A fun/interesting/unfortunate/fortunate consequence of the mental
world model of
Inside
Out (2015 Pixar film) (which is a great movie, and I’m saying
this as a non-movie-type — I laughed, and I cried, and just omgwtfbbq
Disney/Pixar) is that imaginary friends that are capable of autonomous
flight are probably immune to being forgotten.
People are afraid of the dark
because it holds the unknown
and unknowns are scary.
But maybe it is just as frightening
if we let the light shine everywhere
and believe that because we know everything the light shines on
we know everything.
Perhaps for once
when the sun fades over the horizon
and the darkness returns in its dependable cycle
we should silence the fears
and remember
there is darkness in all of us
(Short streak post. And for
the uninformed, I’m using
Spivak
pronouns for this post just because.)
Generally, when people I don’t already know through math competitions
ask me or my parents about something like how to teach their intelligent
child to make em really good at math, or even English or whatever, I am
skeptical by default because there seem to be a lot of Taiwanese parents
who have alarmingly rigid and largely baseless expectations or
assumptions about what their children ought to be interested in and
excel at.
You can lead a horse to water, and honestly I think you could find a
way to force it to drink if you really wanted to, but you can’t make it
enjoy the process of being force-fed. Um.
Force-watered?
Force-hydrated?
You can teach your child math and English, and you could make em ace
all eir tests, but you probably can’t make em enjoy the test so much
that e decides to create more diabolical versions of these tests to give
to eir fictional characters in eir stories for fun!
These are all actual illustrations from the
old stories I mentioned in
part
2.5 of “More Fiction”. Stories I wrote in 2004. As a
first-grader.
This is not Part 3. It’s just two things I thought of tacking on to
part 2.
What can I say? Part 2s are easy blog post fodder; Part 2 appendixes
are even easier.
One, there’s one other wall I run into often during those rare
attempts when I get motivated enough to try to write a story: naming
characters is hard. At least, it provides an excellent motivational
roadblock whenever I even consider committing a story to paper, a point
before I’ve actually written anything at which I think “maybe I should
give up and go on Facebook instead” and proceed to do so. Aggh. And I
think there’s more than one reason for this:
I have trouble coming up with names to some degree. Sure, it’s easy to
browse BabyNames.com and look for choices, but a lot of the names there
are really weird and contemplating them for every unimportant character
kind of rips me out of the immersed mindset.
Reading great stories in English class and elsewhere may have gotten me
feeling like every name ought to be a deep meaningful allusion, or at
least pun fodder. I feel like I will regret it if I write a story and, a
few months and/or chapters down the road, realize I missed a better name
or the name I chose has some undesirable connotations in context or
provides an atmosphere-ruining coincidence.
But I think the real kicker is simply that some part of me is
terrified of the awkwardness of giving a character the same name as
anybody I know, because then they might read the story and wonder if the
character is somehow based on them. And too many of the names that I
consider common enough to not lure readers off into looking for hidden
meanings are used up that way. This is obviously worst if the character
is an antagonist. But it seems just as awkward if the character is a
protagonist in accord with everything I’ve written, i.e. a paper-thin
character blatantly created for escapist purposes. I am already kind of
terrified I might ever meet anybody with the same name as one of my
mentally established characters even though I haven’t actually written
anything about him. And there’s a well-established convention of
not
reusing a first name in a work, so this gets even harder with every
work; I’m just as worried, what if somebody thinks this character is
related to the other character in that story I wrote in second grade? Oh
no!!
It’s like not reusing variable names in a programming language where
everything is in the same scope. Positively nightmarish.
And I actually discovered some evidence this is a thing in my past: I
found some stories I wrote in 2004. They are possibly the most extreme
exemplification of
Write
What You Know imaginable: the main character, Michael, goes to
school and makes friends. That’s all.
Illustration courtesy Brian2004
I kind of want to share these stories, but fast-forward a few years
and you’ll see that a classmate named Michael entered my grade and we
stayed in the same grade until we graduated.
