A fallacy I’ve engaged in, now that my writing has achieved some success, is to turn that success into the goal. When I contemplate writing, too often I’m no longer thinking about the story, I’m thinking about what I want the story to be. How I want the audience to be impressed with me, how I want them feeling about what I’m writing.
But all my best stories happened because I simply had an idea that I wanted to convey and so I explained it. No pretense, no expectation.
I sometimes think about how, when it comes to the fundamentals of computation, there’s a distinction drawn between the primitive recursive functions, defined by iterating in bounded ways on a set of simply defined procedures, and the μ-recursive functions, defined by an infinite loop over all possibilities. Primitive recursive functions are necessarily total, everywhere well-defined, while a μ-recursive functions may never produce a valid answer.
It’s so much easier to recursively build out what’s you want to write, then to do an unbounded search for the best way to achieve some particular end. In principle, μ-recursive is so much more powerful, and yet it invites so many headaches, so much undefined behavior.
Something that stands out to me is that yesterday, at first it really felt as if my latest depressive trough might be finally cresting again.
My day started out with some thoughtful conversations with friends about An Opaque Heart, and I even had an idea for how to finally revise the opening. And then… I did nothing. I never quite resolved how to get started.
Then, later that day, I wrote two thousands words as a one-shot, spurred by nothing but an compelling image, a moment between J and Uzi I wanted to revel in. It wasn’t even supposed to be that long!
And that’s the thing. That’s always the thing. All my best work wasn’t supposed to be.
I’ve watched this cycle play out so many things, over and over. Endless Stars, my first novel, (and still my most polished work after HT) started out as me chasing imagery in a notebook while distracted in high school.
230k words later, choked by ambition, I started up so many projects. First And the Darkling Reefs Abide, then Of Waterweft, then There Lies Already the Shadow of Hope.
TLAtSoH got a 5k word chapter one, followed by a 9k word chapter two, (not) followed by a chapter three that paralyzed me for months. Working through all the lore I needed for the scenes to come birthed Black Nerve. And after all that, aching for something simple, I started up a quest, so unserious I wrote the updates directly in discord.
People liked it, I liked it, and it became Eifre Quest. How far out of hand did it get? The first chapter was six hundred words. The fifteenth chapter was thirty-one thousand. That was the climax of the first interlude arc, where I had an image I wanted to deliver, and was determined to deliver it. Even if I had to write a novella to get there.
That first interlude arc was supposed to be a quick break before we get back into the main action; so with the second interlude, given how well the first turned out, I made my plans just as ambitious. Guess what? The quest is on abandonment-hiatus right now, dead one chapter into that second interlude.
After/during EQ came Kaon Rising, which was intended flat-out to be a be braindead indulgent power fantasy slop appealing to the type of reader who loves isekai and litrpg. How braindead did it turn out? I choose to give the main character a power that hinges on cubic volumes, and the fifth chapter open on an exposition about the ecological physics of magic light.
The list continues; A Chimerical Hope was simply me trying to write a summary; Aurora Moonrise was literally a sidebar example crafted purely for an essay. I’ve already talked at length about the genesis of Hostile Takeover and An Opaque Heart elsewhere.
You see the pattern already, don’t you? I start off unserious, realize I’m actually cooking, try desperately to keep cooking, and the water boils out of the pot.
(This isn’t even the first time I’ve had this observation.)
Every time I see the things I’ve accomplished, I naïvely assume that doing it by accident proves I can do it on purpose — as if adding expectation could only add.
In comments and author’s notes, I’ve lately expressed how the need to live up to the hype has kept me from writing more HT, but yesterday, in my latest comment apologizing for the delay in finishing chapter seventeen, I realized something.
If you went back one year and suggested to my past self I write something to the standards I’m holding chapter seventeen to, I never would have even attempted.
Hostile Takeover, in my mind, has become something I’d never write if I knew what I was getting into. I never wanted to write something so grand — and no one ever asked me to.
Now, this isn’t me saying I’m abandoning HT — though something I’ve been carefully dancing around saying in these all discussions is that I frankly don’t care all that much if I never update HT again, but that’s mostly tiredness speaking. I can fall back in love with the story with some more distance.
If nothing else, I had some cool ideas for the remainder of the plot, and I’m more than willing to summarize where I was going with it. “Summarize”, that is — you know how this song and dance turns out.
Ultimately, none of what I’m saying here is very new, it’s the same old advice. Keep your eye on the ball and stay out of your head; you can’t lock in with self-consciousness getting in the way.
In Jujutsu Kaisen, a skilled sorcerer with total concentration is capable of applying magical energy to a hit within a microsecond of landing it, unleashing profound power in a flash of black sparks. Saturo Gojo, the greatest sorcerer, even wielding all the insight of his mystical eyes, still couldn’t pin down all the variables.
Peak doesn’t come from trying for peak. Because no one, not even Saturo Gojo, can land a black flash on command.