Giving the heroes what they want

I have been v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I was tempted to give a reason here, but: I don't need a reason, damnit! It's Buffy the Vampire Slayer. To contextualise how slowly: it's taken me... maybe a year or so to get to the end of Season 3, and that's with some skips.

This post is going to include some spoilers, at least up to the end of Season 3.

Season 3 is where the show really comes into its own. There's a whole lot I could say about that, about how S3 is really the point where it hits the 'promise of the premise', with some big interesting character arc swings and a great villain story-engine for the back of the season in particular, and how it has just one of the best and most thematic villains in general BUT I want to mention one episode in particular.

The Prom is the 20th episode of S3, the last before the two-parter finale we've spent so long building up to. The episode has an odd feel to it -- the pacing feels really off, and it does a lot of things differently. One of the reasons it stuck out, though, was because of my very strong emotional memory of watching it for the first time about a decade ago.

Towards the end of the episode, during the eponymous prom for the graduating class, Buffy's classmates award her the title of 'Class Protector', complete with a shiny novelty umbrella. This includes a little speech about how 'no one really talks about how Sunnydale High is weird' and 'bad shit happens all the time here and a lot of students die'. They name Buffy 'Class Protector' because she so often seemed to be at the centre of it all, saving people.

My emotional memory of that moment was strong -- an important highlight of the season -- so I was looking forward to this episode. But I was also worried it would feel saccharine now -- too much.

It didn't.

It should, I think. It has all the trappings of a somewhat easy moment that should come off as a bit trite. So I was curious as to why it lands so well.

• First off, it feels earned. We're three seasons deep in a show that doesn't give us a lot of moments like this. The show bounces around tonally, but mostly knows what it's doing. The time with the characters and in this world helps earn this moment. (It would have absolutely died for me if they'd tried the equivalent in S1, for instance.)
• The whole episode serves a different function from usual. This is a 'quiet(er) moment' episode before we move into the finale. It's space for those character moments to breathe, to reflect on where we are in the story and what this means. This is what lends it that 'off pacing' I mentioned above -- the core threat of the episode is pretty small-fry (if personal) and tangential. It's also resolved with what feels like trivial ease. Because that's not what this episode is about. It's a victory lap for the characters before the coming hardships, and the 'monster of the week' really serves to underscore/motivate some of the other moments.
• Another way of putting that is: this episode is about letting the core characters have what they want for a bit (with the exception of the Angel breakup plotline). That's... not something that this show normally does -- or, when it happens, it's to subvert it or serve some other, less wholesome purpose. And again, that makes sense! A lot of the time, characters getting what they want is boring! But here, after a long journey with them so far and all that's coming up... it feels earned, and special.
• The last point, really, and why the 'Class Protector' moment works so well for me, is that it also is the show breaking its own rules. Throughout Buffy, we've got used to suspending our disbelief about the sheer density of Bad Shit that happens in Sunnydale, especially at the high school. We get used to, say, the cops not investigating things and the students not commenting on it, because, hey, it's a monster of the week show. That's just part of its whole deal. (Actually, S3 pushes on that more generally with the reveal of how this structural conceit is embedded inside of Sunnydale's power structures.) In The Prom, though, that suspended disbelief is turned on its head -- and turned into a rare moment where the world acknowledges the wholeness of Buffy as a character. Again, it's a really delicate line -- it risks being a bit 'cute', by hanging a lampshade on some necessary narrative artifice. But to me it doesn't feel like winking at the audience or trying to 'explain away' something fairly functional. It's about reaching to create an earned moment for Buffy, which is precisely what the episode is about, which makes it sing, rather than clunk.

I have a cold coming on, which makes me grumpy and badthinky. I may arbitrarily skip updates this week.

Caffeine, ahoy!

CN alcohol and food/fasting in this post

I took a month off caffeine and alcohol, ending today. I did a similar thing last year, ditching caffeine for about six weeks just to see what happened, inspired in a big way by this article and Michael Pollen's related (and excellent) This is Your Mind on Plants.

Neither this time nor the last has been sufficient to have me contemplating giving up either for good. My goal with them isn't specifically about physical or mental health, but instead about maintaining an intentional relationship with two psychoactive drugs that we're largely socialised to consume without reflection. The act of stopping is a way to remain conscious of the effects they have -- not in a moral sense, but what they change about us, be those good or bad things. I do a similar thing when I fast once a month -- it's partly about the physical benefits, but most of all about having a habit or system which pushes me to engage with how I consume.

I've definitely missed the mental pep that caffeine brings. I've had a fair few days where I feel I could have gone further, done more, or just had more fun working on what I was working on with that chemical boost. But also... it wasn't necessary on those days. Another completely valid -- and probably healthier -- option is for me to reconsider what I 'need' to do and what expectations it's appropriate to set for myself (and how sustainable they are). I am not an individual prone to underworking or underthinking.

But on the other hand, I think I mostly do work for intrinsic more than extrinsic reasons. (I'm immensely lucky on this front..) Which is to say: I love what I do, and opportunities to do more of it (sustainably) and enjoy what I'm doing more by being more mentally engaged with it more of the time. That's not just the ravages of productivity culture; it's a big part of my joy in life.

I've had really good experiences, for the first time, with decaf coffee and non-alcoholic beer, though. Square Mile Coffee's seasonal decaf espresso has been a genuine pleasure (even if the lack of dopamine kick is always going to work against decaf). Beavertown's Lazer Crush is so good that it will probably replace most of the alcohol I would consume at home -- and elsewhere, if I'm lucky enough to find places that serve it. Sampling that and other great non-alcoholic beers has been a pleasant surprise, and a treat.

Today's blog post brought to you by: overcaffeination.

Being messy on paper

I write a lot of things longhand these days. I've found that, over the past year and a bit, the kind of (games) projects I've been working on have benefited from starting in very rough form for draft content.

