Preemptive Retaliation

I’ve been working on this post on and off for a few months now. Every time I wrote it, it felt trite or whiny. It was a problem with an obvious solution, but one that I was having a certain difficulty accepting. Still, time heals all, and all that.

The post I was initially going to write was about a game I had just finished playing called Hollow Knight and, before I go much further, if you haven’t played this game then I urge you to go do so. It is a terrific game from start to finish. The music and art are gorgeous, the mechanics are just so slick and perfect, and the story is illusive and alluring, and just go and get the thing. It’s brilliant, honestly.

Anyway, the post I was initially going to write was about a game, and how much I didn’t enjoy playing it that much.

This is mostly because I ruined it for myself. Through my run I had peeked online here and there to find some collectibles for upgrades, and in my peeking I accidentally uncovered that there were two endings. There was ending number 1, which was the bog standard kill the final boss ending, and there was the super secret kill the real boss true ending. There’s something about a super secret true ending that really entices me. My brother and I spent weekends searching out for them when we were kids (I used to have dreams about collecting banana birds from Donkey Kong Country 3) so maybe it’s ingrained to me to go for it. Either way, I started pursuing the true ending with reckless abandon. It was about then that I stopped enjoying the game.

I still played it though. I played it for another good six or seven hours, toiling my way through the levels, trying to get all the pick-ups and secrets needed. For every moment that passed I became frustrated; with myself and the game. I had turned something I enjoyed into a tick-box exercise. I was no longer exploring for the joy or exploring, but looking for a certain purpose. The art and music and tight mechanics were ignored in favour for what they led to, the metagame. It was all too much, and eventually I threw my hands up in the air, trudged to the final boss, and battled my way into the regular ending. The boring old regular ending.

Really though, it is a terrific game. I’m being serious.

The reason I was so focused on this was because it was reflecting how I felt about a certain piece of writing. There’s a story I’ve been working on for the past few years, and I didn’t know what to do about it. It’s the story of a private detective, working his hard life in an unforgiving city. It was all unoriginal and clichéd as hell, but the hook was that it was set inside a computer and the detective was an anti-virus. It was first vomited out during NaNo in 2013, and I had been meaning to get back to it seriously ever since. Between now and then I had written and rewritten the thing half a dozen times. The beginning, in true rookie fashion, had been combed over more times to count. There was an ending, clear as day in my mind. But it always had an anomalous middle. Things happened. People went places. Other people died.

So how is that related to Hollow Knight? Well, the simple answer is that I’m not enjoying writing about it anymore. No, wait, writing it would usually entail more than scribbling notes in a dedicated notebook – I’m not enjoying thinking about it anymore. At one point I did. At one point I really enjoyed thinking over the characters and coming up with different plot points in my mind. But then I didn’t. I didn’t like turning the thing over in my mind, like a puzzle that I couldn’t quite grasp the solution to. It was torturing me.

Now why didn’t I just abandon the story? Why didn’t I just trash it like the million other ideas that have been trashed in my mind? Well I was hooked into the sunk cost fallacy. I had put so much time and effort into writing that damned story, that letting it go didn’t seem right to it. For all the thoughts I had wasted on it, it didn’t seem like the right way to let it die, so instead of putting it out of its misery I let it drag along behind me, weighing me down. Like Hollow Knight, why couldn’t I have just finished it when it was fun, instead of trying to lift it up to lofty heights?

Now, usually, this is the part of the post where I break down. A common trope by now, I let my somewhat incoherent thoughts tumble into madness as I rant at the internet. In my original draft I compare writing to playing an instrument. Just because I played an interesting if not flawed ditty on a guitar doesn’t mean I can play the double bass. Just because I wrote a story about people having relationships and taking themselves far too seriously doesn’t mean that I can write a detective noir. The rest of the rant was inconsequential, but I cared enough about that analogy to save it from the delete button. What the whole thing ended with was me accepting that I needed drop the story, work on a new project, and be happy. And I knew that was the right answer, because I could recognise that it wasn’t going anywhere, but I couldn’t because I had sunk so much into it.

But

BUT

Somewhere between starting that post and finishing this one, I had a realisation. It rushed upon me without my knowing, and I was so excited that I had to text Mike immediately and run it by him. He was suitably excited at the prospect, though I don’t think he’d ever not be excited at me telling him writing things, and I’ve been fuelled by that ever since. I found that my scope was being both too wide and too narrow to work in a story like the story I was trying to write. So, instead of writing a novel, I’m going to be writing a series of novellas. Let’s say twenty to thirty thousand words per story with each story telling a bigger picture of what’s happening in the computer world.

It’s ambitious, and I haven’t thought it through, and I’m likely just creating a bigger project for myself to get lost in; but I’m enjoying it again. I’m enjoying thinking of the plots and characters before I go to sleep, pondering though motivations and themes.

Though I don’t know. Maybe you as the objective reader can see what this really is. I’m giving in to the abusive relationship again, thinking that maybe this time I could really change her, and in the end I’ll be right back here worked up about it because she’s beaten me down. Maybe. We’ll see. I hope not.

That’s a downer to end on though. I’m happy writing again. Hollow Knight is great. Go do something you enjoy.