Necromanticist

(This is a bit about how I'm annoyed by stock creative advice. However, it's not a joke.)

For your very first project, start as big as you can. Work on your dream project right away. Learn how to tune and present things by bashing your head against something bigger than yourself. Internalize the feeling of defeat, the feeling of spotting the white whale at last. You'll need them if you want to make anything meaningful. Only after enlightened exhaustion can you begin your work on Snake.

Give into fear and shame. Your ancestors did not evolve fear and shame over millions of years for you to ignore them when doing something expressly meaningful to you. Ask yourself why you feel these things-- Do you fear failure? What are you ashamed of? Can you learn something about your values by asking these questions? Listen to fear and shame, defeat them if it's necessary for your soul, but never ignore them.

Think inside the box. There are thousands of years of tradition on how to write good sentences; even if your artistic medium is too young to vote, the question of how to do good writing did not originate with it. Just figure out the problem you need to solve ("My page is blank", &cet) and write the most obvious of the good, voiceful sentences that could solve it. Problem-solving creativity-- Do something weird, outside-the-box, &cet only when you (a) can clearly articulate the problem you need your sentence to solve, and (b) have tried the most obvious solution and it's not enough.

Seriously, don't worry about whether your art is something only you could make. Anyone can make art only they can make by publishing their social security number on itch. Worry about making obvious, good, voiceful sentences. You ever read a mathematical proof? Hundreds of the most obvious possible sentences strung together, literally just "if this is true, then this is true", and they still read like the author is pulling back the curtain of the night sky to reveal truth. By just saying true things in an order.

Don't worry about the inherent qualities of your medium. Sure, people have different ideas about what constitutes a good sentence in blogwriting vs. poetry vs. TTRPG design vs. Rust programming. But your voice is more important than any of these things. Just write a good sentence at a time (I keep saying sentences, but a single good whatever the atom of your creative project is). Then, figure out what problem your text has, and write a good sentence to solve it. Don't worry about whether you're in the "right" medium, and by god don't worry about whether you're saying something you can only say in that medium.

Think obsessively about your audience. Even books are interactive. Even self-indulgent smut for your eyes only starts a conversation between the you-author and the you-experiencer. Conversation. Whatever moral values you have regarding spoken or written conversations apply here, too. Even a tiresome monologue needs a listener.

Distrust your intuition. When you write a sentence that just seems right, and you don't know why, don't say "Well, my intuition knows best." That's how you get thoughtless caricature antagonists, the replication of kyriarchy laundered in as archetype or intuition. Perhaps say "I'm going to pause a moment and figure out why this sentence is effective", or perhaps "I'm going to continue writing, as a way of engaging with this sentence to figure out how it works." There is no Outside.

Don't join an artistic community. Find world-weary weirdos. Make loved ones, those who you can make art with, about, for. Learn to pick fights about art in a kind, compassionate way, and then pick fights about art all the goddamn time. Get people who will talk about art with you like you're an opponent in a board game. Be a bit of a curmudgeon, if you can do so kindly.

Don't try to change the world. Art is all talk. If the process of making and distributing your art feeds people, that's something you are doing rather than the art (and that's a very good thing).

Accept only perfection. Or at least a local maximum. Fight for something.

it’s time for me to start a podcast with mattress ads.

Several years ago, back when I was on twitter, I saw someone post something to the effect of "I love Higurashi and Umineko, but if Ryushiki07 isn't a bad writer, no one is a bad writer".

I think they're probably right: the only possible conclusion is that no one is a bad writer.

I mean, what's the alternative? You could say a lot of bad things about his prose. Some of those scenes are more awkward than a puppet with its strings cut. You could also say his works are about ten times longer than they need to be, and a better writer could do it much more cleanly and concisely. You can feel, in real time, as you read through When They Cry, that this guy is figuring out how to write as he's doing it. That very first chapter of Higurashi relies so much on the twist and shock of violence and mystery, and like its many imitators, doesn't have much more. Many writers can do stories like this better written and better paced and spend their career writing little shocking horror stories that are captivating while you're reading and amazing at hiding until the very end they have nothing to say and aren't really about anything.

