#godfeels

think back to the Crime City streets scene with Mary and Lenore walking through a parade. most of that section is narration with an expository bent, but it isn't an authoritative figure delivering objective facts in an ordered list. it's rooted in the perspective of Mary, an outsider both to Crime Planet and the broader extracosm at large, who is also dealing with a fresh and substantial loss in her personal life. as a result, every observation she makes about the world ends up being an observation about herself. the exposition earns its wordcount by doing multiple things at once, for instance using a troll xenobiology lecture to build romantic tension between those two characters. the math, as such, is finding the optimally interesting route through all the various sights and sounds i want to cover on the way to my planned endpoint-- not the most efficient or economical, but the most interesting. which just gets back to what i was saying about meat and candy in the last post, where you never want your readers to get so much of one thing they get sick of it before you give them something else. so you can see how increasing the size of the cast and the information density of the setting/plot exponentially complicates the math, which is why i sometimes finish a writing session feeling like my brain is overheating. but i think another, less loaded phrase for this would be to just call it a flow state. it doesn't feel like i'm solving the problem when i'm solving it. i am still running on pure intuition. it's just, somehow a sort of mechanical intuition, structured and guided by years of experience and experimentation.

but i want to step back for a moment and make a broader, maybe tangentially related point. writers love comparing their job to other jobs, as in "writing is like building a house" or "writing is like climbing a mountain", which is useful at a surface level but quickly becomes counter-productive when you start acting like there's a genuine procedural connection there. like, if you have the blueprint for a house, you want to follow that blueprint to the letter in construction otherwise you risk longterm structural instability, to say nothing of code violations or good old fashioned tackiness. if changes need to be made in response to unexpected conditions on site, you want the architect and/or engineers there to quadruple check the math before a single other brick gets laid. you can ARGUE that the same is true of writing in some cases, that you should stick to your plan for internal consistency etc etc but at that point we're no longer talking about writing OR building a house, we're just kind of gesturing at conflicting philosophical phantoms that have nothing materially to do with each other.

a story isn't a house. you can ignore the blueprint. you can change it as you go without checking the math. you don't even have to have a blueprint in the first place! there is no cost for trying and failing. there is no penalty for breaking the rules. you SHOULD know the rules, you SHOULD have a solid grasp on what the average Finished Thing looks like, and you SHOULD probably spend some time in the I Fucking Suck At This mines before diving face first into your ambitious narrative epic. but you don't HAVE to. no one is going to send you to forever jail if you don't. you can break every never-ever-do-this rule in the book and still end up with a great story, as long as you write it good. and the only way to learn how to write it good is to write it bad first.

a lot of writing, for me at least, is about listening to what the story wants. any given scene can go a million ways, but the story has a funny way of telling you when you've picked the wrong one. this is where i get writer's block. i can just feel when i've gone off the rails, even when i like what i'm writing. sometimes i push through hoping that i'll manage to circle back on track, but i almost never do. so i end up having to retrace my steps and figure out where the wrong turn was. it's so frustrating how you can be stuck for hours, days, months on a problem like this, and the instant you find that blind alley you took by mistake suddenly the whole thing flows like there was never a block at all. you have to have humility enough, as a writer, to accept that your words aren't sacred and sometimes shit's just gotta go. i cannot emphasize enough how important it is to internalize what "first draft" really means. nothing you write is finished until publication, and words are a profoundly cheap building material. they're impossible to waste, so give up on being precious with them and just try shit.

the question of how to keep a big-idea large-cast story focused has infinite answers, and the right one is whichever works for you. i personally find it helps to have an overarching structural logic dictating the shape of the narrative. i think television is a useful source of inspiration here. a show like LOST maintains focus by structuring each episode around one specific character, giving them dedicated pre-island flashbacks to complement their present day on-island predicament. this diptych forms the A-plot, which typically advances the focus character's arc, some aspect of their relationship with the other survivors, and often an element of the larger mysteries of the island all at once. the B-plot often spins out from the A-plot, where you might have a big group of main characters forced to split up. advancements in the B-plot tend to happen in parallel with those of the A-plot, but with some kind of ironic twist or contradictory information. maybe characters in the A-plot see strangers holding people hostage and assume they're the bad guys, but characters in the B-plot saw that the strangers were actually acting in self-defense. LOST is a machine that runs on unreliable narrators, so a lot of conflicts are the result of nominally-aligned characters operating on wildly different assumptions about the world-- which tells us as much about the world as it does the characters in question. by the end of the episode (or multi-episode arc) the A-plot and B-plot collide again, usually in a way that upends the status quo and sets up the next episode/arc's focus. then of course you'll typically have a C-plot, which acts as a palette cleanser usually focusing on a lower-stakes story beat with comedic undertones.

