Category: Writing

Edginess as a concept is a fatal package-dealing of two separate concepts. In its full, useful form, those two concepts are intertwined in a useful way, so that it points to something useful: the performance of suffering, mental illness, or darkness that isn't earned, or is inauthentic. However, those two concepts have begun to be torn apart by cultural shearing forces (specifically due to a sort of artistic self-consciousness and cynicism); as a result, what many people mean when they say edginess, if you look at what they actually apply it to, is really just the first part – the performance of darkness and suffering – but all of the connotations, the evaluative judgement, implied by including the second concept are brought along for the ride when the word is applied.

It's important to realize why the evaluative weight of "edginess" as a concept doesn't apply when you apply it to just anything that's dark and has a lot of suffering in it. People hate edginess for two reasons: one, because it's a form of stolen valor – attempting to imitate things that haven't been truly experienced in a way that cheapens and mocks them – and two, because it violates "show, don't tell," because the necessary suffering and darkness needed to justify what's currently being shown can't be demonstrated in a great enough depth and nuance by the author, can only be told to the person trying to enjoy the art. That isn't inherently the case even for art that is extremely dark, violent, contains a lot of suffering, and mental illness.

This package dealing is very damaging because it leads people to dismiss certain kinds of art, especially if it's outsider art, out of hand, because the showing instead of telling, the earning of the suffering and darkness, doesn't necessarily have to come before the "payoff" in darkness. Sometimes, you start a story with a character in a very dark place, and only find out after why they're like that, for instance. But because people just think "edgy" means "is very dark and has lots of suffering," because they don't know that there are more conditions than that which allow things to be retroactively redeemed and made complex, nuanced, and good depictions, they'll dismiss it out of hand without continuing forward, curious to find out if the narrative redeems it, like they would for any other in medas res worldbuilding, character, or story element that is only justified over the course of the whole narrative.

This lack of nuanced understanding of what constitutes actually-bad edginess also means that people go based on nothing more than "vibes" instead of a meaningful analysis of whatever text they're looking at. Instead of trying to determine whether the suffering and darkness portrayed is properly earned and authentic on its own terms, they'll just consult their feelings as to whether it "feels right" to them. The problem with this is that everyone's experience with suffering and darkness, and how people react to it, and how they cope with it, is different. Something can be deeply authentic and accurate, and still "feel wrong," and with a simplistic understanding of "edginess," the work will just get lumbed in with Shadow the Hedgehog and various works of fanfiction and badmouthed.

I think the solution here is to abolish the concept of edginess entirely. It's a brainworm. Instead, just talk about whether a work is authentic or inauthentic, earned or unearned, whether it violates the show don't tell principle or not. That way, we avoid the package deal entirely.

I've been interested in parser interactive fiction for a very long time – it's a wonderful, fascinating topic which I was introduced to by one of my favorite books of all time.

The way in which the world is not just represented at the base level of the program as a cloud of points and numbers with no inherent meaning, assembled into trees of containers that are ultimately elided at compile time and cannot be directly manipulated, in such a way that meaning must be arbitrarily constructed on the back of it, but is instead represented using graphs of symbols and relations and rulebooks of events is just captivating. Especially in how this allows the almost seamless intertwining of writing – since writing is, in its essence, just a linear graph of symbols – with the program's world representation in a way that makes the machine almost capable of understanding the semantics of everything. It has a strong overlap with Lisp and symbolic artificial intelligence that's appealing to me.

More than that, parser interactive fiction combines the two things I love doing most in life: writing and programming, things that I often view as intimately related in their nature, the experience of doing them, and how they exercise my mind.

The problem with parser interactive fiction for me is that I'm just not that good at coming up with puzzles (or doing them) – it simply requires too much lateral thinking. More than that, combining programming and writing is just extremely difficult. They are just different enough that the totality of the skill and effort they require is a lot more than they would require alone, and they also have nonlinear effects on each others' difficulty as well, each making the other more difficult – the writing suggests something must be one or the other way, which would be difficult for the programming side to do; the programming requires the writing to be broken up, branched, and oriented around it.

Nevertheless, if I was able to restrict my ambitions, I would probably do pretty well at writing parser interactive fiction. The problem is that I'm very bad at restricting my ambitions – if I'm going to do something, I want to do something big. Visionary. Interesting.

