The Last to Comment Wins
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JayMark
It's Not Easy Being Nobody, But Somebody Has To.
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Tempokai
The Overworked One
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2021
- Messages
- 1,396
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- 153
Tempokai
The Overworked One
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2021
- Messages
- 1,396
- Points
- 153
I'm winning currently by having two good short stories from you know what I'll don't post anywhere besides here:
"'In the quiet districts of Osaka, in one of the residential areas, a young man was having a nightmare.' Scratch that."
That was my first sentence. I threw it at the page like a drunk darts player and then, out of some misguided respect for literature, I erased it. Too banal. Too student-film. Too “what if a ghost was also feelings.” I wanted a story. Not just words arranged like respectable furniture around a yawning blank. I wanted the story I keep seeing out of the corner of my eye, the one that flickers like a fish in shallow water when I blink. It wriggles away when I reach for it. It’s very spiritual that way, by which I mean profoundly annoying.
Draft two: a stoic detective on a ferry in the Seto Inland Sea, watching gulls like origami. Then I remembered I hate birds and that I know nothing about ferries beyond the concept “boat with commitment issues.” Delete.
Draft three: a grandmother and her late husband’s empty slippers, a bowl of broth cooling. I liked that one until the slipper metaphor started stomping through every paragraph like a clumsy chorus line. Delete.
Draft four: cyberpunk messiah. Delete, because I do not want to be the three-millionth person to misunderstand neon.
Draft five: something about time travel and a carp. It ate its own tail and vomited clichés.
All right, I thought, so the drafts fall flat. Fine. Failure is data. Scientists love it, artists pretend to love it, and writers write about it with a poker face. The data suggested I needed a training arc. Every hero has one. The narrative equivalent of push-ups and a montage. Cue the aggressive violin score and a coffee budget that could destabilize a small economy.
I started with the academics, because if you’re going to be insufferable you might as well study with the masters. I bought books with serious equations: syuzhet versus fabula; diegesis versus mimesis; focalization; heterodiegetic narrators; the narratological armory. I learned that stories could be dissected like frogs, and that frogs, having poor legal teams, rarely get to object. I underlined Barthes until he bled. I put Freytag’s pyramid next to Campbell’s monomyth and kissed them together like action figures. Inciting incident, rising action, crisis, climax, denouement. The elegant bones of a story, stripped of the messy organs that turn bone into something that moves.
I went to a lecture where a professor used the word “liminality” nine times in one hour like it was a spell to get tenure. I took notes. My notes were all arrows pointing to arrows. I wrote: “Consider the ethics of representing the Other when the Other is me and also a couch.” I wrote: “What if narrative is a trap designed by language to force meaning out of chaos?” I wrote: “Remember to grocery shop.”
The problem with studying stories like machines is you start to think you can assemble one with a screwdriver and a prayer. I wanted an engine; I built a catechism.
Fine. Pivot to the streets. I joined the webnovel crowds, the update-daily warriors who sprint marathons and call it a warm-up. I made an account under a name (author\_DragonBoi\_17, because shame is for people with dignity) and lurked in forums where readers devoured chapters like pocket candy. These people had rules. Cliffhangers every thousand words. Protagonist must suffer, but cleverly. Tags are liturgy: \[Slice of Life], \[System], \[Harem], \[Villainess], \[Slow Burn], \[Wholesome], \[Regicide]. A good title is half a synopsis and the other half a confessional: “I Reincarnated as the Unwanted Side Character in a Game I Designed and Now I Run a Cafe.” They understood something the academy didn’t: if you don’t update on Tuesday, your readers will hunt you. They also had charts. I love charts. Heat maps of engagement. Drop-off curves. “Hook early, slay late.” They spoke of “wordcount discipline” and “retention.” They jogged in place so the algorithm god would see their devotion and nod.
I learned to end chapters with a hand hovering over a doorknob. I learned to make the doorknob a metaphor for betrayal. I learned that making a protagonist overpowered is a religion with more schisms than Christianity. I learned to make my sentences easy to swallow, smooth as oatmeal. I wrote a serial about a man who opened a ramen shop in the underworld and took souls as payment. I got twenty-seven comments, mostly polite, some feral. “Update faster.” “Make the ghost waifu.” “More food details.” “Drop the food details.” The crowds taught me to write decisively and ignore them selectively. They also taught me that they did not want the story I wanted; they wanted the story they wanted. The lucky writer is the Venn diagram where those circles intersect.
