Essay – Digging Deeper | Pale
Author: Wildbow

Essay – Digging Deeper

Note: this essay does have some spoilers for various works, but I say this as someone spoiler-averse, I don’t think they’re too bad.  Mostly generalized setting stuff you get in the first few chapters and abstract ideas about who a character is.

I’ve been thinking about trying to put my thoughts into words on this one for a bit, and the working title was ‘the essay I’m most likely to regret writing’.  That’s intended as a bit of a hook, but it also lets me stress that I really hope people don’t take away the wrong ideas.

In my last essay, I talked about my process, but it wasn’t the full story.  There’s a reason I settled on the specific characters and ideas for characters I did, and there’s a reason the ‘click’ for Worm was what it was.  What connects me to the work?

Worm had a decade of story drafts and ideas that preceded it, a graveyard of failed stories that I couldn’t seem to get off the ground.  I figured out the issue in my writing routine that was making me run aground, I was reading web serials on and off around then, and I thought having the schedule would work.  That left me at a weird point, though- I literally had over a hundred failed story drafts and story ideas, and how do you pick what works from out of all of that?  None stood out as the idea.

I had a few ideas for powers and people with powers I could dwell on, I liked taking the powers that were boring or overdone, and giving them a twist, or taking powers that were given to the C-list, one-shot villains.  Your condiment kings, darkness controller, flying bricks, bug swarm controllers.  Up until the day I started putting Worm down on the wordpress site, I had a conception of that setting where magic also existed, and aliens had crashed into the north pole, leaving a crater filled with material that was prized for costumes, due to its durability.

The adage of ‘write what you know’ crossed my mind, and with it, things fell into place.  Taylor’s experience with being bullied closely parallels my own – I was a guy and my bullies were guys, mostly, and it was very social bullying, underhanded, with casual insults.  So I framed that as Taylor and her bullies.  It was a chance to take my own experiences and translate them to the page.

Not just the bullying, either, other aspects of her experience matched my own as well.  Self-image, the struggle for validation, the relationship with her dad, abstracted.  My own experience was that bullying and isolation got to me, I stopped going to school for nearly a year, and at the end of that, obviously, report cards came out.  I got caught, and I got in trouble, but nobody really noticed or did anything about it.  The school made a few calls home, I deleted answering machine messages, that was that.  Everyone involved seemed preoccupied.  I started school the next year, started skipping almost immediately, and got caught very close to the end.  The woman who came in once every two weeks to check on my hearing aids and make sure my needs were being met (called an itinerant teacher) caught me in a lie and that was that.  She was the same person who pointed me to an alternative school, but at that stage, I’m moving away from parallels with Taylor.

Aside from two of those itinerant teachers, I had one teacher I would’ve called good in my time at school, and she left partway through the school year to be a principal elsewhere.  The rest of the time, it felt hostile, or like teachers were the bullies.  I’d get a new teacher and right away it would feel like they hated me.  Many years later, when I was working in a grocery store, I ran into the other good itinerant teachers and she told me how the teachers in the school would spend most of their time in the teachers lounge badmouthing problem students, particularly disabled ones and ones with English as a second language.  They hated making accommodations or anything that required extra effort and wearing the body mics that would let me hear them, to the point it was a part of the daily conversation across the years she was my itinerant teacher.  By the time I had a teacher, they’d have heard about me for years.

In writing Taylor, I channeled this- reframed a bit of it.  I came out of school frustrated and angry at that system.  Taylor carries that anger and frustration in a big way, but expands it outward to institutionalized heroism and law, government, and everything else.

So… Taylor is me, right?

But so is Blake.  So is Sylvester.  So is Victoria.  So are the trio.

What does it mean ‘write what you know’?  Because this isn’t autobiographical.  I’ve seen the question asked a week ago on a writing forum, as someone talked about how their life wasn’t interesting- and I don’t think mine was especially interesting either.  At the same time, I think you have to pull something out of yourself.  You have to connect to the work.

In writing Blake, in writing Sylvester, in writing Victoria, I think I was much narrower about what I was digging through my experiences for.  These are characters that I would spend a million-plus words in the heads of, and if I couldn’t connect to them, that would be really hard to do.  Imagine writing Snowdrop as a point of view character, where every line of dialogue requires that extra bit of effort, to flip it around and invert its meaning, while still making it sound like something someone could say, and doing that for a million words.

Doable?  Yes, I do it when writing interludes, but it’s exhausting.  I can say I’ve experienced that a bit when writing Twig, where I had to be constantly mindful of not having too ‘modern’ a voice.

So Sylvester is, in a way, drawn from who I was as a preteen.  I was profoundly hard of hearing, making everything require that extra time and effort to process and make sense of.

I’d needed glasses but didn’t have them yet (I’d memorized the eye chart).