now explode the structure top down. there's the Series, the whole finished thing. sorry to break it to you, but it's impossible to know what that's gonna look like when you just start out. even if you plan the entire story start to finish before writing chapter 1, the final work is gonna look completely different. every writer is making it up as they go along. a good writer has a structure guiding them to make the right choices in that process. so instead of focusing on the series as a whole, you break it down to the season. LOST has six seasons. the first season explores a set of basic assumptions about the island, and ends with the survivors enacting a plan based on those assumptions. the plan then goes wrong in a way that expands and complicates our base assumptions about the island, setting up season 2 to have a whole new set of questions and ideas to explore that season 1 could not. season 2 does the same thing, exploring the new status quo, establishing some sense of objective knowledge about that status quo, then breaking that knowledge over its knee in the finale. every season functions this way, which is why LOST consistently has the best season finales in television history. but for those finales to sing, they need to have a firm foundation to stand on. so you lay out how many episodes you have in the season, you look at where everything is at the start of the season, you gauge where you want it to be at the end of the season, and that's how you dictate the pace going forward. some of those episodes you know have to be Big Important Barn Burners, and as such you know about where they should fall in the episode order for dramatic reasons. but not every episode can be one of those. sometimes you need a fucking around episode. it's meat/candy again! but at the same time, back at ground level, you can't have a fucking around episode where nothing important happens, otherwise your audience will feel like you wasted their time. so you balance your A/B/C plots accordingly, with an eye towards maintaining some kind of abstract meat/candy balance.

so you see now how there's this sort of achronological order of operations here, moment-to-moment storytelling vs scene-to-scene vs episode-to-episode vs season-to-season. structures nested within structures, the way the spiral arm of a galaxy spins with the same visual logic as the water running down a drain. if your problem is too much chaos, then the solution probably involves imposing some kind of order.

literary writers will tell you to stay away from making your prose more like television, and i agree in a general sense. there are strengths to written fiction that are different from broadcast television, and it's easy to just write glorified TV scripts instead of literature. but even as i agree with the sentiment in a general sense, i am nevertheless irresistibly drawn to the episodic flashback structure. to my mind, the best way to deal with a big-idea large-cast narrative is to break them up into smaller, more manageable chunks. split your cast into groups, split those groups into smaller groups, bring them back together and split them up again in a different order, and on and on again at your leisure. if a big idea is hard to grasp, isolate it into smaller ideas that can be each established independently at different times so that you can tie them all together again later on. if you really want to get your media wires crossed, think of it like Mario 1-1. it's a level that teaches you everything you need to know about the video game's base mechanics. every level following on from that complicates those mechanics, drawing insane difficulty out of what might at first seem painfully easy.

build up to the big stuff, basically, is my advice. i try very hard to only put all my characters in a room together when absolutely necessary. i know there are full-cast scenes in parts of Godfeels where a couple people are functionally just sort of t-posing in the background waiting for their next line. sometimes that's okay and even necessary, but it's remarkably easy to fuck up. hence the structure. almost every story i've sat down to write has been motivated as much by a structural hook as the actual narrative/thematic contents. it is through my grasp on the form that i find my way to the function, and it's never a straight or straightforward path. that's why you need to leave room for improvisation. a structure is only as good as its elasticity. it exists to do the hardest parts for you, so you can focus on the component parts.

now to the second half of your question (oh god, we're only halfway through?!). the quickest way to deliberately get lost in the weeds is to just shamelessly write the exposition you've shied away from. i've got a lot of big weird metaphysical ideas boiling in this werewolf story i'm working on, but i didn't know how they could possibly be applicable. so i invented a flimsy guy to write a shitty paper that's just pure stream of consciousness on my part. none of that is usable for the finished story. but in writing it, those previously abstract ideas became very specific, and now i have a very strong grasp on what specific ideas excite me most. this opened a mental door for me, and now i know exactly how and where to deliver that exposition in a way that isn't boring or pointless.

