word is dead (and I killed it with an obsidian spear)

About time I posted more than once a month. I’ll try and keep this one short. (Edit: fuck)

the story so far

Over 5 years or so, I’ve gone back and forth a lot on systems of writing. For example, I’ve tried:

• Writing without planning (Li’s Master)

• Writing with ONLY planning (Submerged)

• Writing like episodes in a season (Two Unlucky Centurions)

And every time I figured if I found the “right” system of creation that worked for my brain I could stop worrying about it and finally do some writing. It was an obsticle and nothing more. This also extended to obsessively reading about other authors’ systems and trying them out to little success.

This tinkering also extended to the tools I used to write. Starting way back when with plain old boring text files, I graduated to LibreOffice because writing stories on notepad is insanity, then Obsidian because it made worldbuilding fun (Recommended if you need a personal wiki), and then Word for its editing and commenting.

It would be a while (including during The Big Burnout™) before I starting giving tinkering the stinky eyeball; that my MO of constantly switching to new systems and dumping the current project every time was a bad idea. I decided to stop the cycle and write with no special systems, no outlining to death, just whatever came naturally.

This was wrong. And also suck. But I’d only find that out later.

writing “perfectly”

I did write a few stories trying to be my “natural” self, but stories just ain’t worth writing if you don’t follow the fun. And the more I wrote without messing around with systems of creation, the more I lost steam.

But how? I did everything right. I wasn’t dicking around, I wasn’t spending a million years outlining, just a bit of pre-planning and off I went. It felt natural, it was supposedly the platonic ideal of writing. I’d won, I didn’t need to figure out my method anymore. But up until this month, the death march started setting in and The Big Cringe threatened to re-enter my life.

This came to a head one day recently when I was in the shower worrying about story, as you do, and thought about playing around with the episodic format of writing again. As a TV lover, it’s always been a bit of fun to pretend I’m a showrunner. And it’s not like there’s a publisher or editor waiting with a baseball bat to tell me that it’s a stupid idea. You certainly might but I also don’t respect you at all.

And you know what? I finally, actually, truly felt something for the first time in a bit. Excitement. Excitement over writing a story in, admittedly, a rather dumb, idiosyncratic way. It felt like every lesson I’d learnt Post-Big-Cringe had just been thrown out. But it made me happy.

And after more thinking, it all brought me to one inescapable conclusion…

i am a systems nerd

And a truly devout one at that. The last five years, my mucking about with systems wasn’t a barrier, it was part of the fun. I’m not a freak who needs to stop tinkering and focus on finishing the damn thing, I’m a freak who needs to KEEP tinkering and never finish anything. To that end, I’ve switched back from Word to Obsidian.

Word is for business, Obsidian is for fun. No, I won’t elaborate.

what now?

It’s a new age! A new system of writing, a new tool to do it with. I’m gonna keep doing this forever and ride off into the sunset.

Or I’ll try it for a month and give up.

Oh, also everything I’ve been working on up until now has been shelved. Surprise!