Starting on pen and paper gives everything a 'rougher' feel. I often refer to it as 'implicit permission to be shit'. The output doesn't look anything like a finished draft. It has no pretences. You can scribble things out, insert words, draw arrows and lines to reroute meaning.

Technically, you can do most of the same sort of thing on a screen. But I find that, in addition to the implicit sense of 'this should be better because it looks more presentable', typing directly into a word processing program forces my brain to work more linearly. In Notepad++, for instance, I do find it reasonably easy to 'explode' a paragraph, throwing down some disjointed fragments and stitching them together. Which is fine if I have a strong handle on what I'm trying to say and the order in which I want to say it, but that depends on the level of organisational complexity for the writing and the amount of existing work I've done on that when breaking a story.

Also, if you're working on paper, you inevitably have to type it up if it's going to be usable. Which bakes a light-but-mandatory improvement pass into the process. This, like the other factors, are mostly psychological props, but they are important onces.

I've been thinking about this more this week. In theory, it does take a bit longer to get to usable draft content this way, since you're writing it out at least twice to begin with. The gamble is over whether generating raw material more quickly because you're getting out of your own way outstrips that doubling up.

Often, for me, it does. But I was curious about when that stopped applying. I can't really imagine writing a whole dang book this way, for instance. Which had me asking: is this a thing that works for me in games and not elsewhere? Or are there other conditions which make this the more or less effective approach.

In my current draft (still games), as I've moved into the middle of the piece, I've experimented with going back to typing-first. And that's actually been okay! I've still needed to work out some pieces on paper (usually the flow of what's happening and in what order -- what information does it need to convey, and how do we progress between the required start state and the necessary end state for onward flow to make sense -- although also filling in details like scene framing can be what's missing), but those parts have been more bare-bones, and I've been able to turn out quick first drafts directly in a text editor (and definitely more quickly than typing it out twice).

My current working theory is that the paper-draft approach is most useful in a few situations:

• When you're trying to find your way into a new piece of material
• When the content is especially 'bitty' e.g. several storylets that all represent separate slices of different scenes, rather than something more contiguous. This is definitely a common one in Fallen London, where you might be putting together a mini scene that's no more than a single storylet or branch.
• When you're stuck for some nebulous reason. There are definitely other tools that help 'unstick' me, and it usually comes down to looking back to purpose and effect or some aspect of scene framing/the place of this element in the overall story -- but sometimes the best thing is just to 'get writing' by throwing a bunch of bad words down, and then parleying them into better words, or using them as diagnostic inputs to the other tools.

Which means that, the more settled one is with a project or the more contiguous a project's narrative units are, the less useful this approach likely is for me.

The cognitive dissonance of meat

CN food and meat for this post

We've been cutting down on meat again recently. We weren't eating much before the pandemic, but the various lockdown food logistics made me less picky about it in the short term, and it's taken time to have the spare brain cycles to reapproach this.

I actually don't have any issue with eating meat in and of itself, but there are some very real factors that change that. My concerns generally hinge on environmentalism, but even more compelling for me is trying to square the cognitive dissonance of how I feel about and relate to non-human forms of life. At a fundamental level, we need to acquire energy with specific nutrients to sustain our bodies, and that fairly inevitably involves deriving it from other organisms in our environment. But there are some more pressing factors of modernity which cut in, here.

First is our level of technology and abundance. We actually have the means to subsist on less meat, and the level of abundance means there are few barriers or restrictions how much meat we can/will consume if we do so without reflection.

I use 'us' here in two senses: first, humanity at large, but also, importantly, us as in 'me and my immediate family specifically'. The distinction matters. It's too easy to make a moral issue of meat consumption from a comfortable middle-class perspective, ignoring the huge disparity in food availability both globally and in this country. So, this is not to moralise, or ignore other people's realities. But it is true for me that I have the latitude to choose, and therefore, I think, a greater moral burden.

The second is that the real problem is the scale at which humanity produces and consumes food. A lot of this hooks into core capitalist and consumerist problems, but it all amounts to: producing meat ethically at scale while sustaining existing expectations around personal consumption habits is impossible. (Just think about how much more it costs to produce and buy high-quality, more ethical meat.)

All of which pushes me to be more conscious in how I consume meat.

This isn't as simple for me as just 'giving it up', though. I have various other food issues that means further narrowing what's available for me to eat can cause problems, particularly in contexts where I don't have such direct control of my food prep and consumption. There are also other concerns with meat-alternatives or other non-meat foods that have different environmental or ethical problems.

So my current planning is around the sourcing and quality of the meat I consume. I'm being mindful of quantity on top of that, but generally being properly selective on these criteria has that effect anyway.

My main heuristic is whether I'm able to find reasonable-sounding information about the sourcing and production of the meat that I buy. I don't always have the context and expertise to clearly evaluate that information where it exists -- or guarantee that it's not being misrepresented in some form -- but the ability to find such information from a restaurant or butcher in the first place (with no obvious red flags) is a shortcut towards a certain kind of quality.

In practice, this has worked out to us largely not eating meat (except when travelling where there are few or no other options), and buying and cooking it only on occasions where the extra labour is worth it.

(I also feel better where I can use a piece of meat more thoroughly, e.g. buying a couple of pork chops, turning them into a few dishes, making stock from the bones, and picking the leftover meat off during the stock-making process for another meal. It fosters a kind of connection with the thing you're actually cooking, and feels vastly less wasteful.)

August blog status

It's amazing how easy it can be to break a habit. I (rightly) took the week off this blog while on holiday. Last week was a little spotty, partly due to extrinsic reasons, but also due to the slight slipping of that habit. I was busy and head-deep in a bunch of different work and work-adjacent things, plus still trying to ramp back out of holiday mode, and it set up a higher barrier to entry to getting thoughts down for this.

