Conversation

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The writing state can be pretty compact, but need not be local in the working text. Feels like a stack where I’m initially pushing a lot more than I’m popping in first 2/3 of the writing, the popping more than pushing in last 1/3. Kinda like the execution of a recursion program.
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The trick to writing with low-error autotelic flow is to keep the right 7-8 chunks of state from different parts of the story in your head as you write. The set changes slowly, and the “story structure” is often a good initial state set, even if you haven’t filled it in.
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I am not seeing discrete stages or rewrite “passes” in my process so far. But it does seem to move overall from skeleton to organs to circulation, to skinning. But it’s not strictly ordered. Bits of skin might snap into place before major bits of skeleton.
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It’s more like painting with words than nonfiction. Or like building code, or mechanical assembly. The closest similar thing I’ve ever learned to do is actually CAD, not nonfiction.
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The part I usually have the most trouble with is names, since they are cosmetic elements with skeletal consequences. I can’t do arbitrary naming any more than I can do outlining. The payoff from finding the True Name for a character or object or place is a high spike.
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Good names are like chunks of protein. They cause discontinuous jumps in the “holographic density” of whatever you’re writing. They’re also the aha! payoffs of the writing process for me. If I don’t find good enough names along the way to finishing a piece, it’s just not fun.
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You’ll notice that the half dozen or so stories I’ve published so far have few to no named entities in them. The quoted latest one at the top of the thread has zero. A good kpi for me might be number of true-named things/1000 words. Gonna try to drive that up.
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Trying to finish a story with meaningless placeholder names and then finding names is like eating a chocolate chip cookie with placeholder pebbles and then eating a handful of chips. The writing is not fun at all, and I’m convinced the output is weak.
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I’d rather write compromised pseudo-stories with no names than phoned-in names. They don’t have to brilliant like “Hercule Poirot” or “Lilliput” but they have to be impedance matched to the story, and kinda have a bit of holographic sparkle. Bring out the character of the story.
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It’s going to be mostly rough and unpolished things for a while. I have some ambitious things sorta sketched out that I’ll polish and finish more, but am still working up to the strength to actually tackle them. So the stuff I’m putting out now is closer to studies/storyboards
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