But he keeps going. He's got these characters and this story, but he has so much more to say. So he doesn't stop: he uses this small town and a small group of teenage friends to go over municipal politics, labor organizing, and right-wing postwar politics as characters hang out and wear maid costumes and eventually get around to killing each other. Is someone who is fundamentally broken and capable of horrible things still worthy of love? And then some kids Home Alone the military. He wants to do a lot, and what he wants to do is so sprawling and ambitious he stumbles constantly and takes forever doing it. A writer trained for decades would be able to do all this much more efficiently, but they also wouldn't be Ryukshi07.

So we've arrived at a kind of impasse. If Ryukishi07 had no other way of writing it, maybe bad writing is good actually, because it does ultimately get people to work on time. There aren't many "bad writers" I'd give a pass like I do Ryukishi, but what does it actually mean, and how does it materially matter, that his writing is 'bad', if he still does exactly what he wishes to accomplish and he does it very well? He's good at something, and his writing is a part of that.

Last year I read Swann's Way, and something I find kind of fun about Proust is that he writes In Search Of Lost Time kind of like a webcomic. Sorry to say that about a foundational text of modern western literature, but I mean it as a complement. I love the way that big, ambitious character-focused works that are begun without an end in mind change over time. The novel is not a "structured" "linear" "story" but a medium for him to explore life through the characters he's created and the society he inhabits, as he tries over and over to capture lost moments from the past He is wandering and exploring, searching for something through time.

Proust was also a kind of laughable caricature of an aspirational writer, but his raw ambition of Being A Writer propelled him through the tremendous difficulty of Not Actually Having Written anything. Compared to novels of the time, he did structurally, basically everything wrong. Not to mention starting your career with a seven-part work literally too long to finish in a lifetime, a classic rookie mistake.

Still, like a lifetime-running comic that is never finished, In Search Of Lost Time can be whatever he needs to be for whatever he wants to explore, and ultimately this was a much more interesting thing for him to do than write what someone would have generally expected from a novel.He's not planning or undertaking the work 'correctly'; he learns as he's doing and the strength of his prose sustains him while he figures it out.

I think it's a good lesson in that to do it, you have to do it, even if you pick the worst and most insane possible way to do it. Doing it wrong is a creative process that is shared by literary greats and visual novelists alike.

When I taught Rhetoric and Composition, everyone expected me to get mad about grammar. Even in my career as a dev, I get engineers trying telling me all the time I can't start sentences with "but", as if the English language has a parser that'll yell at me. Knowing grammar and style is important, and writing is not just vibes and instinct, but knowing the rules also means knowing how to use them.

Listen, you only get one semester of Rhetoric and Composition 101. You think I can teach you everything about writing in four months? If all you could do was only barely start teaching someone one thing about writing, what would it be? Which there/they're/their to use? Or how to interrogate and express your own ideas?

Part of teaching writing is being nitpicky and unfair because incorrect style will be judged, like you might due for any typos you find here. Listen, buddy, no one's paying me for this one. You're lucky I'm editing it at all! I wouldn't have written it otherwise. This is the only way you're getting this essay.

The worst thing anyone can say about anything ever is that it has "good writing". Which of the literally infinite qualities of writing are you fucking talking about? Strong line level prose with beautiful description? Vivid characterization? How? Through dialogue? Interiority? Shit that makes you laugh? You got the feels? The dialogue feels natural? The dialogue feels unnatural, but in a cool way? Did it inform you on a current event? Was the worldbuilding consistent? Is the hard science researched? Did it cite sources in MLA style?

Imagine if the only guidelines that existed for proper formatting, grammar, and spelling were all made by and for academics and journalists, and there was precious little agreement or education on how to write well when one is being creative and making art.

It would be so difficult to become excellent at creative writing when the writing standards you were studying considered only cared about the legibility and maintainability of your prose and without considering expression.

Anyways, what was I talking about? Code? Seriously? I don't know anything about code! It took me a week straight of work to make this happen in Godot:

Looks like a beautiful waterfall, doesn't it? Wrong. Zoom in on that sample texture.

What you thought was a beautiful waterfall is in fact 047.JPG, an image from a Gainax sample texture CD. Not so nice now, huh?

Anyways, can someone tell me if this is good coding? I think that's what this post is about.