let's talk about your society with no concept of romantic love. this is a tough idea to convey because obviously characters who lack something that doesn't exist can't comment on its absence (and presumably you don't have a fish out of water to shine the spotlight). but good news! the audience does live in a world with romantic love, which means they are uniquely equipped to comment on its absence all by themselves. so the trick isn't "how do i tell the audience this fact about the world" but rather "how do i direct the audience's attention so that they can infer this fact about the world?" a society lacking in romantic love will no doubt look very different from our own in certain key ways. it's your job as a writer of speculative fiction to think through the material ramifications of this idea and play them out on scales large and small.

i'd highly recommend you read Ursula K Leguin's Left Hand of Darkness for inspiration here. it's about a society that has evolved to be sexually hermaphroditic and universally genderfluid, and the whole book is just procedurally unraveling all the ways this affects their society and makes it different from our own. Leguin would have you thinking through social rituals. is there an equivalent to dating? how does cohabitation work? is there marriage? is there a concept of the nuclear family? how does the cultural hegemon position reproduction, are they conservative or progressive? do people still have sex for fun? do they have recurring sex with the same person over a long stretch of time? what does that relationship look like without a concept of romantic love? do they have other forms of love in its place, the way Homestuck trolls have their quadrants? is this a universally held position on a global scale or are there competing perspectives? is it biological in origin or a social norm? how does it intersect with gender? how does it affect gendered stereotypes around men and women? how does it affect government policy, popular fiction, music, theatre, board games, video games, films, poetry, television, opera, comedy, braindance, whatever?

this is what we mean by speculative fiction. you speculate by asking these questions and coming up with interesting answers, with the knowledge that most if not all of those answers won't make it into the final story. but in having those answers you are able to confidently gesture in their direction with little more than a couple words. do that enough times and bang, suddenly you've done "world building". it helps to build a setting that is familiar to the audience, except in one or two specific ways. this makes the unfamiliar elements stand out all the more.

but also, at the end of the day, you can't be afraid of letting the audience be confused for a minute. a good story makes the reader do some work, encourages them to actively think about what they're reading as they're reading it. it's a fine line to walk, but come on, this is science fiction we're talking about. do you really want your audience to "get it" on page one? give them something rough and textured to hold on to, direct their attention towards interesting questions and then play with those questions as the story goes on. good speculative fiction still functions as a dramatic narrative even if the audience doesn't have a complete grasp on the broader context. that's an asset! deliberately constructed confusion is a great tool for directing reader attention, and it's one a lot of (especially young) writers seem terrified of using. always remember that audiences don't know what they want, and you're never gonna appeal to 100% of people no matter how hard you try. write for your fellow sickos. that's the stuff that has staying power.

so, yeah, there's another essay from me on writing. i always feel so silly when i reach the end of one of these posts because i really don't like writing advice most of the time. all any writer can tell you is how they wrote what they wrote. maybe that's applicable to you, but probably a lot of it won't be. almost all actionable writing advice comes down to: read a lot, write a lot, live a lot. other writers can help point you in a more focused direction if you're lost, but they can't teach you how to do something that can only be learned by doing it with your own two hands. all the rest is just psychology. playing mind games, coming up with metaphors, designing structures and math problems and blueprints and A-plot B-plot C-plot... it's all just an abstraction. an attempt to impose logic onto an inherently free-associative process. a post-hoc rationalization of spontaneous intuition.

it's your story. it knows what it wants from you, and you know what you want from it. but there is a distance between you that must be bridged before you can be truly in sync. that's a personal relationship. like any good relationship, it requires open communication and reciprocity. all the advice in the world can only gesture at how it feels to be in literary love. it's up to you to nurture that relationship, to try and fail and listen and grow and just see what happens next. fantasy, sci-fi, contemporary literature, whatever. the only thing to do is just to do it, without fear. if you can get that shit on the page in a rough, messy, loud, over-indulgent and chaotic draft, that's still better than nothing. interrogate the draft with honesty and humility, take to it with a vindictive red pen, get an outside perspective (be wary of doing this too early on in the process), write it again and throw it away, make the wrong choice but like what you wrote anyway, make the right choice but fuck it up beyond repair, challenge yourself to do things you've never done before, pay attention and listen and learn and try not to go fucking insane in the process. live a life outside of fiction. we don't hammer that one home enough. you need time and space for the work to digest and develop when you aren't actively writing. sometimes you need to take a break to get some perspective. sometimes you come up with a good story and just can't figure out a good way to tell it. and sometimes you just fucking nail it in one go, and it's the best feeling in the world.

