That Homestuck theory also mentioned the line about real people not having characters arcs, and –

I’ve often said things like that when arguing with people who think that good stories always follow rigid arc structures for all their major characters.

(There’s a whole family of related ideas I disagree with – “everyone has to be paired off at the end,” Freytag’s pyramid as a prescriptive thing, the “dramatic breaks” that BYB used to talk about, that image set explaining that the Homestuck ending was bad because it “broke rules” … )

But, “real people don’t always have character arcs” is not the same thing as “there is no bad way to write a character.”

I’m not going to claim that the Homestuck ending “wrote characters badly” because I wasn’t following the story closely enough by the end to pass judgment.  But in general, when people say “this character’s arc wasn’t finished,” they often just mean “I wish the author had used more of this character’s potential,” not “the author didn’t follow the rules.”

Real people don’t have endings either, except for death.  There are cases where, for one reason or another, you never hear from/about a person again after a certain point.  But even then, something happened to them after that point.  And fiction has the potential to let you see whatever parts of a person’s life the author chooses; if and when you “never hear from them again,” that’s because the author made a choice.

Not providing you with “closure” is sometimes the right choice.  Sometimes it’s even the right choice because it feels more “real.”  But “closure never happens in real life” is just plain false.  People enter and leave relationships, jobs, self-concepts.  No one ever just stops in freeze-frame because they’ve hit “the ending.”

There’s a related point I want to make which I can’t without sounding really pretentious, in the “I’m a ~writer~” way.  But here goes.

A lot of Act 6, mostly the later parts, look a lot to me like the product of a certain temptation that is familiar to me.  One that I felt while writing the later parts of both Floornight and TNC, and gave into probably more than I should have in both cases.

It’s the temptation to use the fact that “shit has gotten weird” in the plot to justify writing choices that aren’t very good, even on the story’s own (strange) terms.  The fictional world is “breaking apart,” so why shouldn’t the writing break apart, too – form fitting content?  This can be done well.  Sometimes writing choices that are objectively lazy, from your perspective as a writer, are also the right choices for knocking the reader off-balance in a certain desirable way.

But of course, once you recognize this possibility, you’re going to start doing motivated reasoning, talking yourself into the idea that this or that lazy choice is oh-so-conveniently a good one.  You can always talk yourself into rash and sloppy writing because “the plot is getting too wild for subtlety” or “I have to surprise the readers somehow”; you can always talk yourself into not resolving things you’ve set up because “the story is about uncertainty” or “things don’t resolve in real life.”  But is any of that really true?  When you set those things up, is this the sort of thing you hoped to do with them?

Certain interpretations rub me the wrong way because they seem like they’re enabling this behavior.  Sure, if someone’s mind was blown by a writer’s lazy choices, their mind was blown, and that’s just a fact.  But sometimes it looks to me like people are teaming up with the little devil on the author’s shoulder.

responsible-reanimation:

@nostalgebraist I just finished rereading Floornight, and the best description I can think of for it is “Literary Stimming.”

It feels so Innately Satisfying, how all these weird pieces interlock and shape one another; the ending is a bit rushed and it would be nice to see more of the Sphere’s world, but it’s more than held together by breathless enthusiasm and charisma.

It really does have a strong sense of you piling together every cool thing you can think of, especially the best parts of anime magnified tenfold, and it has a great balance of lighthearted character drama with Weird and Horrifying Science Stuff.

Every couple weeks I usually reread the first few chapters to get a sense of something that feels fun and compellingly weird and [teeming] with possibility. I had forgotten most of the final parts, and rereading them with the benefit of hindsight was a hell of a trip.

I may have to do more fanart at some point, maybe even a cover.

Thank you!  This post gives me such warm fuzzy feelings <3

I will probably never write anything like Floornight again, because I will probably never have that odd specific combination of “being really excited about what I’m doing” and “not giving a shit about what I’m doing,” although who knows what the future may hold

Very good (and flattering) new review of Floornight here

(I link stuff like this in part because I want people who read TNC to go and read Floornight if they haven’t)

read floornight. you know you need to.

reddragdiva:

floornight by @nostalgebraist is quite good to read while listening to this mortal coil. (no, not king crimson.) i just realised that i had never actually listened to their third album blood all the way through. so i’m doing that while i read about alien weirdness on the ocean floor in the near future.

love the way LUDWIG speaks. a marvelous creation. floating octahedra indeed.

just noticed: “There are other, more moral worlds  where virtue can flourish, but this is not one of them.” so rob, when did you first think up the northern caves?)

good enough i forgot a much-desired cup of coffee while rereading.

