From the late 1980s to the mid 1990s, Stirling Silliphant was my mentor. We ate together twice a week for seven years in Bangkok. Lunch or dinner, always at a table where the conversation ran long. He was an American screenwriter who had won the Oscar for In the Heat of the Night. He died in Bangkok in 1996. I was a young Canadian novelist still learning my trade. He had forgotten more about story than I had yet figured out.
One evening he told me a story about the script for that film. He had been working with Norman Jewison, the director. They met many times to go over the screenplay. Each time Jewison would tell Stirling the script was brilliant. Stirling noticed something. Jewison brought the script to every meeting with yellow tabs stuck to pages he wanted to argue about. Dozens of them at the first sitting. Over weeks and weeks, the tabs came off. One at a time. Each meeting, fewer tabs.
The last meeting, one yellow tab remained. It was on the last page. The ending. Stirling, over lunch, how he had visualized the scene and came up with the new one.
He described the new final scene. A train station platform, 1967 Mississippi. The murder is solved. Virgil Tibbs, a Black homicide detective from Philadelphia, is leaving town. Bill Gillespie, the white police chief who had spent the whole film resenting him, picks up the man’s suitcase and carries it to the train. Nobody asks him to do it. He shakes the detective’s hand. He says, “Virgil. You take care, you hear?” Tibbs says, “Yeah,” and boards.
That tab was removed. Jewison never argued about that scene. It needed no defence.
In 1967 Mississippi, the whole order of that place decided which man carried which man’s bag. The director reversed it and said nothing else about it. No speech about brotherhood. No music swelling under a confession. A white lawman carries a Black man’s suitcase down a platform, and the entire change in him lives in his hands. Not his mouth.
A speech would have been a thing you could argue with. The suitcase is a thing you cannot.
That gesture changed hearts. Not by arguing with them. By showing a single act that bypassed argument altogether.
I have spent the years since Stirling’s death thinking about what makes that kind of moment possible. Not just in film. In fiction. In essays. In any work where a writer or an artist is trying to reach a reader and leave something behind that stays. I have come to believe it requires two things working together. The first is a set of conditions inside the artist. The second is a set of moves inside the work.
Let me start with the conditions.
I call them TOC. Tolerance, openness, curiosity. They are the fuel of imagination. Without them the engine does not start. Each one exists because its opposite is the human default.
Tolerance is the hardest because intolerance is the oldest instinct. Tribalism runs deep in every culture. The stranger is a threat until proven otherwise. The body knows this before the mind has time to think. Creating art that reaches across tribal lines requires a writer to resist that instinct. Not to pretend it does not exist. To push against it while knowing it is there.
The Edict of Milan in 313 AD is the example I keep returning to. Constantine and Licinius, co-emperors of Rome, issued a decree granting religious tolerance to Christians and every other faith in the empire. What makes it remarkable is the context. The Roman state had been persecuting Christians for decades. Constantine himself would spend the rest of his reign favouring Christianity above other religions. Yet the edict did not declare one faith superior. It declared tolerance. It allowed diversity of belief inside a system that had been designed to crush it.
That is what tolerance does for art. It creates space for the unfamiliar to exist without the artist needing to defeat it first. A novelist who cannot tolerate a character whose values oppose the novelist’s own values will write a flat character. A playwright who cannot tolerate ambiguity will write a sermon. Tolerance is not agreement. It is the willingness to let something you do not share breathe on the page.
Openness is the second condition. Its opposite is the closed system. Ideology. The mind that has already decided what it thinks before it looks. The reflex to protect a position rather than test it.
Marcus Aurelius is the example I reach for. A Roman emperor, the most powerful man in the known world, who spent his private hours writing notes to himself about how little he knew. The Meditations are not a book of certainties. They are a record of a man trying to stay open while everything around him, the court, the wars, the weight of empire, was pressing him to close down. He wrote about his own failings the way a scientist writes about a failed experiment. Not with shame. With attention.
For a writer, openness means entering a draft without knowing the ending. It means following a character into a room the writer did not plan. It means letting the material talk back. A closed writer produces efficient prose. An open writer produces prose that surprises the writer first and the reader second.
Curiosity is the third condition. The world spends enormous energy trying to kill it. We tell children that curiosity killed the cat. We build school systems that reward correct answers and punish odd questions. By adulthood most people have learned to stop asking.
Hokusai, the Japanese printmaker, is the example that stays with me. At seventy-three he wrote that nothing he had produced before the age of seventy was worth counting. At seventy-five he said he had learned a little about the real structure of nature. At eighty, he hoped, he might make some progress. At ninety, he expected to get close to the essence of art. At one hundred, he wrote, every dot and every stroke might be alive. He died at eighty-eight, still reaching.
That is curiosity as a life practice. Not a phase. Not a hobby. The refusal to declare the work finished while the artist is still breathing. Every serious writer I have known shares some version of this refusal. The ones who stop being curious are the ones who start repeating themselves.
TOC, together, defines the creative space where art gets made. Tolerance clears the ground. Openness lets the material arrive. Curiosity keeps the artist moving into territory that has not been mapped. Without all three the imagination starves. It can still produce content. It cannot produce work that changes a reader.
Now the second part. The moves inside the work. I call them POG. Place, object, gesture.
The three examples I carry with me are the suitcase, the puddle, and the glass. Each one contains all three elements. Each one moves a reader or a viewer without explaining why.