Then, of course, I asked the machines. I fed an LLM my broken outlines. “Outline a psychological drama set in Osaka about insomnia, memory, and debt,” I typed, like I was ordering a sandwich with adjectives. It suggested: “Act I: Introduce protagonist and routine. Inciting Incident: Disturbance to sleep cycle. Theme: The cost of avoidance.” It was not wrong. It was never wrong. It was the sort of right that feels like a polite lie. It said, “Show, don’t tell,” with the confidence of a thousand internet writing tutors. It said, “Use sensory detail: the flicker of a neon sign, the hiss of kettle water, the metallic tang of fear.” It said, “Establish stakes by page ten.” It said a thousand solid things like a thousand sturdy chairs. I could sit in them forever and never go anywhere.
I made spreadsheets. Of course I made spreadsheets. Color-coded arcs, beat sheets (Save the Cat! beat 5 goes there, don’t you dare forget the Dark Night of the Soul or the story police will issue a ticket), a Snowflake Method that grew into a blizzard. I plotted scenes on index cards and flicked them on the floor so it looked like my apartment had been assassinated by stationery. I learned Kishōtenketsu because I wanted to be elegant and also inscrutable. Four-act structure, twist as development, conflict optional, thank you Japan for permission to exist without a villain every five minutes. I taught myself that sentences could calm down if I let them. Then I tied them to chairs and tried to calm them harder.
The quality improved. That is the worst news. Improvement is seductive; it whispers: you’re almost there. My paragraphs clicked like cutlery in a drawer. My metaphors didn’t mix like a teenager’s drink. The scene transitions were smooth enough that you could skate on them. I used motif sparingly, like salt. I didn’t kill all my adverbs; some of them had families. I became the sort of writer who could be proud in public.
But the story—the thing that hummed in my skull through all the gentle humiliations of wasted thought—the story did not arrive. Or rather, it kept arriving as a corpse. It arrived embalmed in technique and respectability. It arrived wearing borrowed clothes. It arrived as the shadow of itself cast on an expensive wall.
I doubted. Doubt is boring, but it’s an honest worker. Doubt made me throw out another draft, this one about a maintenance man who fixes apartment buzzers and occasionally hears confessions through intercoms. That one had a pulse. I strangled it with three subplots and a flashback to a monastery. Doubt made me try a minimalist version, skeletal and tasteful, the literary equivalent of furniture that hurts to sit on. Doubt made me entangle my characters in precise dilemmas with moral math, and then doubt made me hate them for obeying the equation. When I wrote a good sentence, I distrusted it for showing off. When I wrote a bad sentence, I distrusted it for being honest.
The story I wanted stayed quiet, the way cats do when they suspect the vet.
I stopped training. Not dramatically. There was no cinematic bonfire of textbooks. I just got tired of talking about stories like they were a mountain I was mapping instead of one I had to climb and fall off repeatedly. I closed the tabs, put away the index cards, and let the kitchen reclaim the table. I made a bowl of noodles that did not symbolize anything except carbohydrates. I sat at the desk while the sun surrendered to a dull orange city. I remembered the first sentence I murdered on day one.
“In the quiet districts of Osaka,” I typed, and did not scratch it out this time, not yet. I pictured actual streets I had actually walked, that very unfashionable ten minutes between a train station and a corner shop where you discover life is mostly residential. The air is mild, occasionally fraudulent. The cats own the alleys. The vending machines glow like bored gods. A young man lives there, sure. So do an old woman, a child who skulks like a cat, a night-shift nurse, a businessman who stores rage in neat stacks, a shabby novelist who is very busy failing. The young man is having a nightmare. The nightmare isn’t profitable. It is not a symbolic dragon or an allegory about capitalism. It is shaped like the thing he won’t say out loud: he owes money, he owes apologies, he owes a version of himself he promised he’d become and never did.
I did not add a twist about his dream predicting a flood. I did not bless him with an ancient sword in a convenience store. I did not pace the scene for optimized engagement. I let him be particular instead of universal. He wears socks with lemons on them because they were on sale. He thinks he has fooled everyone he loves; he has fooled no one. He wakes to the sound of a distant garbage truck—it beeps backwards like a tired heart monitor. He sits up. He forgets his dream in the efficient way the brain protects cowards. He does what all of us do when stories refuse to be grand: he makes coffee and tries again.
This is where the training was not useless. The professors taught me names for things so I could stop staring at them like ghosts. The webnovel crowd taught me stamina and where to place the end of a rope if you want someone to hang on through the next paragraph. The machines taught me that a competent outline is not a soul and that competence is not a sin. But I didn’t need them to tell me the obvious: when you want to tell a story you care about, you have to let it be small and let it be yours. Thrilling, I know. Groundbreaking. Please award me a grant.