Flash forward to today, and that's had a compounding effect. I'm feeling much more energetic than last week, but still, this feels tricky. Somewhere between a chore and something I don't quite have time to do.

(I am pleased that my brain is back in better shape so far this week vs the last few. This bodes additionally well since I will be reintroducing caffeine soon. I've definitely found myself having more 'off' days without the synthetic mental pep it gives. Which is something for continual examination (and part of the point of the exercise to begin with), but certainly something that will benefit me.)

August saw 19 posts on here. That should make this shard #78. By visual inspection, the posts with most connections are:

Ways of Being
Further heat-ravaged thinking about narrative units
What are we really talking about
A Chain of Thoughts on Fiction-First TTRPGs vs D&D
Legibility of life
Layers of Rules
Going low noise

This refers to cross-linking between post, not any kind of external backlinking or traffic measurement. In theory, these are the most joined-up parts of my thinking for this blog, and the things I keep referring back to. My method of arriving at this list isn't particularly scientific, and it looks at raw linking numbers rather than strictly backlinks. But it's interesting to see the ideas which have 'floated' the most in this way.

New Story: The Faces of Ghosts

I skipped yesterday's blog for uhhh obvious reasons. Not as a mark of respect, or anything like that, but because my planned post was a self-promo thing which just seemed guaranteed to get lost and be mostly a waste of time.

Anyway, here's a self-promo thing!

My flash fiction piece The Faces of Ghosts was published yesterday over on Uncharted Magazine.

Go read the story!

This one has always been a favourite of mine. It's creepy, and technological, and from very much what I would call my 'rejected Black Mirror plots' phase of stories. I wrote it first in 2017. I think it was, actually, the second story that I wrote that year, which was when I actually started taking writing seriously and trying to do a lot of it and work really intentionally to improve. Which, y'know, is going fine.

I've revised it about half a dozen times since then. It's been doing the rounds on submissions for much of that time, and every time I thought about just putting it out somewhere myself, I'd read back over it and go 'no, this is still actually good' [with some small number of revisions]. It did actually sell some time in late 2018, to a magazine that closed shortly thereafter (I got paid, and the rights reverted, which was some consolation, but I really just wanted to see it published.)

I wouldn't write the same story now, for better and worse. It has something of the 'vignette' nature to it that a lot of my early attempts at writing did -- where I had an engaging idea and largely forged ahead to try to write the idea without the nuts-and-bolts craft work to developing the idea, the world and characters around it. I think it succeeds well enough in spite of that, partly by accident.

I wouldn't approach a piece in the same way now, but I think parts of my limitations there also helped the story a bunch incidentally -- particularly in the way it cuts so close to the core of the idea and doesn't waste any time. Perversely, I don't always have the same clarity and confidence then as now.

I was going to make the title of this post my favourite line from the story, but then I thought about how, uh, wonky that might appear showing up on Twitter right now. So you get it here instead:

She only lived once, but she has died many times. I have buried her many times.

Technical solutions to social problems

I've started going back to the gym. At last! It has been, apparently, 10 months since my previous session. And there weren't that many then, either, since the year+ gap enforced by, well, you know.

Annoyingly, I was in my best shape of the past decade before the pandemic kicked off. That is a... pretty small loss, all things considered, but having spent so much time being knocked off my training game by this and that and LIFE, it had felt good to get back to that point.

I enjoy picking up heavy things and putting them down again. I think because I'm hypermobile, highly dynamic forms of exercise tend to fill me with... a certain anticipatory dread at best and major physical discomfort at worst. So, something focused and singular that also plays well with other aspects of my physiology... is fun. I struggle to motivate myself to do most other forms of exercise with the same obsessive regularity.

One thing that's struck me about this return to the gym is that the only thing that puts me off from going is a relatively minor (but subjectively massive) social awkwardness element. Specifically: if someone is using one of the (annoyingly finite) pieces of equipment I need, the thought of asking them when they'll be done and/or putting myself in the proverbial queue becomes an oddly insurmountable challenge.

I think it's a combination of a) loud background music/noise, b) a situation with no established social script, and c) me being there for a task that requires a mostly interior focus, being asked to mode-switch to an exterior one. I would mostly rather chew my own arm off than try to have that awkward non-conversation every damn time I go to the gym. It is, in effect, enough to put me off going altogether, and I have done my best, most consistent training in the past when I've had a schedule that allows me to go the gym at unorthodox times.

My instinctive response here is one that annoys me, which is the 'techno-solutionist' approach of having some external queue-layer, the digital equivalent of putting a coin down on the pool table. Tap a button on your phone, put yourself next in line for the squat rack, or see how long the wait is. But really, that's a distraction. All this actually is is a 'talking to people problem', and solving it by other means is just a bit silly.

Anyway, I was reminded of this partly by 'This DC-Area High-Tech Toilet Startup Wants to Solve the Public Bathroom Problem', which is also an extremely silly technological solution to a social problem (though in this case, 'social' in the 'vital public infrastructure' sense).

God, but it's so silly. "The sanitation industry is one of those that has not really been touched by much innovation and disruption". It doesn't need disruption! It just needs some modicum of public investment to accommodate a basic bodily function! Why are we putting up with this and coming up with tortuous solutions when it's so fundamental and basic?!

Anyway, as an antidote to that, look back to Belonging for some nice Simon Sarris writing which is relevant here. Going back to a space, again and again, is in itself a valuable thing for building familiarity and a sense of belonging. (Maybe it'll even be enough to get me to talk to a person.)

Blood, stones, and water

I was on holiday last week, a thing I recommend. I wouldn't say that I have returned with a huge surfeit of energy, but I did relax, and it has helped me already make different prioritisation decisions around work. Which included skipping writing a blog yesterday because I had too much else going on and was otherwise too tired. And making this one short and reflective for much the same reason.