Distracting ringing in my ears that fed directly into lack of sleep.

A visual ‘snow’ over everything I saw (that I only realized wasn’t normal as an adult).

Which I think played into me having an overactive imagination.  When there were so many barriers between me and the rest of the world, I could tell myself stories or draw, doodle, and it was clear.

As part of that, I think, I lied a lot starting in middle school (which definitely didn’t help my teachers like me much- but that ship had long since sunk).  Part escapism, partly creativity needing an outlet and not having writing yet, partly a way to assert control when I felt like I had none.  I told my teacher (the one good one, sadly) that I couldn’t do my homework because our family was renovating our house and we were living in a tent, and got caught on parent teacher day.  I got months with no homework, out of that.

Astute readers my remember Verona’s ladder story, and that’s a close parallel.  She got that, out of my store of personal experience.  But when I finished Pact and was reaching for a protagonist who’d be distinct from Blake, I looked for dishonesty and tapped into the me that I was as a preteen, or the me I wanted to be back then.  Or a combination of those: painfully dishonest, in control in the chaos, smarter than everyone around me.  It’s an anecdote and a note of background for Verona, but it’s Sylvester’s lived experience.

You can place the protagonists on a loose timeline of my life, for where their perspectives and mindsets were pulled from.  Sylvester, then the trio, for elementary and then middle school, Taylor for high school (already talked about her), Blake for post-graduation, struggling with the crush of negativity coming from the past.  Victoria as the most ‘grown’ me, wrestling with family and a world that wasn’t doing so hot, once you looked past the surface.

When I approached writing Pale, I had a lot of things to consider, when piecing it together.  I wanted to place the story in a framework, genre-wise and setting-wise, that would constrain it a bit (obviously I abandoned that to a big degree).  I also wanted to look at past stories, to see what worked for me.  What was I pulling from?

When I was sorting through the various options for what I’d do for Pale, I remembered how things had clicked well with writing Taylor once I started doing that ‘write what you know’ thing, drawing on personal experience.  I figured I didn’t have much to lose- if the short serials didn’t work, I might be done with writing anyway, so I played hard into the ‘write what you know’ thing, even knowing I was rehashing some old stuff.  You can trace lines, from Sylvester as a liar to Verona doing the same- for different reasons.  The background feeling of being abandoned and isolated as Avery connects to the same thing for Taylor with her dad and school.  Was some of that my/Avery’s/Taylor’s fault?  Not reaching out better?  Probably.  But we fall into the traps we fall into.

Lucy’s experiences with subtle racism and the weight of doubt are informed by my own with ableism.  Is that teacher talking to me like I’m an idiot because that’s how he talks, because I’m deaf and he’s trying (and failing) to help, or because he thinks I’m an idiot because I’m deaf?  Is that teacher hostile because of my hearing impairment?  Which, if you go back and read some comment sections, is kind of funny- somehow, it’s when I draw most closely on personal experience that people say stuff isn’t true or doesn’t happen in real life- Lucy being treated like she was, Taylor’s experiences at school.

And yeah, I have parallels with Verona’s experience too.

I’ll stress that when veering in such a direction, it’s more about capturing the overarching sentiments than 1:1 recounting of events, or an expy of a real life person.  Capturing the actual events would require hundreds of thousands of words on the subject, and nobody wants to read that.  Instead, it’s about finding the isolated moments that encapsulate stuff and conveying things through those.

In brief: my mom isn’t Brett, but my experience growing up looked a lot like some of those scenes in the story.  My parents weren’t Connor and Kelsey Kelly, but Avery’s experience being stuck watching talent show reality TV was my own (except in my case it was hockey).  There’s no direct analogue to Lucy’s teachers Mr. Bader or Mr. Sitton, but that feeling like the way teachers treated her and how unfair and perplexing it was?  Those were my own.  And, as described above, were validated by an outside party, years later.  I’d like to think Lucy would have something like that, too.

And through that, I think I can sort of process stuff and digest it.  Writing Taylor as a lens through which to see my own past experience helped me recognize that I was angry at those systems in the first place.  Writing Verona, Avery, and Lucy helped me do the same with other experiences.  I fractured aspects of my own experience and those aspects were the ones I settled on, when trying to figure out what my protagonists would do.

Through that, with Lucy, I feel like I’ve settled parts of myself or my past that were uneasy or unresolved, when it came to teachers, the unfairness of that institution and the lack of consideration I got.

I’ve dwelt on the idea of isolation and what it means and what I want, on that front, out of life.  With Avery, I wrote a pretty standard romance for the first time in six million words or so?  Through that, on my side of the screen, I was processing ideas about romance, having to push myself to write it.  Avery reached out, she found Nora, she reconnected with family.  I don’t think that suits me, though.  I’m mulling over the fact I may be aromantic in the way Verona describes- or if things are a spectrum, I’m leaning fairly heavily that way.  I’ve dated, it’s almost universally been a mess, partially owing to the fact I was never that into it.  I’m pretty content on my own.