The young man leaves his apartment. He walks to the corner store. He nods to the clerk who has the world’s worst haircut and the world’s best memory for regulars. He buys milk, even though he’s starting to think adults are supposed to drink almond or regret. On the way back, he passes the elderly woman who feeds strays. She says good morning like it’s a new idea. He remembers a debt and then forgets it again. A girl drags a suitcase, the wheels battering the pavement. The vending machine hums. The air is not quite cool yet and tries to pretend otherwise. None of this is a setup. It’s just the lane he walks down when he thinks no one is watching.
I could give him a plot now. I could engineer a crisis and aim Freytag’s triangle at his head like a weapon. I could connect him to the detective, to the grandmother, to the buzzers, to the ramen underworld, to a long arc that bends into a satisfying click. Or I could do the thing I should have done from the start: put him on the page and stop filing his life into theme. He will have to do the rest because he is a person, not a slot.
Maybe, eventually, a pattern appears, the way footsteps wear a smooth lane into stone. Maybe there is a night when the nightmare returns with teeth, and he actually pays the bill that has been haunting him like a weak ghost. Maybe he apologizes and isn’t forgiven. Maybe he forgives and isn’t thanked. Maybe he buys a new pair of socks with strawberries. Maybe he starts to sleep. None of this is the kind of beauty that convinces strangers to clap. It is the kind that convinces someone to keep walking.
So yes, I wanted a story. I did the respectable things, the foolish things, the technical things, the crowdsourced things. I made it elegant and I made it edible, and neither gave me the taste I was after. I gave up, or what counts as giving up for a person whose entire personality is a series of retries. I started to write, which is either the crassest or the bravest move available. I let the sentence be the sentence, and I let the nightmare be a nightmare instead of a referendum on the human condition. I let Osaka be a city and not an atmosphere. I let a vending machine be a vending machine. I let a young man be a young man, which in literature is radical only because we insist on making him a statue.
Now, I will try again, and for once I won’t flinch. I’ll begin where I began and refuse to apologize to my past drafts for moving on without them. This time, I will not say “scratch that.” I will simply let it run, and see if the running sounds like heartbeats. If it doesn’t, I will still have walked the lane.
“In the quiet districts of Osaka, in one of the residential areas, a young man was having a nightmare...”
That was my first sentence. I threw it at the page like a drunk darts player and then, out of some misguided respect for literature, I erased it. Too banal. Too student-film. Too “what if a ghost was also feelings.” I wanted a story. Not just words arranged like respectable furniture around a yawning blank. I wanted the story I keep seeing out of the corner of my eye, the one that flickers like a fish in shallow water when I blink. It wriggles away when I reach for it. It’s very spiritual that way, by which I mean profoundly annoying.
Draft two: a stoic detective on a ferry in the Seto Inland Sea, watching gulls like origami. Then I remembered I hate birds and that I know nothing about ferries beyond the concept “boat with commitment issues.” Delete.
Draft three: a grandmother and her late husband’s empty slippers, a bowl of broth cooling. I liked that one until the slipper metaphor started stomping through every paragraph like a clumsy chorus line. Delete.
Draft four: cyberpunk messiah. Delete, because I do not want to be the three-millionth person to misunderstand neon.
Draft five: something about time travel and a carp. It ate its own tail and vomited clichés.
All right, I thought, so the drafts fall flat. Fine. Failure is data. Scientists love it, artists pretend to love it, and writers write about it with a poker face. The data suggested I needed a training arc. Every hero has one. The narrative equivalent of push-ups and a montage. Cue the aggressive violin score and a coffee budget that could destabilize a small economy.
I started with the academics, because if you’re going to be insufferable you might as well study with the masters. I bought books with serious equations: syuzhet versus fabula; diegesis versus mimesis; focalization; heterodiegetic narrators; the narratological armory. I learned that stories could be dissected like frogs, and that frogs, having poor legal teams, rarely get to object. I underlined Barthes until he bled. I put Freytag’s pyramid next to Campbell’s monomyth and kissed them together like action figures. Inciting incident, rising action, crisis, climax, denouement. The elegant bones of a story, stripped of the messy organs that turn bone into something that moves.
I went to a lecture where a professor used the word “liminality” nine times in one hour like it was a spell to get tenure. I took notes. My notes were all arrows pointing to arrows. I wrote: “Consider the ethics of representing the Other when the Other is me and also a couch.” I wrote: “What if narrative is a trap designed by language to force meaning out of chaos?” I wrote: “Remember to grocery shop.”