We canoed over an aqueduct (whose stones are infused with ox blood). Climbed a hill to a castle. Saw a crow. Good times.

Belonging

A rare saturday blog, for two reasons. Firstly, I'm off next week, and will not be blogging (at least on a schedule), and secondly, I just read an article which had some nice connection points with yesterday's shard.

There exists a certain kind of romanticism to be found even within the everyday belonging, though it often seems to hide from sight. Is it possible to cultivate this familiar mysticism of the world?)

Familiarity and Belonging, Simon Sarris

The article is actually about belonging in places, and the significance of familiarity, repetition, existing in spaces without the expectation of novelty. But it did chime for me with the idea of finding beauty in the everyday -- in what's here, with us, now.

The article did speak to me more generally, though. I'm not someone who particularly craves travel, though I enjoy it in moderation. We've started making repeat trips to a particular place in the forest, which initially came out of expedience and limited access/energy during the pandemic, but has taken on a pleasant quality of its own. When talking about it, I've always felt some implicit need to apologise, almost, for travelling without novelty. The way this article recasts that -- that familiarity is specifically a good in and of itself -- is something that helps me a lot.

Beauty in the everyday

If you happen to be a Fallen London subscriber (or want to be! Start playing the game, it's excellent! https://www.fallenlondon.com/), you can catch my first 'Exceptional Story' for Failbetter, A Columbidaean Commotion on there this month.

Even if you have nothing to do with Fallen London, however, you are mandated to go and check out the utterly incredible poster for the story, done by Toby Cook.

It's about pigeons. As anyone who follows me doubtless already knows, pigeons have become somewhat of a pandemic obsession (birds generally, really, but pigeons are something special). I know they get a bad rap (which is partly what the story is about), but they're really so remarkable. I know that I never really looked at them that closely before. It's true that many of those in cities are in poor condition -- but that's generally down to poor living conditions and no access to clean water, as the birds actually have very good hygeine standards -- but pigeons just really are beautiful when you start looking.

The city pigeons we see are feral versions of the wild rock dove. Pigeons were humanity's first domesticated birds, before even chickens, and we've spent a long time living with each other. Now, they're largely abandoned (hence 'feral') and often marginalised in city spaces (I know they can behave in pestish ways, but they are not inherently pests). They nest in buildings edifices, alcoves, crevices, because they're reminiscent of their natural cliff environments. They are really remarkable flyers.

I'll say this for pigeons, though, even if you're sceptical: if you can find them beautiful, it will make your life better. Just being able to see them, everywhere you go around cities, pottering, soaring, existing as a bunch of wonderful feathery idiots, that will add so much to your life. To turn something banal into something that's a daily delight and pleasure. The art of noticing, seeing, connecting with the world of which we are. To find beauty in the everyday.

Photo by: Ash McAllan

Autoremembrance

I'm tired today. A week or so of insomnia (possibly caused by heat, possibly not -- though it sure ain't helping), with the great irony that I'm in the middle of a month without caffeine. But: I'm tired.

There's a phrase I think about quite a lot. 'Who are you when you're not doing?' I think I came across it on the Hurry Slowly podcast, though I haven't listened to that for a fair few years now. The question is meant to interrogate: when you get past the activities, work, hobbies, actions that define your day-to-day... who is the person under that?

I actually don't find it that useful a question (which doesn't keep me from coming back to it). It's an interesting question, though, in that it reaches for something that runs against focus on doing and productivity and action, and encourages contemplation of what makes us up beyond that. For me, though, I'm often struggling with the opposite -- trying to pull myself out of abstract (and often unhelpful, circular) thought and into action or immersion in something. The thoughts without action can go round and round and are really just a circular trap.

On days like this, where my brain is just fundamentally broken from tiredness, I feel like I'm trying to remember myself. We are all made up of the stories that we tell ourselves (which is one of the reasons being around other people can be so important -- they actualise or challenge those stories for us). When my brain gets like this (and I find it VERY unpleasant), I feel like I have a better sense of 'who I am when I'm not doing'. I'm the bit of myself that's responsible for remembering all the other bits.

This is mostly a passive process normally, though I do find I lose some sense of solidity when I spend too long not around people (known to me or strangers -- they do different things in this regard). Though I also know that I can only do so much of that in a given period.

In states like this, though I feel I have to work at it -- to hold all of those pieces in my head at once, actively. Which is about as much fun as it sounds.

This isn't meant to be a maudlin post -- I think it fits within the general bailiwick of this blog, and the alternative was no post at all because, well, see above.

I really would like some sleep, though.

Birds, brains, and tentacles

I was pleased to read that the Cambridge Comparative Cognition Lab has received funding and avoided being closed.

This video makes for highly recommended watching:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVwMSLe-Rx4&feature=youtu.be

No great conclusions from me on this, other than that I bloody love jays and am very happy. There's a family of four or so who seem to live around us (though maybe they've fragmented a bit now the younger ones are older), and it always feels like a treat to see them.

Animal intelligence continues to be one of my major sources of fascination. I got a massive octopus tattooed on my arm, in large part thanks to Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds. I also highly, highly recommend The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman. I've got another of her books on my somewhat pendulous reading list. And, obviously, there's always Ways of Being for a broader look at non-human intelligence.

This Guardian article also has a good survey of a lot of the elements that go into both.

(Yes, I know octopuses have arms, not tentacles, but that would be a much less arresting title, wouldn't it?)

Breaking the story

Notes from a work in progress. Might not be very coherent, as I suspect yesterday's wasn't, as I'm running on a frustrating sleep deficit and words are much harder than usual.

