Other stuff I should do at some point:

Make an actual functioning ebook of The Northern Caves.  This will take nontrivial work, since I want to preserve as much of the textual content of the forum sections as possible, but I think it’s something that needs to be done.  (I myself have such a hard time reading fiction in a web browser that if I hadn’t written TNC, I probably wouldn’t be able to read it.)

Record audiobook versions of Floornight or TNC?  Some people have expressed interest in these, and I would have fun reading them.  I only have a laptop microphone, though, and don’t want to spend money on a microphone, so this may or may not be feasible.

Speaking of which, I was of course thinking about “Red Pills” recently, and also TNC, and then I was reading over some bits of TNC, and noticed this phrase, from a chapter about its most central big-scary-concept:

it presents itself in a complete bolus of absolute responsibility

“Bolus” is not a word I see every day.  I couldn’t quite remember what it meant.  (Had I known when writing the passage?)  So I looked it up:

argumate:

I’m waiting for @nostalgebraist to start writing Neoreaction a Basilisk Prime.

I mean, I did do a creative project about many of same themes treated in NAB, and it was literally “a horror novel written in the form of a lengthy Internet comment.”

It’d be simultaneously dickish, tacky, and incredibly simplistic to claim that The Northern Caves is some sort of substitute for or alternative to Sandifer’s book.  It clearly isn’t, and I’m having trouble writing this post because I’m worried about even the hint of that implication.  But it’s definitely a creative flight of fancy involving many of the same ideas.  I’ve recommended it to Sandifer and I’m excited to hear what he thinks.

lovestwell:

nostalgebraist:

The most common complaint about my stories is that I promise too much and don’t deliver.  Some of this is just poor planning that I can get better at.

But I worry that the majority of it is inescapable, because it’s hard for me to write without adopting a bias toward “saying yes to new shit” – being willing to put in anything that seems fun to me, and hoping it’ll fall into place in the bigger picture eventually.

It would be one thing if I could just stop doing this and retain a core of essential material without extraneous loose ends.  But without the devil-may-care attitude that produces the loose ends, I can’t even produce the essential material.

Presumably (a lot of) Real Authors deal with this by revising and reworking over a long period of time, but that feels very weird to me.  I like writing serial fiction because it’s almost like roleplaying as the characters.  Being able to “undo” some character’s action in order to improve the plot still feels wrong.

I’m beginning to think that many readers (including myself) implicitly grade authors on how well they perform under the constraints that they, or they story’s logic, or the story’s world, impose. What I’m trying to say is that maybe instead of looking at it in terms of “promise and not deliver”, look at it in terms of “set up a tightrope walk, CHEATED while tightrope walking”. The “cheated” thing is an instinctive reaction to the feeling that the author is exercising too much freedom in throwing shit around. We don’t like it, because… I’m not sure? Maybe because we feel that universe and our lives are relatively tightly constrained, and so our stories should be too? Not as tight as to forbid all magic, SF, miracles, whatever (although now that I think about it, maybe some people who don’t like SF/fantasy don’t like it because of that). But we feel the magic aspects should be world-building, not author’s-ass-saving. 

In HPMOR, some people were turned off by how Harry was not being emotionally his age at all, it worked well with the plot but was not believable in terms of character. And then later EY said “of course but this is how I planned it all along, because Harry is a shard of Voldemort and his extreme emotional coldness is yada yada yada”. And that didn’t satisfy ANYONE (I’m exaggerating) because that feeling of “this is under-constrained. EY is puppeteering Harry in ways that are too easy for him. Real-life Harry would not be so convenient to EY’s plotting” is local, it’s generated while reading the text, and is not placated by a later global retrofit, even if for the author it was not a retrofit.

