Serpentine Squiggles

Like my last essay, this was a first a tumblr post, so it’s a bit more informal than other essays. Context dictates form as well as style; these posts leaned on Murder Drones examples in contrast to my typical unexmplified abstraction.

hi again! I have another question😭 do you have any tips on writing pre-existing characters? (while still adding more to the table of course.) How do you keep it in character? like how you write J or Uzi for example.

I once decried the three act structure. I once called “beginning, middle, and end” the worst of high school english class truisms.

And yet, when someone came to me asking for advice, what’s the most appropriate thing I thought I could say?

It’s been a few years. I’d like to check back in on that old post on the no-called Ur-development and see how I feel now.

We’ve been over this before: a scene is people doing stuff in a place with a twist. But is that formula enough for a scene? No, it’s missing something. This is a recipe, not a meal. So how do we get cooking?

Don’t use adverbs. Don’t use adjectives. Don’t use ‘was’ or ‘like’ or ‘which’. Don’t follow these rules. I’m waffling. I want to talk about the process of writing better prose. Again.

We say stories are slow reads or page-turners. Sections drag, or happen too fast. Every reader seems to have a speedometer – except me. Does pacing exist? I’ve made a fool of myself by insisting it doesn’t. It’s a meme, we made it up as a joke. But I can hone the delivery.

What is prose? How do you recognize it? Prose is the thoughtful selection and careful arrangement of words. But if you really want to understand it, you’re better off ditching the word. It means at least twelve different things.

I opened up a random chapter of Mother of Learning, and I have come to decision. MoL’s prose is alright. In fact, with a very reasonable definition of what “prose” is, I would outright concede that MoL has good prose. But.”

Once that snippet of prose runs out of steam, how do you continue it? What’s the next sentence, the next paragraph? You have ideas, but nothing flows right, does it? And once you’ve outlined all the broad bits of plot, how do you actually start write it? You know what needs to happen next, but that next line isn’t coming. Let’s fix that.

A few days ago, the youtuber Big Joel released a video about Godzilla (1954) called “We Must Destroy What the Bomb Cannot”. What did he mean by this?”

The second thing to always keep in mind is you don’t want to be outlining. Your goal here isn’t to produce a finished outline — I never have. The only rule of writing is tell your story, and you only need enough outline to accomplish that. Here’s what you need.

There are no characters, only actions. If the illusion of ‘character’ arises from an urge to correlate actions to some underlying reality beyond the page, then a problem of characters must be solved by improving actions, not the implied reality.

Where do false hydras come from? Are they creatures that propagate themselves, or than spell effects or spontaneous generations? Just what does a false hydra sing? What grants its these antimemetic properties? It's not about falsehood. It's about cognitive dissonance.

Surely the rules of writing are much more complicated? No, I think I could give them in a sentence. Writing — all writing, really, not just fiction — is on setup and payoff, question and answer, tension and release. The rest is corollary.

Xenofiction is a challenge for the imagination. It fails by failing to imagine. How do you allow a xeno to be like humans without it being falsely familiar? How do you make them truly different, rather than falsely alien? I’ve never found anyone giving a good answer. I’m going to fix that.

If you’re reading this essay, you’ve heard it. It’s the first piece of advice anyone in the market for writing advice hears. But don’t tell me to “show don’t tell”, show me.

Why does it work? Because it sounds better? Because it deeply engages the reader? Because it’s what Good Writing is? Sure, but why?

There are seven reasons.

I’m not going to say much here that’s new, but the framing might be. I want to talk a bit about detail in stories. Why do stories need detail? What purpose do they serve, and when is that detail unnecessary?

You can say stories are arguments, logical explanations of a series of events. You have a premise (a land of dragons and wizards ruled by a evil king, awaiting a chosen one), which poses some interesting question (how do they depose of the evil king?), and the stories exists to explain the answer to that question.

I'm writing this post as a response to a specific person on a specific server, but this is a public site, so I'm going to lay groundwork that might seem elementary in the original context. Given how fundamental our differences are, it may yet be fruitful anyway.

Ra is a critique of itself. Ra is a proof of its rationality, a justification of its setting, that doubles as a argumentum ad absurdum that it could never have been otherwise.

Whether it’s pokeballs in Pokemon, sealing scrolls in Naruto, or any number of other ‘hammerspace’ or ‘pocket dimensions’ effects, the ability to store large objects inside a much smaller volume is a common trope in speculative fiction. But it presents problems, if you want your setting to be consistent and systemic.

What is a fight scene? Nothing more than dialogue by others means. There’s spectacle, too — after all, prose is a visual medium.

I discuss several models for assigning probability to timelines under the assumption that time travel is possible, but paradoxes are absolutely impossible, as is the case in many fictional worlds. The models are mathematically precise, and illuminate issues that have previously confused many people about what sort of timelines are “most likely”.

I’m told I write good prose, and there are a few topics that come up again and again when I’m line editing for other people, so I decided I could write a short article or two about the sorts of things I think about when editing prose. Today I decided to write about emphasis and stuff.

When seeking to understand and replicate the human body, artists — especially traditional artists — make use of anatomical figure models. You see one particular type used a lot, simplified and stylized like:

What’s valuable about this construct is that you can physically pose it. Trying to actually draw a human freehand in 3d space — respecting both proportion and perspective — is fiendishly difficult without years of experience. So a figure model helps hugely if you want a draw some action pose more complex than a three quarters T-pose.

Dear reader, we need to cook.

I’ve written about characters before, and I’ve written about plots at quite some length.

The word of the day is arc, that progression of a character from nascent beginnings to some more realized form. But need I say any more after pointing you at those posts? Does an arc not simply turn in the same fashion as any other plot, only with character traits as one of its gears?