I'm working up a new story from a bullet-point outline. The outline details backstory and 'forestory' i.e. the events that I was expecting to happen 'on the page'. In my own... I guess I'd call it a 'personal writing manual', I break the writing process into five stages: Concepting, Development, Breaking, Writing, Revising, and Feedback. It's not actually a linear process that advances between those phases, but they represent the broad trajectory of a piece of work, and each have different lenses and techniques that are helpful.

Bullet-point outlining is one of my breaking tools. It's where I take all the information from Concepting and Developing and trying to organise it into something the shape of a story. It forces me to get somewhat structural and specific, and start spotting gaps or things where I'm vague. It's still, though, somewhat loose.

Where I've progressed from there today, and what I really consider 'breaking' the story: I started by breaking it into scenes (dramatic units, if you will). Some of this is intuitive, in that elements in the forestory go together in sequence with logical breaks. But it also means thinking about backstory and where things get surfaced, specifically (where they need to be at all).

For each scene, I broke out Content, Effect, Framing and, because this is a video game, Verbs.

Concept: What is this scene trying to accomplish? What information does it need to convey? What, essentially, is its function in the narrative?

Effect: What do I want this to achieve stylistically? How do I want it to reach the audience? How do I want them to feel? Chaotic and action-packed and high-stakes, or subtler, creepier, etc.

Framing: What's the in-fiction context to this scene? Where does it take place, what are the characters doing, when do we come into and leave this scene? This can just be a way of thinking about 'cool stuff' to get into the story, but it's also an opportunity to support other aspects of the narrative. If I'm worried about space to convey everything in Concept, can I bake something into the framing? Can I just better support things by using scene-framing?

Verbs: What is the player actually going to do? Ideally this is super-specific and potentially unusual, but if nothing else, it's a forcing function to ensure that they are doing something and not just talking or passively receiving information.

Once I'd got all this down and eyeballed it till it just about makes sense, I moved on to breaking into form-specific units. In this case, that meant using a spreadsheet, mapping those scenes onto the specific units of the game. Translating from a dramatic layer to how this actually works 'on the page' [screen], and adapting accordingly.

I don't quite do Concept/Effect/Framing/Verbs with each of these. That would take ages and have fairly low returns. But, I refer back to the scene-level CEFV when constructing, and try to mark up each unit with what information it's conveying or how it's moving the story forward (and if it isn't doing those things, I capture what its function is). It's a good forcing function to be super clear about what I'm trying to do, and spot duplication, wishy-washy non-specificity, and gaps where more is needed.

Working back through this list, I looked for opportunities to collapse or eliminate elements with a view to the overall 'weight' of the story. Sometimes, units or beats end up doubling up, or are better collapsed into one another. Other times, it's the reverse, and things need more room to breathe/I anticipate needing more space to do what I need to with the writing. Generally, though, I'm keeping tabs on the issues that are sticking out to me while stretching the skin of the story over some bones, and trying to resolve what I can at this stage.

It's also important to compare the final result to the aspirations for the story from the previous stages of the process. Some things may change because the ideas just don't survive contact with applied narrative. Other things may just have slipped my mind or have been mistakenly assumed.

This is one of the most fun (and tricky) bits of the writing process for me. It's where I feel like I'm doing most of the real work, and it's looking to snap everything together nicely so that first-drafting doesn't feel too painful. It's where, for a little while, everything feels like it actually might work.

For all this, you can't actually write the story before you've written it. This is all just trying to make that work as direct and enjoyable as possible. And then you need to write fast.

Peeling back the skin

A read from the weekend:

Murmurations: Returning to the Whole, adrienne maree brown, Yes! Magazine. Encountered via the Dense Discovery newsletter.

One of the first steps we can take towards generating internal accountability is to develop an assessment of why the world is as it is. This requires us to leap from the uninformed faith we have in the societal myths we were given as children, to the informed faith that we need in order to co-create the real world as adults. This informed faith is based not in cultural myths, but instead in lived experience, political education, and analysis. And this informed faith can allow us to embark on the right assessment, which then helps us find the balance between understanding the systems that have most deeply shaped us, and the responsibility we have over our own lives, choices, and impacts.

This makes me think back to something I linked last week: Seeing wetiko (in The Great Mind Virus).

How does this connect for me? I'm thinking of the impetus to see beyond social illusions -- see the water in which we swim for what it is. To move towards new systems that account for more than ourselves. To learn to unthink our core conceptions of politics and governance.

The fragmentation that has resulted from colonial constructs of race, gender, class, and power has wounded many of us so deeply that we identify more with the wound than with any experience of wholeness or oneness. Because we identify with the wound, we fight against each other over differences that don’t need to be battles. We opt in to these constructs, often without conscious choice.

I think what resonates for me in this piece is the idea that we are a species in denial. The articulation of the need to engage with that in meaningful and constructive ways without shying away from the harm of it all.

I want to live in a world where humanity has a more generous, encompassing view of what the world is and our place in it. I don't know how we get from here to there, but it feels like what's talked about here -- cultivating the ability to dispel illusions and accepting accountability -- is a fundamental part of it.

It hadn’t always. She’d grown up with flags everywhere, learning Founding Fathers history on base. To her, America was a myth, a dream, a story people told, and like a lot of first impressions, she had not realized just how right that one was until it was too late. ... Pop had fought for this country, and so had Mom in a sense, and so had all the beautiful, broken, uniformed boys and girls she’d grown up idolizing on base. But it was not her country. She knew it only through bad history and untold stories in languages Pop had not wanted her to learn. You had to work to know this place as it truly was—she’d had to work, in her own heart, to peel back the skin of what she was taught. To excavate.

—Max Gladstone, Last Exit

The Great Mind Virus

This was in my weekend magazine last week:

Seeing wetiko on Culture Hack, by Alnoor Ladha and Martin Kirk.