basically, you have to be willing to stand on the shoulders of giants. you can't find places no one's ever been before if you don't know where people have been. study! read what you love, read out of your comfort zone, and DON'T JUST READ SCI-FI EITHER. get some Ursula K Leguin and Iain M Banks under your belt. read William Gibson's Neuromancer, then read China Mieville's The City & the City, then read William Gibson's Pattern Recognition for good measure. some of these are more sci-fi than others, but they're all examples of genre stories that present complex concepts in ways that are entertaining to read and thought-provoking long after you close the cover. and if you're reading this like "oh no that's so much, i'm so behind, i'll never catch up," don't worry, that's how i feel too. i basically didn't read sci-fi until... well, until the point when Godfeels started telling me it wanted to become a sci-fi story. most of the books/authors i mentioned above didn't enter my lexicon until like six years ago. i'm a slow reader, it took me a lot longer than other kids to learn how to read, so there's a sort of ingrained tedium associated with reading for me that i still struggle to overcome. like i love reading, but i hate to start reading, you know what i mean? which is just to say, if my dumb ass can push through and do the reading anyway, so can anyone. and you should want to!! a lot of these books are awesome!!

it's good also to be aware of different paradigms of sci-fi and how they affect your conception of the genre. a lot of the popular film/television sci-fi of the 2000s was embarrassed of being science fiction, so more often than not they were just Indiana Jones films with flying cars. think the Will Smith I, Robot or the various not-remakes they did of Logan's Run. going into my twenties, this left me with a very strong feeling that good sci-fi should be about stuff. good sci-fi doesn't run from its own ideas in the hopes of reaching some critical mass of broad audience appeal, it embraces those ideas and takes them seriously regardless of how momentarily confused the audience might be. part of the fun of good sci-fi is feeling like you're in way over your head and are just barely keeping up (Iain M Banks' Consider Phlebas and Seth Dickinson's Exordia are marquee examples). but at the same time, when i was younger i did try to read the Classic classics. Heinlein didn't do much for me, Clarke didn't do much for me, and Asimov... oh brother. i think i made it about halfway through the first Foundation novel before tapping out. i don't think i finished any of those books, actually. i'm sure i'd feel differently today, but certainly at the time i felt that traditional "hard sci-fi" could be painfully dry and, frankly, more than a little masturbatory.

so it's like any art practice, really. you develop a sense of what you like and don't like by triangulating from the art you've previously experienced. i like to write in the vein of the New Weird, walking the line between space opera and materialist speculative fiction with a jester's abandon. i would not have this clarity of preference had i not read This Is How You Lose The Time War, There Is No Antimimetics Division, and The Left Hand of Darkness back to back to back in 2021/22. the more intentionally you go about this process of study, the clearer a picture you'll get of your own personal predilections. and you have to do it for YOU. there'll probably be stuff you love that other people hate, and stuff you hate that other people love. this is how you learn which audiences are okay to alienate and which ones you want to keep in mind. like, i know my brand of sci-fi is never gonna appeal to someone who's all in on The Three Body Problem or Foundation, so i don't bother trying. that's not really what i enjoy reading, it's not something i'd particularly enjoy writing, so i accept the inevitable disagreement and embrace it. i know what i'm writing and what i'm not writing because i have an accurate map of the territory i've chosen to explore. of course i'm always open to new information, new approaches, new examples to learn from-- no matter your preference, the worst thing you can do for your art practice is convince yourself that you already know everything you'll ever need to know about the form.

but that's only one half of the equation and it's the half that is entirely invisible to the reader (unless that reader is also a writer experienced enough to see evidence of the map you were using). a map is only as good as your ability to follow it without losing your way. you can do all the study you want and it won't mean squat unless you write the fucking thing. at the end of the day, the map is there to save you from doing unnecessary work... so that you can then put that energy towards the necessary work. and that's all on you.