Hi, Michael. You’re probably not reading this, but the character I
created in 2004 is not in any way based on or inspired by you,
especially not this image. And unlike later in this post where I name a
character after myself, I’m not being sarcastic, really.
It’s olympiad season. Taiwan placed 18th in the IMO rankings1. Next day there are news stories about how it’s our “third worst performance in history”, and commenters drawing casual arrows from changes in Taiwan’s standardized tests and curriculum to this result, and the Ministry of Education saying they’d review their procedures or something.
What.
Did you forget our performance last year? Do you think our olympiad training system is completely overhauled on an annual basis, or has even a tangential relationship with the overall education system?
My mom says I blog too much about myself. I am completely guilty of
that and this post is mostly not an exception. Sorry.
It’s not that I wouldn’t like to write posts about others and for
others. But I know more about myself so obviously there’s
more
I can write about myself. It’s kind of a habit, and it’s been a very
personally helpful habit. I discover lots of things when I write
introspectively. But I’m a very weird person and a lot of the insightful
things I discover when doing this are things I doubt I can generalize to
other people. I tried getting a lot of my friends to join HabitRPG when
I discovered it, but it was nowhere as effective on them as it was on
me.
What else could I blog about? What else do people blog about?
All through high school I had really high standards for myself. Not
the grades, mind you (I admit, humblebrag, my grades were always
uncomfortably high, probably as an expected but still sad byproduct of
this process (yes, I’m actually complaining about grades being too high.
I don’t want my report card to have lots of Bs or Cs, but I really
didn’t need to pour enough resources into schoolwork that I graduated as
valedictorian, when there were so many other personally and socially
meaningful things I could be dedicating effort into creating — but
that’s a subject for another post (humblebrags all the way down.
Somebody get some internet pitchforks and poke some sense into me))),
but simply how I managed my time for doing homework.
In my opinion: not very well. I always spent too much time surfing
the internet and doing things less urgent than homework, then ended up
sleeping at midnight or one o’clock or whenever often to finish what I
should have done earlier.
And yet, compared to many of my friends (definitely not all, though),
that’s not late at all and the amount of buffer time I had between
finishing work and having it due was positively luxurious. But then, I
suppose, I didn’t have the same amount of math homework. But to counter
my excuse, I had additional responsibilities such as practicing olympiad
problems and preparing weekend presentations and translating the school
newsletter. So I don’t actually know if my workload was significantly
lighter than average or not, ergo I don’t know whether my time
management skills were significantly better than average or not. It
seriously doesn’t feel like they would be.
And allegedly, even when I’m procrastinating, it’s more productive
than my friends’ procrastination, maybe even
Paul Graham’s good
type of procrastination. Often when I gripe about how much my former
self procrastinated they will ask me what I’ve been doing and, after
hearing the answer, tell me this. What have I done to put off homework?
Oh, I did some olympiad math problems, committed to my GitHub projects,
read a bunch of programming blogs, organized my old chemistry notes from
two years ago, and surfed the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Yeah.
Total waste of time. Meanwhile certain friends surf 9GAG whenever they
get the chance. (Which is not to say that I don’t procrastinate in
obviously unproductive ways sometimes — I surf reddit, YouTube, and
TVTropes of course. Sometimes I even just read my own blog or dig
through old folders in my computer. I’m weird. But anyway.)
If you came to this blog or this post hoping to read English, sorry
not sorry. It’s only fair, really, given how many people on Facebook
can’t read the massive English textwall posts I’ve spammed them with for
so long.
Part 1 was here. This is
still part of the daily posting
streak I have openly committed to and standard disclaimers still
apply. Just as in my original
post, back to the flip side — let’s see what I have to do to
write fiction to my own satisfaction. And this time I have a
guide: the list I made in the first part of this post. Could I create
fiction I would enjoy reading?
1: I enjoy calling things before they happen…
2: …I also enjoy the Reveal for questions when the author has done
something clever I didn’t catch…
Well, obviously, I can’t predict things in my own plot. But I can
develop riddles in the plot, set up expectations and drop subtle clues
and use Chekhov’s Tropes. Can I?