The problem with studying stories like machines is you start to think you can assemble one with a screwdriver and a prayer. I wanted an engine; I built a catechism.
Fine. Pivot to the streets. I joined the webnovel crowds, the update-daily warriors who sprint marathons and call it a warm-up. I made an account under a name (author\_DragonBoi\_17, because shame is for people with dignity) and lurked in forums where readers devoured chapters like pocket candy. These people had rules. Cliffhangers every thousand words. Protagonist must suffer, but cleverly. Tags are liturgy: \[Slice of Life], \[System], \[Harem], \[Villainess], \[Slow Burn], \[Wholesome], \[Regicide]. A good title is half a synopsis and the other half a confessional: “I Reincarnated as the Unwanted Side Character in a Game I Designed and Now I Run a Cafe.” They understood something the academy didn’t: if you don’t update on Tuesday, your readers will hunt you. They also had charts. I love charts. Heat maps of engagement. Drop-off curves. “Hook early, slay late.” They spoke of “wordcount discipline” and “retention.” They jogged in place so the algorithm god would see their devotion and nod.
I learned to end chapters with a hand hovering over a doorknob. I learned to make the doorknob a metaphor for betrayal. I learned that making a protagonist overpowered is a religion with more schisms than Christianity. I learned to make my sentences easy to swallow, smooth as oatmeal. I wrote a serial about a man who opened a ramen shop in the underworld and took souls as payment. I got twenty-seven comments, mostly polite, some feral. “Update faster.” “Make the ghost waifu.” “More food details.” “Drop the food details.” The crowds taught me to write decisively and ignore them selectively. They also taught me that they did not want the story I wanted; they wanted the story they wanted. The lucky writer is the Venn diagram where those circles intersect.
Then, of course, I asked the machines. I fed an LLM my broken outlines. “Outline a psychological drama set in Osaka about insomnia, memory, and debt,” I typed, like I was ordering a sandwich with adjectives. It suggested: “Act I: Introduce protagonist and routine. Inciting Incident: Disturbance to sleep cycle. Theme: The cost of avoidance.” It was not wrong. It was never wrong. It was the sort of right that feels like a polite lie. It said, “Show, don’t tell,” with the confidence of a thousand internet writing tutors. It said, “Use sensory detail: the flicker of a neon sign, the hiss of kettle water, the metallic tang of fear.” It said, “Establish stakes by page ten.” It said a thousand solid things like a thousand sturdy chairs. I could sit in them forever and never go anywhere.
I made spreadsheets. Of course I made spreadsheets. Color-coded arcs, beat sheets (Save the Cat! beat 5 goes there, don’t you dare forget the Dark Night of the Soul or the story police will issue a ticket), a Snowflake Method that grew into a blizzard. I plotted scenes on index cards and flicked them on the floor so it looked like my apartment had been assassinated by stationery. I learned Kishōtenketsu because I wanted to be elegant and also inscrutable. Four-act structure, twist as development, conflict optional, thank you Japan for permission to exist without a villain every five minutes. I taught myself that sentences could calm down if I let them. Then I tied them to chairs and tried to calm them harder.
The quality improved. That is the worst news. Improvement is seductive; it whispers: you’re almost there. My paragraphs clicked like cutlery in a drawer. My metaphors didn’t mix like a teenager’s drink. The scene transitions were smooth enough that you could skate on them. I used motif sparingly, like salt. I didn’t kill all my adverbs; some of them had families. I became the sort of writer who could be proud in public.
But the story—the thing that hummed in my skull through all the gentle humiliations of wasted thought—the story did not arrive. Or rather, it kept arriving as a corpse. It arrived embalmed in technique and respectability. It arrived wearing borrowed clothes. It arrived as the shadow of itself cast on an expensive wall.
I doubted. Doubt is boring, but it’s an honest worker. Doubt made me throw out another draft, this one about a maintenance man who fixes apartment buzzers and occasionally hears confessions through intercoms. That one had a pulse. I strangled it with three subplots and a flashback to a monastery. Doubt made me try a minimalist version, skeletal and tasteful, the literary equivalent of furniture that hurts to sit on. Doubt made me entangle my characters in precise dilemmas with moral math, and then doubt made me hate them for obeying the equation. When I wrote a good sentence, I distrusted it for showing off. When I wrote a bad sentence, I distrusted it for being honest.
The story I wanted stayed quiet, the way cats do when they suspect the vet.
I stopped training. Not dramatically. There was no cinematic bonfire of textbooks. I just got tired of talking about stories like they were a mountain I was mapping instead of one I had to climb and fall off repeatedly. I closed the tabs, put away the index cards, and let the kitchen reclaim the table. I made a bowl of noodles that did not symbolize anything except carbohydrates. I sat at the desk while the sun surrendered to a dull orange city. I remembered the first sentence I murdered on day one.
