There’s an endless supply of metaphors for the act of living. Life is like cooking. Life is like music. Life is war. Life is theatre. My personal favorite is probably “life is like a video game”, which might seem basic and cringe from some angles, but I instinctively return to it often because it’s such a natural fit for me. There are very few things that really have you controlling a particular character and their actions, making decisions, running and jumping, or gathering resources and so on.
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I’ve changed my mind multiple times and gone in circles about what I want to be doing with this substack. When explaining it to my wife on one of our long walks together, I found myself saying that it’s like I’ve put in all this work into doing the worldbuilding lore for my version of Game of Thrones– all this backstory about the First Men and the various houses and so on– but I hadn’t yet figured out who my protagonists would be, what my pilot episode would be. And I realize now, I think over a year later, that I’ve been putting too much pressure on myself to try and make a big story happen. It makes far more sense for me to do sketches. And I’ve brushed up against this realization a couple of times. But I would then return to my initial plan of basically grunting and straining against something too big to budge.
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A while ago I read The Goal (1984), a book by Eliyahu Goldratt about manufacturing processes and the theory of constraints. I’d witnessed it being recommended by several people who are very serious about managing their processes, and I was stuck in my own process, so I thought what the hell, I’ll check it out. It’s written as a work of fiction. Which immediately reminded me of another book I’d been reading, The Richest Man in Babylon (1926), which was also written as a work of fiction. Immediately I found myself wondering… maybe the thing I’m trying to do with Frame Studies might be best achieved as a work of fiction? But I don’t have a lot of experience writing fiction, and I definitely don’t have any experience writing-and-publishing serialized fiction. But it resonates with me nonetheless as something that might be very worth exploring. Maybe the best way to do it would be to write fanfiction using my interpretations of characters from other frame stories. Or, well. That’s one way to do it, anyway. It seems like it might be fun, but it’s also scary because I imagine I would mess it up. There’s probably a clever solution to that, which would involve a feasible explanation for why things are clunky and messed up… the way Toy Story (1995) was about toys particularly because 3d animation at the time wasn’t very good yet, and an animated movie about toys was more convincing than an animated movie about people.
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Anyway, why did I bring up The Goal? Because… well, I thought it was a really good way to get the reader invested in a particular struggle. Right away from the first couple of pages, there’s all this tension and conflict at the manufacturing plant between workers and management and the representative of the customer, and you want to know out how it’s all going to work out. Later we learn that the protagonist is also having troubles in his marriage, which some reviewers found unnecessary, but I personally thought it made for a more compelling portrait of a situation. It makes sense that the guy who isn’t doing great at work because of his poor management, likely isn’t doing great at managing his home front either.
Similarly, I remember getting kind of emotional at the opening pages of The Richest Man in Babylon, again for its really great description of a decent hard-working chariot-maker who’s struggling to make ends meet and can’t quite understand why. He’s discouraged, he’s looking at his partially-completed chariot, and his wife’s furtive glances reminds him that the meal bag was almost empty. His best friend, a musician, shows up to ask to borrow a couple of shekels, and he gloomily confesses to having nothing to spare. The two of them comisserate over their unhappy financial affairs and then resolve to seek advice from– cue the title card– the richest man in Babylon.
In both cases I think I was really struck by the fullness of the descriptions of the scenarios. A really great description is something that can be compelling far beyond any intent that the describer might have had.
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OH, I remember now. I brought up The Goal because I wanted to discuss something specific about inventories! I had previously internalized some idea like, “It’s never a bad thing to have more drafts. You should always be sketching, always be producing more drafts. A large ‘warehouse’ of drafts is proof-of-work that you’re a serious creative.” As I say it out loud I realize it sounds a little bit silly, and that I’m falling into a kind of hoarder’s mindset. And I had this mindset dislodged slightly when reading The Goal and there was something about how… when there are too many work-in-progress parts on the factory floor, it can get confusing for the workers, and create mixups and confusion which lead to slower production.
I have a whole separate draft somewhere– several drafts, I think– where I try to make sense of why I have a hoarder’s mindset with my drafts. (I know, I know…) The short answer is that I believe I was kinda traumatized by a couple of bad experiences in the past, one when I lost my entire blog to a server crash, wiping out the largest cache of my writing from ages ~10-16, and another was when I deleted many of my own blogposts in an attempt to streamline things, without being clear about whether or not I had first exported them, and where I kept those exports. There’s a chance they still might be in an xml file somewhere in a folder of folders on a hard drive or something, but I’ve never quite been able to take the time to really search for it– some parallels here with my evergreen fantasy of reading all my chatlogs with my wife, or going through all of my photos on my phone. Intellectually I know the solution is to work the problem and break it down into a project with manageable sub-projects– maybe spend a weekend just focused on a single year’s worth of stuff, for example. But in practice I haven’t seemed to have been able to stick to the plan without getting distracted by a dozen things.