What I've found, however, is that if I break large projects down into small chunks that can be individually completed relatively easily, and actually feel relatively complete and stand-alone when done, but which can steadily build up toward a larger more ambitious project, then I'm able to make a lot more progress. The amount of writing in the "Category" sections of this blog is a testament to that – more than 90,000 words in around 30 days (not counting a few days of breaks for my disability).

In order to make writing that feasible, however, I needed to use hypertext to its utmost potential: a big part of the reason I felt like all of my writing had to be these gigantic projects was due to the limitations of static, essay-oriented writing. Thus, if I had multiple interconnected ideas, the only way I felt comfortable working them out was in a monolithic narrative that wove them together, and if I wanted to use ideas from elsewhere in my work, I felt that I had to briefly reiterate their definitions, which made each such grand narrative need to be relatively self contained. But, conversely, I also often had an overwhelming number of ideas on a topic, often in tension, which led to these essays ballooning to gigantic proportions.

This possibility was partially encouraged by the fact that for a long time all my writing was done locally, not published to HTML or a website, which made hypertext a bit outside the realm of anything I'd thought about, but part of it was the tooling I was using – essentially, Emacs treated as if it were Vim, editing plain text Markdown and using a static site generator to export it. There's really not much room for play there, and linking between things (or finding what to link) is tedious and annoying in such an environment.

Thankfully, the possibilities of org-mode, made possible by its computing environment have completely reinvigorated my writing by solving this problem. This means that composing highly interlinked hypertext bodies of work is completely fluid and trivial. It almost happens at the speed of thought. I've found this to be immensely liberating for my non-fiction work.

Now, lately, I've begun wondering lately how much I can apply this idea to my fiction writing. Using highly hyperlinked text, with the power of org-mode behind it has been a completely transformative experience for my writing in so many ways, and I want to bring that to other parts of my writing. A lot of the same problems apply: I find myself only really capable of completing short stories, but I want to be able to build larger worlds and narratives out of them, and a linear assemblage of short stories just doesn't do the trick for that – the limitations of that are just too great.

At first, I considered taking the classic hypermedia approach: separating each scene, character background, perhaps even event, into separate hypertext nodes and linking them together. The idea behind this was to use hypertext not just to enhance my writing experience, but to significantly change how readers experienced my writing. I god excited about the concept of providing only a set of events, from various perspectives, and various histories and thoughts from various perspectives, all interlinked heavily, and letting the reader navigate through them to determine the narrative and meaning of them. It seemed really interesting, like an extension of some things I'm interested in about post-structuralism.

Instinctively I was a little suspicious of this idea, though, because I'd bounced off of the vast majority of my interactions with such hypertext fiction (usually in the form of Twine games and such). So I started looking into what, if any, literary theory there was on the subject. Eventually, I came across an article that made a very good case for why hyperfiction wasn't pleasant for readers, and that the theories in post-structuralism that seemed to apply were mis-applied in this case, or just totally out of touch.

As a result, I decided to take a new tack. In my new model for how my hypertext fiction will work, I'll still write short stories, or even whole novellas, as self-contained works with a linear structure. However, I'm going to write them all in the same world, and whenever the paths of various characters cross, even for a moment – even if they aren't named – I'll create a hypertext link out of the sentence describing that their path crossed to the specific part of the other character's story where that crossing happened for them. Likewise, for events that are seen from multiple points of view, maybe I'll have hyperlinks to all the other versions of that event. This way, readers will be able to enjoy a linear, self contained narrative arranged for them by the author, but there will be a meta-narrative (not in the traditional sense, but in the literal sense of a narrative composed out of narratives) operating in the background which they can explore through these chance connections and different perspectives – either going back and reading the whole story the event or chance crossing of paths linked to, or just reading that part in medas res and then moving on to something else.

In order to avoid this being distracting (especially as the number of connections grows), these links will be "hidden" – they'll be styled so that they look identical to regular text, except for the fact that when you hover over them, your mouse turns into a cursor. This way each story can be read as self contained, and readers need not be bothered by the interconnected meta-hyper-narrative aspect unless they're intrigued.