A while ago I wrote why I liked FN less than TNC and I think I wrote smth like FN feeling much less “tight”, and I’m thinking now this may be more usefully expanded into thinking in terms of constraints. FN felt like something that didn’t respect enough its own/its author’s previously imposed constraints, and that was a turn-off. I’ve just read the earlier exchange with a critic of FN you just posted, and I’m inclined to interpret their criticism in the same vein. LUDWIG feels like a huge cheaty character because once the reader realizes that this mind-out-of-thin-air controls the entire sphere it feels like the author is WAY under-constrained, and is just throwing stuff around w/o trying to internally motivate it. And just as with EY, it doesn’t help to say “but this is globally explained by Martin etc.” It doesn’t help with the local feeling of – uhm-this-is-falling-apart–

So yeah, I don’t know how to square that with “saying yes to new shit“, but certainly part of the answer might be careful editing later. I think lots of writers put in substantial work while editing to bury their leads, to reshape the flow of information, and precisely to manage the readers’ feelings of constraint-strength. “I know this tightrope is legit, but this colorful vest that I’m wearing - the audience are definitely going to think it’s a safety harness. I need to come up with more decisive ways to let them know IN ADVANCE it’s not. Taking it off and letting them see it up close when the walk is over? - not good enough”.

(I don’t know if that makes much sense, and I’ve no time to write this shorter and more thought-out, sorry)

Hmmm.  Part of what going on here is that (IMO) there are certain kinds of stories that are inherently hard to make tightly constrained, particularly those where “the (partial) incomprehensibility of the rules” is a core, non-removable feature.  This includes stories where the incomprehensibility has aesthetic appeal – say in many stories that get categorized as surrealist fiction, weird fiction, magical realism, slipstream, etc. – as well as stories about encounters with entities far more powerful and/or intelligent than human beings.

If you’re writing this kind of story, you can either completely eschew “making sense,” or you can strive for making a kind of partial sense, with the knowledge that this will have to be fundamentally unsatisfactory in a certain way – there is usually going to be a big hole somewhere that could potentially explain or do anything, like the way a single logical contradiction in a system makes every statement true.

I’ve just made the latter category sound bad, but I actually really like it and I’m always happy when I see another instance of it.  I can easily get frustrated with surrealist, magical realist, etc. fiction because the fantasy elements feel weightless and artificial because they seem to have no rules, not even alien ones.  (I feel this way about Haruki Murakami, for instance.)  “Being extremely and continually weird while still using cause-and-effect explanations and partially defined rules” is a sweet spot for me, since it’s how I intuitively feel these kinds of stories would play out if they were “really happening” – there’d at least be patches of explicability here and there, because we’d build little local models in our heads that would at least sometimes capture the local characteristics of the alien-rules.

But like I said in that other post, for me this is the best of both worlds, but I can easily see how someone would experience it as the worst of both worlds – inviting all the head-scratching of a real rule-bound story without rewarding it.  I think this difference says a lot about the very divergent reactions to Floornight.

In particular, people who liked the story tended to see it as “climbing up from surrealism” (which is how I saw it) rather than “climbing down from hard SF.”  All the science-y terms made the story look like an attempt at rule-bound SF to many people, which then led to disappointment when their efforts at figuring it out were wasted.  For me, and some other readers, the mere appearance of some rule-boundedness was a “bonus” layered onto a story whose main appeal was surreal weirdness.

From the “climbing up from surrealism” viewpoint, it’s simply in the nature of the genre to introduce bizarre unmotivated elements like LUDWIG, and the fun (for author and, hopefully, reader) is to see how much this chaos can be made to seem orderly.  It won’t be as orderly as something intended to be orderly in the first place, but that’s not the game we’re playing.  (Incidentally, I felt much more satisfied with my plotting in Floornight than in TNC precisely because with the former the task was so much closer to being impossible; with Floornight I thought “if this makes any sense, I’m a genius” and with TNC I thought “if this isn’t airtight, I’m shameful.”)

(via lovestwell)

transgenderer:

The Northern Caves and Floornight (which you should all read theyre free online and INCREDIBLY WELL WRITTEN) are like….if homestuck was good

Since I actually really love Homestuck, this feels like way higher praise than I think you meant it as, but anyway, thank you!

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.

worldoptimization:

But how oddly are all things arranged in this sublunary scene.

–Alexander Hamilton to Angelica Schuyler Church

(via worldoptimization-deactivated20)