“In the quiet districts of Osaka,” I typed, and did not scratch it out this time, not yet. I pictured actual streets I had actually walked, that very unfashionable ten minutes between a train station and a corner shop where you discover life is mostly residential. The air is mild, occasionally fraudulent. The cats own the alleys. The vending machines glow like bored gods. A young man lives there, sure. So do an old woman, a child who skulks like a cat, a night-shift nurse, a businessman who stores rage in neat stacks, a shabby novelist who is very busy failing. The young man is having a nightmare. The nightmare isn’t profitable. It is not a symbolic dragon or an allegory about capitalism. It is shaped like the thing he won’t say out loud: he owes money, he owes apologies, he owes a version of himself he promised he’d become and never did.
I did not add a twist about his dream predicting a flood. I did not bless him with an ancient sword in a convenience store. I did not pace the scene for optimized engagement. I let him be particular instead of universal. He wears socks with lemons on them because they were on sale. He thinks he has fooled everyone he loves; he has fooled no one. He wakes to the sound of a distant garbage truck—it beeps backwards like a tired heart monitor. He sits up. He forgets his dream in the efficient way the brain protects cowards. He does what all of us do when stories refuse to be grand: he makes coffee and tries again.
This is where the training was not useless. The professors taught me names for things so I could stop staring at them like ghosts. The webnovel crowd taught me stamina and where to place the end of a rope if you want someone to hang on through the next paragraph. The machines taught me that a competent outline is not a soul and that competence is not a sin. But I didn’t need them to tell me the obvious: when you want to tell a story you care about, you have to let it be small and let it be yours. Thrilling, I know. Groundbreaking. Please award me a grant.
The young man leaves his apartment. He walks to the corner store. He nods to the clerk who has the world’s worst haircut and the world’s best memory for regulars. He buys milk, even though he’s starting to think adults are supposed to drink almond or regret. On the way back, he passes the elderly woman who feeds strays. She says good morning like it’s a new idea. He remembers a debt and then forgets it again. A girl drags a suitcase, the wheels battering the pavement. The vending machine hums. The air is not quite cool yet and tries to pretend otherwise. None of this is a setup. It’s just the lane he walks down when he thinks no one is watching.
I could give him a plot now. I could engineer a crisis and aim Freytag’s triangle at his head like a weapon. I could connect him to the detective, to the grandmother, to the buzzers, to the ramen underworld, to a long arc that bends into a satisfying click. Or I could do the thing I should have done from the start: put him on the page and stop filing his life into theme. He will have to do the rest because he is a person, not a slot.
Maybe, eventually, a pattern appears, the way footsteps wear a smooth lane into stone. Maybe there is a night when the nightmare returns with teeth, and he actually pays the bill that has been haunting him like a weak ghost. Maybe he apologizes and isn’t forgiven. Maybe he forgives and isn’t thanked. Maybe he buys a new pair of socks with strawberries. Maybe he starts to sleep. None of this is the kind of beauty that convinces strangers to clap. It is the kind that convinces someone to keep walking.
So yes, I wanted a story. I did the respectable things, the foolish things, the technical things, the crowdsourced things. I made it elegant and I made it edible, and neither gave me the taste I was after. I gave up, or what counts as giving up for a person whose entire personality is a series of retries. I started to write, which is either the crassest or the bravest move available. I let the sentence be the sentence, and I let the nightmare be a nightmare instead of a referendum on the human condition. I let Osaka be a city and not an atmosphere. I let a vending machine be a vending machine. I let a young man be a young man, which in literature is radical only because we insist on making him a statue.
Now, I will try again, and for once I won’t flinch. I’ll begin where I began and refuse to apologize to my past drafts for moving on without them. This time, I will not say “scratch that.” I will simply let it run, and see if the running sounds like heartbeats. If it doesn’t, I will still have walked the lane.
“In the quiet districts of Osaka, in one of the residential areas, a young man was having a nightmare...”
Anonjohn20
Pen holding member
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Wah!
Anonjohn20
Pen holding member
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Now you have more time to meet your writing goals. lol jk
Tempokai
The Overworked One
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2021
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I literary fell asleep while writing a roast. I suddenly was hit with the mysterious urge to lay down in bed while listening to Dream Theater and zzz happened while lights were on. I'm winning currently by writing a roast.
Anonjohn20
Pen holding member
- Joined
- Mar 22, 2023
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