Another interesting thing that falls out of this is that there will be no central entrypoint to the larger narrative of my world, only individual people's perspectives, narratives, and the points of view on certain events that happen in them. Thus, the question becomes, how do I inject the reader into such a data well? I think the only right answer is to randomly select, when they click "ENTER," which complete short story they start out on. Of course, I'll also have to annotate each story with a future history date, and create a secondary sitemap that orders them in a timeline with small excerpts or descriptions, so that those who want more control, or to go to a specific story, can find it, but I think the randomized way of entering the narrative is more true to what it is at heart.

Thus, this is not going to be a set of hyperfictions, but a hypertext story world containing many fictions!

Although reading in depth is very difficult with my disability, and after years of having to rely nearly exclusively on audiobooks for my entertainment I've been finding myself deeply burnt out on them, I try to make a point to really challenge myself in my reading. To choose things that, while still within my range of interests, are dense, complex, nuanced, have interesting ideas, try new literary devices, or are part of the literary canon of whatever genre or subgenre I'm exploring. I push myself very hard, when I can, to read better and better things, as much as I can. I also try to make myself step out of the genres I'm comfortable with – mostly space opera science fiction, hard science fiction, and speculative fiction – to explore other genres like mystery, literary fiction, fantasy, romance, etc. I do this so rigerously – spending hours per book I add to my reading list to determine that it's worth my time and that I'll get something unique out of it – that many people have commented on it.

To a degree this is unhealthy and driven by childhood trauma that I'm not going to get into here. However, much of this is for a very simple reason: by pushing myself to read difficult things, I grow my mind. I get better at remembering details, interpreting texts, noticing nuances and subtility and being able to understand and think about them. I stay flexible, able to understand nonstandard literary devices.

I also gain more ideas for my art when I read high-brow art. I pick up new narrative and structural devices that can make my writing more interesting, more examples of ways to use prose and words that can give me greater range for writing different characters, or can be woven together to create richer a richer voice for myself. I also just get more and more examples of how to do things with writing. Elegently, efficiently, and stylishly – or baroquely, expressively, and impressionistically – conveying anything, even basic elements like the setting a scene takes place in, the spacial relations between things and their motion, and casual conversation, don't come naturally to anyone, and cannot be derived except through long experience or by learning by example from people who are actually really good at it. You can always tell the writing of someone who only reads fanfiction by their lack of repertoire!

I don't snobbily only consume "high literature," though. Especially when it comes to movies, but also in literature, I love pulp. Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Jordan (yes, The Wheel of Time is pulp – very long and impressive pulp, however), Stephen King (although in my opinion his best books transcend being "merely" pulp). Army of Darkness. The Crow. Even Equilibrium. Jujutsu Kaisen. From these, too, I can glean ideas, and tricks of the trade. Often they'll be less sophisticated than their equivalent high art, so it's important not to restrict my diet just to them, but enjoyment and rest is just as valid as learning new things, and I do learn new things from these fairly frequently, about what can be executed well and how. Furthermore, there's a spectrum – much of the art I consume is far more involved, complex, detailed, rigorous, and has far more interesting and new ideas, than what most people consume – compare, for example, Chasm City, with the average BookTok fantasy novel – and finding the optimal point on that spectrum, where you're pushing yourself and learning enough for it to be useful, but it isn't a total moonshot you won't repeat anytime soon (and then slowly pushing yourself up that curve) is important.

All I ask from the art that I want to engage with is that it know what it is and be in love with it, to fully embrace it, and excell at it. And often, to excell even at pulp, that requires great technical mastery! The age-old saying is true: one must understand the old-fashioned rules and be able to operate excellently within them to break them masterfully. That's the difference between a teenager's "anime" sketch in their sketchbook, and the art of Kentaro Miura.

Always remember: subversion is not a substitute for a good story.

I don't know if I'm capable of making very challenging or novel art – what we'd call high art, the kind of art that I seek out. I suspect I'm not. I'm just not that good at lateral and creative thinking, nor do I have that level of commitment and dedication to any one project. I think anything I make will inevitably fall into the pulp genre fiction category. The important thing, to me, however, is to write good pulp. Pulp that is able to borrow from the masters in a skilled and expert way, and use those tools to craft an excellent, sinewy story that grabs the reader and holds on to them, and maybe shows them something new they didn't know a pulp story could do. I also hope that I have interesting and unique enough views on philosphical topics – from technology and identity to epistemology and ethics – that when they shine through the text, as they inevitably will, readers will find something new and interesting to engage with there. However, my stories don't have messages. That destroyes stories.