I think it's a really interesting piece at framing some of the big problems. The biggest problems, probably. Beyond all the mechanisms of capitalism, the mindset that underpins it is the worst issue of all. Second worst, actually; worse still is the fact that we regard such things as fundamental: outcomes of how the world works rather than something we have created and imposed upon it, a singular version of things ('As if these peopled systems were just something// we had dreamed beyond the glass//And were not names//we had inscribed upon the world to make it in our chosen image')

Not quite on the same topic, but Ways of Being has a similar take on Alan Turing's vision of computing. We've essentially ended up down one branch of the trousers of time in terms of our definitions of computing, when actually there were more and more diverse ways we could have gone with that. But it's such a part of our milieu, we don't see the water any more.

Some connections that jumped out to me from the piece:

• The reference to the Milgram experiments threw me. They're definitely misrepresented in general, and don't stand for what people think they do. There was some selective editing and presentation of the results, and some big flaws in the original experiment Which all comes down to: it's not evidence for the cruelty of humanity. The Criminal podcast had a good episode on this. Doesn't undermine the article, but snagged me.
• The obsession with growth pointed to (which seems increasingly mad to me as I spend more time in the world -- it just doesn't make sense), and the focus on 'value creation' vs actually doing all the other things we desperately need to do to keep our world running, reminded me of Deb Chakra's Atlantic piece 'Why I Am Not A Maker'. We need doctors, teachers, nurses, those doing the work of family, and instead we reward (sometimes venerate) executives, bankers, etc.
• '"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."' John Muir. I keep coming back to this quote (I've heard it before, but I think I came across it most recently in, shocker, Ways of Being, because that book's such a perfect nexus point for all my other thinking at the moment. The quote's been rattling around my brain since then.) Everything is hitched to everything else. Things are complicated. We, ourselves, are included in 'everything'. We are hitched to everything else in the universe. Within cells interlinked.
• The piece cuts to the thing, the always-thing: the body corporate and how it's just another living being (mostly trying to eat us).

A notes from the revisions desk

No further resketch today; I was doing some work on a short fiction piece last night and briefly wanted to document my process.

• This is the same 'space wizards' piece I was talking about back in Oblique Reflections on a WIP Short Story. Specifically, I was working on point 5: Thematics.
• The story wasn't clicking for me. It was fine, but felt like a Set of Neat Things that Happened, or perhaps some fun action figures to play with, rather than something that was singing.
• Specifically, there was a disconnection between the main character and the events -- she was a bit 'along for the ride', I don't think the basis for her decisions were clear enough, and the ending didn't feel like a kind of inevitability when you got there.
• I think it just about worked, but I wanted it to do more than just 'work', hah.
• So I reworked some aspects of the MC's background. Not radically, to be honest -- mostly deepening/expanding on some threads that had come out while writing. This was 'off the page', in a notebook, just to figure things out.
• This also meant connecting more specifically with something else I was snagging on: a lack of clarity over what the story was really about, in terms of it's thematic core.
• On reflection, due to the deuteragonist and the story that unfolds, I realised it was really about the shapes the world fashions us into, and what it means to reject that.
• Specifically, the secondary character is a kind of weapon. Circumstances and the world have explicitly fashioned her as a weapon, and doesn't particularly want to be one.
• The main character's own background and arc (such as there was one) didn't really snick together with that. So I did the above to find ways that she could fit into place with that. How her own story was similar to and different from this other character's, in a way that would make sense of their relationship in the story.
• In some ways, it's less about making the MC's story connect with that other character's, and more about making it link back to the piece's thematic core. It just happens that the thematic core builds on this other character's story.
• Having figured out that in the abstract, I tried to block out some specific ways I could show that on the page without massive rewriting. There are some lighter options like background or 'cosmetic' details which point to it. Framing scenes in ways that help reveal it. And dramatising it through existing or new scenes.
• From this, I figured out a new scene that I think will really strengthen the piece and solve a separate pacing issue. (Ignoring for a moment that its wordcount is already well over where I want it to be.)
• But I want to get a lot of this information right up front for the reader, and this new scene wouldn't fit there. (Well, it could, but I think it would wreck momentum and pacing while undermining the value of the new scene.)
• So I broke out the current first scene (which I also thought wasn't pulling its weight and had flagged to collapse anyway) into its key functional points (starting to think in terms of Further heat-ravaged thinking about narrative units|sequences as narrative units), married that to the list of new thing I was hoping to accomplish and surface about the main character and the stakes for her, then reworked the scene.
• This meant some new writing and throwing some stuff out, but not too much.
• Now, I need to type that up and fettle it a little, before moving on to the next problem. I'm trying to avoid solutions that don't require lots of writing generation, particularly when I'm anticipating having to cut and throw out a bunch anyway, but this felt like the right move.
• I'll eventually have to simmer everything down a whole bunch. It's knocking on 6,000 words without the whole new scene, either. There's a bunch of loredumping I know can be thrown out, but if I want this thing to be good and also hopefully saleable, I want that wordcount to come down notably.

Approaches to feedback (Resketch I)

(This is a resketch of yesterday's post.)

Giving feedback is about meeting the other person where they are -- understanding the context of what you're being asked to do and what you're actually meant to be bringing to the table.

Here, I'm talking specifically about explicit feedback cycles on pieces of work, rather than the looser concept of 'feedback' as in Thanks for the Feedback (which is still a very useful way of thinking about it).