Thanks!

Everyone loves LUDWIG, it seems.

They’re obviously not the same character, but writing Cept definitely involved channelling the same part of my mind I used when I was writing Salby.  (That stuff is definitely semi-autobiographical.)  Incidentally, that particular line was inspired by this one from Ada or Ardor:

In other more deeply moral worlds than this pellet of muck, there might exist restraints, principles, transcendental consolations, and even a certain pride in making happy someone one does not really love; but on this planet Lucettes are doomed.

nostalgebraist:

Incidentally, one thing that Floornight does sorely need is an editing pass, which I have been putting off for nearly a year, and have finally started working on

Mostly this will just be fixing simple grammatical errors, although there are one or two continuity mistakes I want to fix, along with touching up some of the more egregiously bad word choices (the redundancy of ”sibilant hiss” makes me cringe, and for some reason I waaaay overused the phrase “pretty much” in the early chapters)

Update: I went through and changed the passages I’d highlighted as bad while re-reading on my Kindle.  These changes have been applied to the AO3 version although they still haven’t propagated to the epub and mobi versions yet.  Still need to tone down “pretty much” etc.

(I realize no one probably cares about this)

Incidentally, one thing that Floornight does sorely need is an editing pass, which I have been putting off for nearly a year, and have finally started working on

Mostly this will just be fixing simple grammatical errors, although there are one or two continuity mistakes I want to fix, along with touching up some of the more egregiously bad word choices (the redundancy of ”sibilant hiss” makes me cringe, and for some reason I waaaay overused the phrase “pretty much” in the early chapters)

Floornight

lovestwell:

nostalgebraist:

lovestwell:

Floornight is the other web fiction by @nostalgebraist​, besides The Northern Caves, which I recently read and liked a lot. 

In Floornight, scientists figured out that minds (called “souls” throughout) exist independently of brains, which are merely convenient hardware to run minds. There’s weird mind-physics which allows for conscious radiation, transient literal Boltzman minds hovering in space, and splitting a single mind into many shards coexisting in different universes (QM Many-Worlds-like) which can later be reintegrated back, remembering all versions together (this reminded me of Coil’s power in Worm). A small community of scientists study all this on the ocean floor which for some reason is a potent source of non-human mind-radiation.

While the premise is intriguing and much of the tech-building is superb, I didn’t like Floornight overall and abandoned it somewhere around the middle. My main complaint is that it’s very much not tight. I’d call a piece of fiction “tight” if everything in it feels inevitable in-world, everything fits snugly with everything else. Nothing feels ad hoc, made up to advance the plot but not making sense on its own. In Floornight, almost everything is ad hoc and flabby. 

The intriguing sci-fi premise is stretched thin to enable plot twists that abuse its nature. E.g. at some point the entire community is forcibly “reintegrated” into a more “mainstream” reality, but none of them get double memories from their supposed counterparts, as they did before on a smaller scale. (It’s possible that this is explained later, or maybe even at that point and I missed the explanation. But even if there is an explanation, the fact that it’s needed makes it all feel artificial and arbitrary, flabby). Characters behave very unnaturally; they seem to follow emotional scripts preselected by the author, and barely react emotionally to the hugely important events around them, like the aforementioned “reintegration” that cuts them away from the entire world (this is lampshaded a little by the author, but still remains very hard to believe). Everyone is a rather clumsy puppet on a string. 

Some things are excellent. The writing overall is very good. The characters are distinct and well-designed. Terminology, special effects, suspense, all these are great. But I couldn’t look past the very flabby plotting and the NPC-like behavior of the characters as the plot unfolds. By the middle of the book, I was bored with all the characters, my suspension of disbelief was completely shot and I couldn’t see myself caring about what adhocish unmotivated stuff is going to happen next.

It’s quite amazing just how much better TNC is (written just a few months later, I think?). None of the problems above exist in TNC; everything is orders of magnitude more motivated, interconnected, “tight”, confident. 

Thanks for the commentary.  (I mean that – constructive criticism is valuable.  I hope the below doesn’t come off as overly defensive.  I’m mostly trying to clarify where I’m coming from, which may be interesting if you’re wondering how I could produce these two stories in such close succesion.)

I think the “loose” or “ad hoc” nature of Floornight was an inevitable consequence of the kind of story I wanted to write.  I deliberately wrote it as a “kitchen sink” story mixing together every cool idea or plot bunny that came to mind, with the hope that the sheer batshit weirdness, combined with my own enthusiasm for all of it, could create its own sense of wonder.  I tended to err on the side of gluing on new plot elements I liked even when the glue wouldn’t be totally invisble, because my goal was chutzpah and grandeur, not fastidious flawlessness.