so, yeah, let's drop the homework and get to the real meat of your question. i think there's a widespread genre-writing culture online that's all about, like, creating functional magic systems, drawing maps and making wikis, outlining your characters' backstories, plotting everything out in advance. it feels downstream of the TTRPG boom and the subsequent cottage industry of how-to-play/how-to-DM guides, where it's all about creating a quality collaborative experience. like savory improv, basically. but tracing the river even further upstream it's also a tributary of OC culture, where you've got a Guy and you've got Lore and you've got Really Cool Plot Ideas, and very little that actually tells the story in any traditional sense.

this is the quickest way anyone can get lost in the weeds IMHO. you've got all this information, right? you spent so much time developing this world and you're really, really excited to share it with other people, pages and pages of notes and ref sheets and scene outlines. so you start writing a dialogue scene, let's say, and one of the characters pauses to make an observation about some piece of set dressing. that's good, you want the reader to have a sense of place in the moment! but you as writer don't just know what's in the room, you know the history of everything in that room, and you know that you're almost certainly never gonna return to this room again. so what, do you just let all that lore go to waste? no, of course not, you put too much effort in, you HAVE to use it. so what could have been a couple lines of descriptive narration becomes a paragraph or more of direct exposition. instead of evocatively expressing how the odd design of a candelabra adds unwelcome tension to the scene, you end up talking about the art movement its design philosophy came out of, all the hands the candelabra passed through to get to this room and all the drama it might have witnessed, the history of its industrial production and where its component metals were mined, whether or not slave labor was used in the wicking of its candles, and on and on. this can be fine, anything can be fine if you write it good, but usually it's not. JRR Tolkien did not keep one of the most important relationships in The Lord of the Rings almost entirely relegated to the Appendices just for you to be like "no everything must go in." save it for the back matter, boss!

but. but but but. i am not an orthodox "show don't tell" writer. i think there are many many cases, in fact, where it's exponentially more expedient and useful to tell instead of show. thing is, i like good exposition! sometimes it's nice to just be told some shit outright, and in sci-fi settings that's often necessary. and honestly i think even the staunchest "show don't tell" people know this. that's why there's so many scene set in classrooms or offices or at a workplace, settings where it's plausible for someone to deliver a paragraph of breathless technobabble uninterrupted (NOTE: if a character *does* interrupt to say some shit like "in English, doc!" you're no longer writing science fiction, you are writing Joss Whedon's next tv show). ironically, these scenes often end up feeling way clunkier than they should precisely because that's not really how people talk in those settings. it's all contrivance! it's all a balancing act! again, at the end of the day, the difference between shit and brilliance is whether or not you wrote it good.

i have tons of lore and history and random details cued up for Godfeels and i'm constantly chomping at the bit to share them at length. but i also understand that those ideas are only interesting insofar as they relate to the characters experiencing them. i've very deliberately constructed Double Album so that the central cast is as clueless about the new setting as we are. they have questions when we have questions, they learn shit when we learn shit. but the fish out of water thing gets old really fucking fast, so i put a lot of work into setting up the cast to all have very different reactions to the situation. for instance, Calliope wants to learn everything they possibly can about the EWL, but (Terezi) is aggressively indifferent. now the introduction of exposition serves multiple functions at once, both as simple worldbuilding and as a locus of character conflict. here's my obligatory nod to LOST, a show that's all about getting us hooked on interesting questions through the eyes of many radically different characters. it's good to have a plausible vehicle for exposition, but it's just as good to have a counterbalance of anti-exposition. the more grounded perspectives you can draw out on a particular bit of information, the more organic its inclusion will feel.

i think it's useful here to refer back to Homestuck's own creative dichotomy of Meat and Candy. Meat is hard and chewy but satisfying and leaves you full; Candy is sweet and exciting and easy in the moment but it's not satiating and might leave you feeling sick. i think a good story, irrespective of genre, always finds ways to constructively oscillate between feeding the audience Meat and Candy. everything in Godfeels is written with this in mind. Chapter 8 is this massive explosion of wild traumatic elements that hurtle the Homestuck cast into a completely new setting, and if it works at all that's because i went to great pains to balance the Meats and the Candies along the way. i couldn't possibly just do normal Godfeels stuff and then introduce my OCs sight unseen and expect the readers to come along peacefully. that's like classic self-insert fanfic rookie mistake shit.