There are three main contexts, at least in my current thinking about the topic, where you might be giving feedback on such a piece of work. These encode various assumptions about the relevant considerations and what you, as the feedback giver, are able to offer:

1. An audience's reaction to a piece of work
2. Helping to shape a piece of work for release
3. Offering peer or mentor coaching within your field of expertise

There are probably others, but let's start here. To help me refer to them, I'll give them some short names, based on the role of the feedback-giver:

1. An audience's reaction to a piece of work: Responder
2. Helping to shape a piece of work for release: Editor
3. Offering peer or mentor coaching within your field of expertise: Coach

There are also a bunch of shorthand mechanisms for feedback that I can think of from various places. There are almost certainly some I'm missing here, and I'd love to refine this in a future resketch:

• Change suggestions ('how about if you tried changing this thing?')
• Direct editing ('do it like this')
• Statements of effect ('it made me feel like...')
• Focus areas ('try this exercise'/'next time, how about you try')
• Opinions ('I don't like this bit)

Which of these mechanisms are appropriate vary based on the role of the feedback giver (well, technically, based on the circumstances in which the feedback is being given, but I've collapsed the two for now).

As an Editor, it makes sense for me to offer change suggestions or direct edits -- they're often expedient, and the author can push back if they feel strongly or I've missed some information.

Direct editing makes no sense as a Responder, and in places that explore the Responder role in depth, such as Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process, change suggestions are also deliberately excluded. A Responder, who is either someone without domain expertise or someone who is being asked to play that role for the purposes of the feedback, they don't have the context or the information to offer helpful change requests (they often become useful only for 'the note behind the note' -- the underlying statement of effect they point to -- while ignoring the change suggestion; better to just get to the note).

Direct editing from a Coach can be helpful, but often buries what's really important -- lessons for development and focus areas for the future.

This doesn't quite map on to the Appreciation, Evaluation, Coaching model from Thanks for the Feedback, but does have some elements in common. Principally that problems arise when the feedback giver and receiver are expecting different things.

Out of time for today, but I might do more thinking on this. I like the idea of a set of broad feedback 'tools' which can be combined in different ways for different needs. That's my approach to craft in general -- building toolsets, developing diagnostic instincts, and cultivating rules for when to apply them.

Approaches to feedback

• I'm thinking about feedback this week, and the giving and receiving thereof.
• Thanks for the Feedback is a great book on the subject that I found useful particularly for framing the issues and offering some useful models/heuristics.
• In the intro, they talk about how they set out to write a book about giving feedback. But of the people they surveyed, everyone thought they were brilliant at giving feedback and that, coincidentally, everyone else was terrible at giving it.
• So they focused the book on receiving feedback well. Although, obviously if you understand the dynamics of that, it should make you better at giving it, too.
• A key thing there is that 'feedback', by their definition, is not solely the explicit stuff. You receive 'feedback' from lots of little things in your personal life.
• The core model that's stuck with me is that feedback tends to trip us up for three reasons:
• Truth. We disagree with the substance of the feedback or think that it's based on incorrect information.
• Relationship. We see the feedback as a proxy statement about our relationship with that person on the whole. So, some small criticism from a partner -- even if fair and kindly delivered -- might trigger a defensive response where we think that it means they don't like us.
• Identity. 'If this is true, what does it say about me and the stories I tell myself?' If I consider myself a good communicator and someone says something which suggests that, in a particular instance, I have not been that, it shakes one of my pillars of identity, even (especially) if I think it's true.
• So, we tend to react badly when feedback knocks against those things, often exacerbated by the way the feedback is framed or delivered (often badly). The book provides a bunch of tools for catching yourself when doing that, and turning yourself towards finding something useful even in badly framed feedback (or knowing when you really can ignore it).
• Separately, I've been thinking about feedback specifically in an artistic context. Hannah Nicklin's book introduced me to Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process, which is a structured conversation designed to help get to good feedback on artistic work.
• Separately again, I've been thinking a bunch about how these two styles of feedback model differ when it comes to giving professional peer feedback (e.g. giving feedback on writing as a writer) and how that differs further when doing so with broader considerations that craft and artistry -- e.g. the commercial considerations of doing so as part of running a live game.
• The things learned from Thanks for the Feedback are fairly generalisable -- ways of taking feedback better and considering how to frame your feedback for people while being mindful of those major pitfalls.
• Another aspect of the book I didn't mention above is that it divides feedback types into three: Appreciation ('This meal is delicious!'), Evaluation ('The sauce is a little salty.'), and coaching ('Try adding a little brown sugar to your sauce to balance the salt.')
• Problems most often occur when people are looking for one kind of feedback and get a different one -- they want appreciation and encouragement, and they get an honest critique. Neither are 'wrong', they're just situational. (As I mentioned in [What are we really talking about])(https://www.georgelockett.com/shards/2022/4/30/what-are-we-really-talking-about).
• So, above all, understanding the purpose and nature of the feedback you're giving is key.
• The Liz Lerman process is about quickly creating a rapport and trusting environment to get feedback on an artistic work in progress, trying to cut to the meat of useful feedback and avoid traps of defensiveness.
• It does this by offering a specific conversation flow that wards off unsolicited opinions (and opinions on things that are not important at that stage) and focusing on targeted questions and overall effects/impressions, which are more useful.
• That's not the same as a peer-feedback system.
• My thoughts on all this are rather tangled and I'm out of time for today, so I may take this forward as an experiment in resketching tomorrow.
• Or I may not. Let's see.

Layers of Craft

Late blog today. I blame the promised storm not arriving yet plus the fact that I'm on Day 1 of ditching caffeine for a month. I spent all my energy credits for the day already.