 You’re right that TNC is “tighter,” but I don’t feel like this represents any kind of improvement on my part.  The developments in TNC are more sensibly motivated because they’re (for the most part) mundane events happening for familiar reasons among (in most respects) ordinary people; they’re easier to believe because they’re much closer to things we’ve actually seen in our own lives, not because I’ve gotten any better at writing “believable” events.

TNC is a story in which – for most of the text – almost nothing actually happens; Floornight is a story in which, so to speak, almost everything happens.  My hope was that the people and events in Floornight would get sufficiently far from familiar signposts that suspension of disbelief would remain because none of us really knows what it would be like for that stuff to happen anyway – but obviously it is possible for this strategy to fail.

---

The lack of multiple memories in the big reintegration is not ad hoc – it is presented as unexpected, and the characters remark on how surprising it is both at the time and afterwards.  Moreover, it’s not as though I temporarily suspended the “real” rules of the setting in order to make things more convenient for me as a writer; I certainly could have included multiple memories without messing up the plot (and indeed it would allow for some cool possibilities), but that actually wouldn’t fit into the full rules of the setting, and I’d have had to do something ad hoc (!) to make it happen.

I think the real issue here is that I was dropping too much novelty on the reader too fast – I didn’t tell the reader that a large-scale reintegration like that could occur, or show them what a “normal” one would look like, before giving them an unusual case.  I don’t think the inclusion of an unusual case is bad in itself, since after all this is (in part) a story about scientific discovery.

(None of this is to say that there isn’t plenty of ad hoc magic in the story, just that I don’t think this particular example is an instance of it.)

Thanks for the explanations, and no, of course they’re not overly defensive (actually, come to think of it, authors should be allowed to get overly defensive over their works. It’s the least we can do for those poor folks). 

I kinda suspected the lack of multiple memories was explained in the story, and I missed it because I was half-skimming by that time, but I deliberately decided not to go back and reread that part, and instead record the impressions I did end up with. 

What you’re saying about “chutzpah and grandeur” makes a lot of sense, but also, for me, ties into the way I felt characters in Floornight had inappropriately muted emotional reaction to events around them, as if the characters and the events were written separately. If the story was built with “anything goes, aim for maximum wonder”, maybe that’s inevitable, or at least likely to happen. By comparison, think about how much of TNC is descriptions of characters freaking out over something (very believably, too). Doesn’t seem to happen in Floornight much or at all, despite the fact that the wonder-stakes are so much higher (grr, I feel like I’m belaboring this too much and also unfairly since I only read half of the book. OK, I should stop here).

I can’t seem to let TNC go, so let gush a little more about it (I don’t really know what sort or volume of reaction you’d been getting over it, but I’m going to go with the crazy theory that the threshold of boredom over praise of one’s work is very high for most authors). I’m a literature snob, so tend to be disappointed by >90% of fanfics or web fics I try to read. TNC is Good Stuff the way very very few fics ever are. Salbianism is done in a way that’s as creepily effective as anything out of Gene Wolfe or, I don’t know, Pynchon (I’m thinking of “V”). I really think you should try to get it (possibly edited and) published. 

There is a fair amount of freaking out in Floornight, mostly (IIRC) in the later parts.  My justification for the muted responses to the big reintegration (which may just be what you mean by “lampshading”) was that the Sphere staff have self-selected for caring much less than average about people on the surface – they’ve agreed to work in an isolated facility, in most cases for years at a time without leaving, while dealing with dangerous and incompletely understood phenomena (making it less likely that they had loved ones on the surface waiting for them), etc.  If they cared that much about the world beyond the Sphere, they wouldn’t be on the Sphere in the first place.  (Jorge, who is one of the few Sphere employees with more normal social ties, is devastated by the reintegration.)

I’m not sure whether I did a good job depicting this sort of person, but then very few of us are that sort of person, so arguably we don’t have the experience necessary to judge.  But that may be assuming too much, and of course, if it doesn’t ring true to you, it doesn’t ring true, and there’s no solving that.

Thanks for the TNC praise.  I am proud of a lot of the sentence-by-sentence writing, if not so much of some other aspects of the story.  I think getting it published would be difficult, both because of the unusual length (it’s too long to be a novella but it’s a very short novel) and, more importantly, because of the forum sections.  It’s easy for us to ignore this, but I think those sections are really pretty inaccessible to people without the relevant experience.  (E.g. my father, who enjoyed Floornight, started reading TNC and literally could not make it through the very first forum chapter.)

(via lovestwell)