And through Verona, writing out the Brett stuff, having written stuff in Ward on a similar-but-different front as well, I explored a lot of past experience.  Sometimes we grow up, we don’t dwell a ton on past experience, but when we do have occasion to, we look at it all in aggregate and realize it sure wasn’t great.  I had an experience like that, and when partway into the story, my mom reverted back to old behaviors, I ended up going no contact with her.  I don’t think I would’ve done that if I hadn’t been writing an analogue of it through Verona.  My life is a tenth as stressful, now.

I tapped into the ‘write what you know’ more seriously because I thought it might be a boost for the story and it really worked.  I’d argue it’s a chunk of why I took Pale from something shorter to something longer.  It was rewarding, not least because of how it helped put things to rest and explore stuff that I wouldn’t otherwise have done.

That raises issues and questions, though.  That’s a limited pool of experience and there has already been a bit of overlap.  I don’t want to have protagonists seem too similar.  I do want to tap into that, though.

Across all of these essays, I hope a general sentiment of intentionality comes through.  Mindfulness.  Whether it’s making sure that every failed story gets a title page that helps map out what I’m doing and what’s working, or what isn’t, or recycling unused characters, or paying attention to my writing process or other stuff, the key is to pay attention to what I’m doing.

Part of doing that in a good way involves pulling my head out of my ass or sifting through the noise and recognizing cues and heads-up about what I’m not being mindful about.  A lot of the time, that comes in the form of wake-up calls when I’m using language or tropes that aren’t good on a meta-level (like the treatment of LGBT+ characters in some earlier works) or people calling stuff out in their critiques of the work.

I’ve been told, for one example, that I do a poor job of differentiating character voices, or keeping consistent voices.  Part of that is serial writing at work- when I have to get 10k words of writing done by a set deadline, slowing down and considering each character voice isn’t easy… and maybe it’s not something that comes natural to me, when I’m hard of hearing and I’m not that good at hearing voices in the first place.

So, that in mind, is there a way to write a new story where individualized character voices are something I’m forced to work on?  Cornering myself?

I do this with every story, even if it’s as simple as writing Pact with the goal of ‘now do what you did with Worm, but do it again, different genre’.  When approaching Twig, I wrote an intimately connected team and structured the work so the arcs are a season apart (kinda- it gets tricky), to slow down and have more character interaction, after complaints on those fronts in Pact?  If I could work out a story idea that also forces me to address a weakness or take a new direction, that’s ideal.  Not necessarily easy, but constructive.

The question I’m left asking myself is: How can I be mindful and constructive while assessing this ‘write what you know’ energy I was really able to tap into with Worm and Pale?

What if, for example, addressing stuff I’m passionate about that isn’t a part of my personal lived experience serves as a way of tapping into that energy and finding that enhanced flow?  Without drawing from a limited pool and having overlap between protagonists?

Or, taking a page from how I’d get stuck on a story in the pre-Worm drought and then turn around and write a story from the antagonist’s perspective… maybe there’s an ‘undercity’ style reversal where I find something I want to explore and explore it from the other side.  Once serial numbers are filed off and a fresh angle is taken, that could open a lot of doors, and while such a character might not be the easiest to write, it could still hold onto that energy I get from digesting.

As I approach the idea of shorter stories, this is something I’m doing in the background.  It’s not just about coming up with a story idea.  Coming up with a story idea is easy, I have a hundred sitting in a writing folder.  It’s about finding a character or idea I can connect to, something I can do that’s constructive for building up skills while I’m writing it, giving it the click I talked about in my prior essay, and making sure it’s something the audience would be intrigued by at the same time.  That’s where it gets tricky.

Part of the reason I thought I might regret this essay is because I worry a bit that when I write a future story, people will be speculating or making assumptions, and it’s something that people are often really, really bad at. I’ve been called a woman, Asian, black, an only child, a robot, an old man, multiple authors writing under one pen name, and more.  Almost always wrong.  When a comment on a site or an email says “Wildbow thinks…” or “Wildbow does this because…” it’s wrong more often than it’s right, short of direct quotes.

I remain worried that if I write a story and it deals with a celebrity, I’ll have readers pointing their finger and going “Clearly, based on the ‘digging’ essay, Wildbow is writing about himself and the fandom!”  Or if I write about a cyborg, people will point to my cochlear implant or draw false analogies to the Deaf community.

Maybe that’s the door I open by writing this- I just hope it’s interesting enough for enough people to read that it’s worth any annoyance I suffer on that front.

Or maybe, by writing this, I corner myself and force myself to take a new, constructive path.