The Power of Fiction & Comedy & Crafting a Kids Book with Your Child with AI

Intro

Welcome to my weekly newsletter, Iterations, where I discuss random thoughts, ideas, and stuff from my trials and errors that might hopefully be useful to one or two others.

Quote of the Week

“Artists are those who can evade the verbose.” – Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

It′s not a famous quote, just words that struck me when reading my book this week. Encouraging me not to overthink creativity and in particular, my writing is allowed to be simple and unpretentious.

Behind the Scenes (Projects and Thoughts)

Sales Consultancy Work

uilding up my flying hours in sales consultancy. This has been an interesting project and something I started with last year, beginning to share all the knowledge I have gained over my years of selling for other companies and of course my own company BRUK.?

Interestingly enough, a few fellow media production companies have reached out to me to learn more about lead generation and closing processes.?It's been great to hear the responses from those companies and to see them gain results from the work we have been doing together.?

This a shameless plug, as this is LinkedIn after all! If you need some assistance or ideas for your business's sales then get in touch I′d be happy to help.?www.mbarton.co.uk

Thoughts

My thinking this week has been around focussing on the riches of life that are not monetary.

I am naturally an ambitious person and a lot of that ambition is focused on wealth acquisition which is just how I am wired and I am unapologetic about it because I consider myself to be reasonably grounded.?

This week though I have been focussing my mind on what money can not always buy and how rich we are to have those blessings. For example, the ability to see, time spent with my daughter and enjoying being relatively young and healthy.?

Elements of life people would trade a lot of money for if they could, making these aspects of life invaluable.?

Gratitude is a powerful tool for perspective and I aim to practice it daily.

Podcast/Video Recommendation

I slightly changed the title of this section because I have a video recommendation this week, and knowing my YouTube consumption levels, I know there will be more recommendations. This week, I have two.

Starting with comedy podcasts. This one tickled me this week I just appreciate great comedians—they′re typically very smart people—and I’m fascinated by comedic timing and the power of comedy to alleviate stress. So when I have a stressful week, I can just put something like this on just for fun and take that pressure off myself of always having to consume books and media for learning or gaining an edge.

The other video that I liked a lot this week was this one, titled "i am begging you to read some fiction bro"

The creator of this YouTube video makes an interesting argument that you can better retain life lessons gained from fiction writing as opposed to nonfiction.

As I am pushing myself this year on fiction reading, this was a nice motivator, and from the one-and-a-half fiction books I have read this year, I think he has a great point.

Book of the Week / What I Am Reading?

Continuing on the topic of fiction and very much linked to the quote I shared at the beginning of this newsletter, this week I have been reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.

There are people much better placed than me to review this book, but I have enjoyed elements of it so far and also struggled with it at times. I concede that could very much be part and parcel of fiction reading.

It was gifted to me by a close friend who wrote a small inscription, which, on a side note, is a very thoughtful thing to do and something people don’t do that much anymore. For that reason alone, I will aim to finish this one, as it’s clearly an important book to this close friend of mine.

There is a lesson there, right? Gift more books, and when you do, write a message on the inside of them.

What I’m Experimenting With

Teaching my daughter about the wonders of AI.

Whilst travelling in England a few weeks ago, I decided to print out Worldly Wisdom by Charlie Munger on paper, because I have a strong preference for reading on paper as opposed to a screen—see screen retention bias.

Anyway, my daughter saw me go through the effort of printing out this essay, much to the detriment of my father’s printer! She was excited that I had been able to create this book from scratch and had this beautiful amazement and curiosity about it all.

So when we were on the plane back, she said, “Daddy, can I make a book too?” The answer was absolutely.

Below is how we did it, and here is how you can use AI to create a book with your kids too.

First: The Manuscript

Naturally, with my daughter being 5, she wanted to start with the illustrations. So, she first drew something and then dictated to me the words of her story, word by word.

Step 1: Kid draws, parent writes the dictated words—pretty easy so far.

Next Step

A couple of days later, I said, “Would you like to learn how to make your book a reality on the computer and then print it out?” She was incredibly excited by this, and here is where the AI part comes in.

We simply uploaded the images and text, in this case, to ChatGPT (other LLMs are available) and asked it to help us format our story and book. Of course, the AI is not yet advanced enough to read my hieroglyphical handwriting.

Then we created the images.

Printing out

In our case, we don’t have a printer at home, but it gave us something else to do in terms of taking our story to a local print shop and paying to get it printed out. They also helped us cut and staple it.

Conclusion

All in all, there are so many elements from starting the book to completing it that I believe are great for kids:

1. Drawing & Dictating (i.e. creating a manuscript): Teaching kids all about the power of getting their ideas down on paper, but also the fact that first drafts are pretty much never the final product.

2. Using computers and AI at an early stage: Exposing kids to this kind of technology and showing them how to use computers/tablets in a way other than playing games.

3. Structuring and editing a story so it has coherency: Teaching them the importance of organising their ideas.

4. Having fun: Simply enjoying seeing something they have created in their minds illustrated in a fantastic, colourful way.

5. Turning ideas into something tangible: Showing them the possibility of bringing their ideas to life and proving firsthand that it is possible to take an idea from their head and make it a reality.

Other Tips

You can, of course, also dictate into your phone or computer your story or get your kids to make a voice recording. Then upload it to an LLM and ask for it to be structured into a story.

My daughter was incredibly happy with the results. We had to read her this story several nights in a row, and she even wanted to take it to school.

Thanks to my friend Alastair, who reminded me that this was worth writing about in this week’s newsletter.

So let me know which part of this newsletter stood out to you. What do you want more (or less) of? Have an idea you’d like me to explore? Let me know! Send me a direct message or comment below.

Have an incredible week ahead. Keep iterating, keep trying, and keep learning!

Yours faithfully,

Matthew Barton