I told you the first one already. Place: a train station platform, where people arrive and depart. Object: a suitcase. Gesture: a white sheriff picking up a Black man’s bag and carrying it to the train. No one explains the gesture. The act itself transmits a feeling that lingers long after the screen goes dark. Stirling Silliphant wrote it. He won the Oscar for the screenplay. Norman Jewison directed it. Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger played the two men. Between them, in one silent exchange, they said more about human dignity than a hundred political speeches.
Stirling told me that story over dinner in Bangkok, more than thirty years ago. I cannot prove it happened the way I remember it. There is no surviving draft with a yellow tab still attached. No producer’s memo. No other witness left alive to ask. I have only what Stirling told me, and what I have kept of it since.
The second example comes from George Orwell. Burma, a wet morning in the 1920s. Orwell, then a young colonial policeman, walks behind a condemned prisoner toward the gallows. Two warders hold the man by the arms. Somewhere in the forty yards between the cell and the rope, the prisoner steps to one side. He is avoiding a puddle. He has minutes to live. He does not want wet feet.
Orwell wrote later that until that moment he had never grasped what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. Not the cell. Not the rope. The puddle. A living body, still careful, still keeping itself dry for a life it was about to lose.
Place: the prison yard, forty yards wide. Object: the puddle. Gesture: the sidestep. No one in that essay argues against the death penalty. Orwell never says the word colonialism. The wrongness comes through the body. One small useless act. The reader feels it before the reader can reason about it. An argument can be answered. The sidestep cannot.
The third example comes from Thailand, where I have lived since 1988. Ajahn Chah was a Buddhist monk in the Thai forest tradition. He died in 1992. His teaching on impermanence is the one that has stayed with me longest.
He held up a drinking glass. “For me,” he said, “this glass is already broken. I enjoy it. I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably. If I tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, of course. When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”
Place: a room, a monastery, a forest in northeast Thailand. Object: a drinking glass. Gesture: tapping the glass with his fingernail, listening to the ring. The glass is useable and broken at the same time. Only time separates the two states. The tap is the gesture that makes the teaching land. Not the words. The sound of a fingernail against glass.
In all three cases, no one explains the gesture. No one makes a speech about what it means. The act itself carries the meaning. A speech would have weakened it. An explanation would have killed it.
This is the part where AI enters the room. And this is where the conversation gets honest.
AI is extraordinary at searching, finding, organising, analysing, and reporting. I work with AI systems every day. I have built a working constitution for how I collaborate with Claude, the AI made by Anthropic. I use AI as an editorial partner on my essays. It has changed my practice and improved my work. I am not writing this as someone who fears the technology.
But AI cannot do TOC. And AI cannot generate POG.
Start with tolerance. Tolerance exists because its opposite, intolerance, is the human default. The push against intolerance is what gives tolerance its weight. An AI can be configured to treat all inputs equally. That is not tolerance. That is indifference. Tolerance requires something to push against. A body that feels the tribal pull and chooses to resist it. There is no divide in the AI world between tolerant AIs and intolerant ones. There is only calibration.
Openness requires the possibility of being changed by what you encounter. An AI processes a prompt and generates a response. It does not come out the other side altered. A writer who truly enters the material comes out different from the writer who went in. The character talks back. The scene refuses to go where the outline says. The writer’s assumptions crack, and something better grows in the fracture. That openness is a feature of being alive, and of having something at stake.
Curiosity requires not knowing, and wanting to know, and being willing to be wrong about what you find. An AI can simulate the seeking. It cannot feel the itch. The itch is the thing. Hokusai at seventy-five, saying he had learned a little about the structure of nature. That “little” is the sound of a man who has been looking for decades and still cannot look away. The AI has no decades. It has no accumulated frustration with its own limits. It has no version of “I am not there yet” that runs deeper than a token prediction.
And POG is even further out of reach. The suitcase on the platform works because Silliphant did not plan it as a symbol. Nobody sat down and said, “We need a gesture here that encodes racial reconciliation.” The scene survived because it was the one thing, after everyone had picked over everything else, that no longer needed defending. That is how the puddle gets found. After the seventh draft. After the cuts. After an editor or a producer beside the writer has stripped away everything the story does not need, and what remains is the thing that was carrying the weight all along.
AI can assemble a scene with a place, an object, and a gesture. It can do this on command. The result will look like a POG. But it will not be one. Because the puddle is not designed in advance. It reveals itself through honest rewriting. Looking for it before that point is writing toward a symbol instead of toward a story. And a symbol assembled on purpose tends to announce itself, the way a planted clue does in a bad mystery.
The fear of AI in the cultural space is, I think, misplaced. AI will not replace the writer who works inside TOC and discovers POG through the long, messy, resistant process of making something real. That writer’s position is secure for the same reason a handshake on a platform in 1967 Mississippi is secure. You cannot fake the gesture. You can only do it or not do it.
Where AI will change things, and where the danger actually lives, is in corporate and governmental control. Propaganda that has been socially and psychologically designed to feel creative and powerful. Content that wears the costume of art but serves the machinery of persuasion. That is the wolf in sheep’s clothing. It will look like imagination at work. It will be the opposite.
Stirling Silliphant died in Bangkok in 1996. I still think about those yellow tabs. Dozens at the start. One at the end. The one that survived was the scene nobody needed to argue about because its meaning was carried in a man’s hands, not his words.
If you are a writer, or if you are someone who cares about what writing can do when it is working at its best, remember the tab that survived. The gesture that needs no speech. The puddle that cannot be answered. The glass that is already broken.
Those are the things that change hearts. They always have been. No algorithm wrote them. No algorithm will.