Thursday: Thinking out loud about narrative units
Friday: Further heat-ravaged thinking about narrative units

I realised today that my budding division there -- between i) Dramatic Units, ii) Form-Specific Units, and iii) Atomic Units -- maps loosely to something else I've had in my head a long while. Writing as a craft is a gestalt of many different skills -- broadened further by the way it plays in the tidepools of different forms. Good writers are good at lots of different things, and have suitable levels of proficiency in the various elements -- but they're not equally good at all things. You need to be good at at least a few things and know how it all fits together, but you can suck at a bunch of craft-related stuff and still be a good writer. (Though it helps a lot if you know where your balance of strengths lie and choose projects that fit that. )

You can't really separate all those different seams out, but you can loosely group them in a useful way. I've tended to think of that craft into three major 'chunks':

• Devising stories. The nebulous craft of 'worldbuilding', having interesting ideas, coming up with interesting characters. Sharpening all of that until you've got something worth telling.
• Storytelling -- in the sense of knowing how to structure and present your story. Crafting good scenes, building out a plot, knowing what needs to happen on the page and what doesn't. Twists, turns, interesting emotional stakes.
• Getting good words down. What I tend to call 'nuts and bolts' writing. Word choice, clarity and grammar, filigree and ornamentation, imagery, and the like. The business of words and sentences, above all.

So, you need to be able to do all of that at least functionally to get anywhere. (Although -- perhaps not even that if you're just working to brief. That can shortcut at least some chunks of it.) But you don't need to do all of it equally well. For me, I think the third type, the craft of words, was the thing I was best at early. Which is deceptive, because it made me think I could write far better than I actually could in practice, in the sense of writing that encompasses all of these groups. But turning a good phrase can only get you so far. I haven't actually gone back and re-read any of my many draft stories from a decade ago, but this is the problem I remember being plagued with and lacking the tools to fix.

I've seen plenty of work that is very pedestrian in its nuts and bolts writing, but sings in the ideas and construction -- it's never felt like a deficiency. And the inverse -- I've read work that's beautiful but at the structural level unremarkable or 'badly functional'. Which isn't always a death kneel either, though I'll admit that it's less often to my tastes.

'Nuts and bolts' writing can seem to matter disproportionately, because it's often one of the easier things to evaluate -- you can get to grips with it quickly in someone else's work. Though, that said, I think it's often a reasonable proxy for the overall quality when evaluating someone's work, if it just doesn't land right for me at that level.

I consider nuts and bolts writing the easiest thing to get better at, but that may just be because I had a historically stronger grasp of it myself. (Though there's certainly some concrete elements to that, too -- you can learn digestible rules and styles, and you can iterate quicker than the other categories.)

I think people from outside the discipline overindex on the first and the last groups when thinking about what 'writing' is. There's a tendency to think of writing as 'just' the last bit. There's also this myth that it's just about coming up with loose, exciting ideas. This plays into weird-and-amusing-but-also-not-amusing anecdotes about people coming to writers with their awesome idea, and they'll magnanimously allow the writer to use their idea and split the proceeds. Ideas aren't actually worthless, and truly good ideas are rare enough to be worth treasuring, but they sure as heck ain't the bulk of the craft, either.

(Actually, I'll posit that the skillful part of 'ideas' part of the writing craft is more centred around forcing the generation of decent ideas. Having really good ideas come to you out of the blue is great, though the number of times I've found that powerfully useful in practice is small. Better still is the ability to come up with the ideas you need right now and make them work for you.)

In any case, given this mental division of the craft that's long existed in my head, my nascent taxonomy of narrative units probably isn't surprising.

A closing aside: this inclination over the past few posts to respond to my own previous post in some way has given me a notion. One thing I'll try in a forthcoming week is to write the same blog post over five days. More specifically: drafting something loose and exploratory, then aiming to cover the same ground in the post the next day. And so on for the rest of the week. It'Ss not about revising the previous post as much as rewriting it (and stealing chunks from it if needed) to try to sharpen it and see what falls out of my head when doing this. Sketching and resketching./

Further heat-ravaged thinking about narrative units

Today, I'm trying to do some resketching of yesterday's shard.

Terms

Form. Refers to the broad shape of a piece of work. This can be at the macro level of 'video game', 'stage play', 'novel', etc., or some of the subdivisions within those e.g. 'first-person shooter', 'TV episode', or 'one-woman show'. There are obviously distinctions between those, but the slight squishiness of the term is in itself useful.

Medium. Perversely, I'm going to use this to refer to the means by which written material is present. NOT in the sense of narrative units -- that comes later. But in the sense of 'an intervening substance' the word implies at its root. Prose is a medium to me. As is dialogue (spoken) and dialogue (displayed), or images and set dressing in the story-world. A video game can use prose, and so can a novel. So, medium and form are distinct.

Narrative Unit. Generally, 'the bits you can break the narrative into'. This is the bit that stands well for me from yesterday. Narrative units are things you can generally poke at when writing to interrogate specific information/content/function and effect in terms of how you want it to reach the audience. Specifically:

Dramatic Units: Scenes, acts, plot beats, and the like. Anything that can be used to carve up a story irrespective of its form or medium.

Form-specific units: Commonly used chunking in the specific form you're working. Comic pages, novel chapters, audiologs, in-game texts, storylets, etc.

Atomic medium units: For prose, words, sentences, paragraphs. For dialogue, mostly lines. Probably gets a lot squishier as you branch into other mediums.

The taxonomy here is still hideous and horrible, but it's still one million degrees in here, so that's a 'fix it later' problem.

So, the issue I was talking about with prose yesterday is that I have a good handle (I hope...) on the atomic medium units of prose as well as the dramatic units, but less on the form-specific units.

I think (in yet another terrible name-collision) that 'beats' is really what I'm looking for here. Not so much in the 'plot beat' sense, though also yes -- but in the mode of a... I guess unit of timing. This happens. Then this happens. And this happens. If you described the prose in highly simplified but exhaustive bullet points, they're all the things you couldn't leave out.

And yes, these really occur everywhere, they're kinda an atomic medium unit in some ways, EXCEPT I don't think they're strictly tied to medium or form. Nor, strictly, do they sit in 'dramatic units' since they're a writing tool to me rather than a breaking tool.

Sigh. I think I just described something not actually captured in my taxonomy. Well, this is still a work in progress, I guess.