writing Chapter 8 felt like solving a complicated math problem. every time new elements get introduced, there's a rubber band back to something familiar. when we get really dark and serious for a while, there's humor or lightness that breaks through soon after. the Chapter 8 Epilogue is 100% exposition, and i only got away with that because it comes after the most emotionally harrowing sequence of events in the story so far. i bought the reader's tolerance of technobabble candy like denexustic radiation and fabulgrade dementia with mountains of meaty melodrama and character death. readers accepted the intrusion of Dana and Lenore because their relevance was seeded through our growing distrust of Silverbark over many tens of thousands of words. they accept that Risk and Dare are fully their own characters now because i wrote a chapter about them the length of a fucking novel. Divergence Syndrome is 233k+ words long, almost half of the entire wordcount of Godfeels, and that's because nearly every chapter meticulously sets up a multitude of hooks related to things that will come later. the new ideas are threaded into the old ones with care and patience so that, hopefully, the reader barely even notices the change when we've gone full space opera. if Double Album doesn't feel like it gets lost in the weeds, that's because i made sure to give the audience a pretty comprehensive map of at the least the edges of those weeds before they were even a conceivable destination. conveniently, this also makes my own job a lot easier too. you're not the only one who needs a map, after all!

i think also it helps to have convenient outlets for the expository impulse outside of specific characters. Double Album's paramniscient epistolary format exists the way it does precisely so that i can deliver hard unambiguous exposition and tell a dynamic character story simultaneously. track B1's flashbacks are told through documents whose formatting and quirks imply things about the EWL. we catch glimpses of a wider world, in the way you would by reading a US military report as someone who's never heard of the US before. incidental, and maybe infuriatingly unremarked upon at first. this is good! going back to the Meat/Candy split, as writers we're essentially strategizing around the reader's appetite. never let them have too much of the same thing all at once, and never let them feel full until you want them to put the book down for the night. carefully metered exposition can create an exquisite hunger in the audience. this is a dangerous force to play with because readers love to make up their own meals while waiting for you to feed them again, and sometimes they'll get so invested in what they cooked up that your actual intended course arrives as a disappointment... which can, unfortunately, turn into harassment and stalking if your readership is deranged enough. HOWEVER. i still think it is broadly good to not give the reader everything they want when they want it. good stories linger in our minds precisely for the dark corners and bizarre alleys we wanted to learn more about but never could. a story that is fully, satisfyingly self-contained and wrapped up in a neat little bow is a story that will almost certainly fade from people's minds over time.

you have to wait. you have to be patient. i know you want to show off how cool your ideas are, but you must restrain yourself. none of it will mean anything until the reader has a context for it, and a belly hungry enough that they want to eat it. think of the shipping grid in Homestuck. that's explained to us in one of the most infamous bits of exposition in the history of web fiction, but it notably comes after we've already had a lot of time to see how trolls interact with each other. attentive readers will have picked up on the fact that troll romance is peculiar, and that their social norms seem to defy ours in certain ways. the reader doesn't know WHY this is the case, but their not knowing why isn't the same as being so confused that they might as well be reading Greek. in short, the way to avoid getting lost in the weeds is to navigate the weeds as if you aren't lost. you might think that a certain concept is ESSENTIAL to explain as soon as it's relevant, but you actually can get away with being vague for a really fucking long time if you play your cards right.

think of yourself as a climber leading a group up the mountain you've spent months if not years exploring. you are always going to know more about this place than they ever could, unless they're already experts or they decide to become experts. you might feel the urge to explain everything you find cool about the hike, but if you did, you'd never reach the top before sundown. much as it might pain you, the hikers you're guiding don't need to know the history of every bush and every rock. if you guide them with intention and confidence, then if nothing else they'll know that you know where you're going, and that's all you need. maybe inside you ARE flying by the seat of your pants and are constantly improvising new directions on the fly without telling anyone, maybe you're terrified that you're a fraud and everyone knows it... but they don't, and they never will if you never show it. they might be confused or not understand why one way is quicker/safer than another, and maybe you're cool enough to stop and explain it every once in a while, but you don't have time to explain everything and ultimately they're not the ones who've climbed this mountain before. as long as you give them a good view and take care of them on the way up, make them laugh, make them cry, make them want more, you'll quickly learn that readers in fact need exponentially less than what they say they need to be satisfied.