filmed by Clint Eastwood, Don’t Say A Word, filmed starring Michael Douglas, Empire of Lies and When Christmas Comes. He has been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award five times and has won twice. He wrote the screenplays to A Shock to The System starring Michael Caine, One Missed Call starring Edward Burns, and Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer starring Dean Cain. His essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, his political satire videos have been viewed by tens of millions of people, and he hosts a popular podcast The Andrew Klavan Show at the Daily Wire. He is also the author of a memoir about his religious journey The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ and the USA Today bestseller The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus. His latest crime novel is The House of Love and Death, the third book in the Cameron Winter series.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Our minds are interesting because we are said to use only a portion of it. So we don't know what's happening, I think, within the creative process or with any of these great physical feats where you have to summon bravery. We don't know where it comes from. It must be from outside ourselves because I can't imagine that that strength can always just come from within ourselves or that focus that you spoke about where you can slow time or you can change kind of physics.
ANDREW KLAVAN
It's a really good point because I think that the modern sensibility and certainly the post-modern sensibility tells us that everything is self-referential. That if we have a certain feeling, it's because of our chemistry, it's because of our sexuality or urges that come within ourselves. But the older way of thinking is that we're in a relationship with a world that actually is reflected in our mind. And I think that that older sensibility is probably closer to the truth. It explains a lot more. It makes a lot more sense of things.
So every writer knows this, that he's not actually drawing so much from himself as some kind of literal inspiration, some kind of breathing into him that connects him, his own experiences, his childhood experiences, life experiences, his mental experiences with something that is very real outside him. And what he's trying to do in art, I think, is communicate that experience to other people in the only way possible. You can't describe it, you can't put adjectives into it. You have to dramatize it or paint a picture of it or write a song about it. That's the way human beings communicate the experience of being human.
Hard to convince anybody of this nowadays, but life isn't actually about how many likes you get on your social media. It's not about money. It's not about how many different people you sleep with. It's really about the experience of being here and how deep and rich and joyful it can be and whether it is deep and rich and joyful enough today that you don't want to be better tomorrow.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
And your own journey has been different. You're a person of the Christian faith and you had later in life conversion. I was wondering, to explore characters in storytelling, it comes out of our lived experiences. Do you need to have present dilemmas and unresolved conflicts within yourself to flesh out well-crafted stories? What happens when you resolve those conflicts and find faith? Where do you find your drivers for your stories?
KLAVAN
Resolved questions don't actually make for good drama, and they don't actually help people on their own journeys. If you just tell people that you have all the answers, which I don't, then you're, first of all, lying to them. And second of all, you're boring. And it's just a lecture and propaganda that you're giving people.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
So you mentioned your podcast where you give your opinions. It feels to me like your fiction is a counterpoint. A place for you to explore difference and doubt. Is that how it feels for you?
KLAVAN
A story can be interpreted, but a great story can be interpreted different ways because you're looking at it from different angles. And there might be wrong interpretations, but there might be many correct interpretations. And so I'm not looking for...I'm not telling allegories. I'm trying to communicate a vision of life. I'm trying to communicate what I've seen of life to you. That, to me, is what art is. It is the communication of the internal experience of being human.
But when you look at your life, where does the joy come from? It comes from growing. It comes from changing. It comes from finding out something, having something happen to you that never happened before. And I think that it's very encouraging to me that if you are growing towards something infinite, there's no end to that journey. You can always become better and more and life can become more abundant.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
And to go back to your book The House of Love and Death, I think that we also have to appreciate the ends of things as a storyteller, that the end is what gives the whole journey meaning. If our lives were just this endless story, it's almost like torture, even an unending bliss, we can appreciate it when we have - we don't want suffering, but something to compare it with. That we appreciate where we've arrived at.
KLAVAN
You know, when you look forward to the future, I'm not against AI. I'm not against technology. I'm not against enhancements. You wear glasses. I wear glasses. That enhances your body, but you want to enhance yourself in such a way that you are following your humanity to the next step?
There's no reason that tools can't improve your humanity, but to go beyond your humanity or away from your humanity is a mistake. And so, until we ask ourselves these central basic questions. What am I? What am I doing here? How can we know whether we should use a machine or not? Because there's always going to be some billionaire idiot who thinks he's the smartest person on earth telling us we've got to implant this thing in our brain, or we're going to be less than the guy next to us.
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I found faith very late in life. And while it has been an incredible joy for me, a joyful journey. It remains a journey. You still are traveling. You don't suddenly think like, now I've got it all figured out! So you still are aware of your own struggles. And the fact that it took me so long to come to a place where I could believe...I was 49 when I was baptized. And I had gone down every stupid, wrong, obviously dishonest road it was possible to go down. I was not somebody who converted at 19 and never changed my mind. I changed my mind a million times. And so I was aware of where all the dead ends were. Now I can at least say I know that this road ends here, and this road ends there, logically, morally, and emotionally. And that's been helpful to me.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I hope you don't mind going on to this subject because I think AI, the future of humanity are important questions. And AI, all the different technologies, big data and all of these things, some people are really excited when they talk about post humanity. Like – Oh, it's great. We will no longer be human. We'll be better than human! But there's this old saying, “Follow me, said the wise man, as he walked behind.” I think just because it's faster and has access to everything, is that intelligence? I mean, maybe it's intelligence, but is it consciousness?
KLAVAN
I mean, just us looking at one another, even though we're far apart, we see a million things in one another. You can tell whether a person has kindness, whether a person has compassion, whether a person has any depth at all. You can see that in their face when they sit down in front of you in the first moment. And I don't think something that something like AI that just reads your face is going to be able to do that. I don't know, ultimately, whether we'll be able to create human beings, but AI is not a human being. And to look forward to a post-humanity, again, is to look forward to death. And I look forward to life. I believe that life is what life is all about.
