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been turning something around in my head since i read the "how to not get lost in the weeds" ask you answered. it was fascinating but it brought up what, for me, is the far larger issue: the whole "complicated math problem" angle. i'm someone that just writes from vibes alone, and i have no real idea how to manage plot threads and all that stuff. whenever i write a new chapter, it's always just because it's what i want to write, or what i would want to see next. and this works (i think?) for more vibes heavy character focused stuff. but it hit a huge brick wall when i started writing a complex book with a huge cast because i could go in a thousand different directions, and actually weaving together current and future plot threads while maintaining a reasonable economy of story was something i had no experience in. how do you actually build something that feels focused, especially with such a large cast of characters each with their own stories?

(also dumb question that you don't have to answer: how do you... get lost in the weeds? i have a bad habit of just avoiding any exposition at all. eg: the society in which my book takes place has no concept of romantic love whatsoever. how do you explain that, especially when the characters don't even know of the thing that they're missing?)

this is such a good question i had to force myself to wait until i had enough time to give the answer it deserves. here's the original post being followed up on for folks who don't know the context.

so let's start with the "complicated math problem" bit. this is something i say about my writing process pretty often, particularly when i'm working on really intense or complicated parts of a story, but i worry it might be a bit misleading. for starters, there is no actual equation to speak of. in fact, it may surprise you to hear that i am very much someone who also writes from vibes! i've found that the quickest way to sap a story of its creative energy is to plan everything out in advance and treat that plan with biblical devotion, perhaps second only to excitedly infodumping every single idea you've come up with before you've actually set pen to paper. i try very hard to know only the bare minimum going in. what "the bare minimum" is varies wildly from story to story. with Double Album, i know the theme and arc of every Track, and i know what character developments and plot reveals need to happen in each Verse and Chorus. basically, i have the endpoint in mind when i start. for instance in B1, i knew that Dana would start the track being skeptical of the new guys on the crew and end the track having gotten a little bit closer to them; i knew Dare would start by concealing their identity and end with a coming out scene, etc. i also had a laundry list of ideas that needed to show up somewhere at some point in this phase of the story. the weirdness of Crime Planet, the disjointed relationship between the Comet crew and the Falconers, the EWL's reputation on the outside, the way it treats orphans, etc. what i don't know is how these things will end up "on screen" in a way that's interesting or fun to read. *that's* the math problem.

think back to the Crime City streets scene with Mary and Lenore walking through a parade. most of that section is narration with an expository bent, but it isn't an authoritative figure delivering objective facts in an ordered list. it's rooted in the perspective of Mary, an outsider both to Crime Planet and the broader extracosm at large, who is also dealing with a fresh and substantial loss in her personal life. as a result, every observation she makes about the world ends up being an observation about herself. the exposition earns its wordcount by doing multiple things at once, for instance using a troll xenobiology lecture to build romantic tension between those two characters. the math, as such, is finding the optimally interesting route through all the various sights and sounds i want to cover on the way to my planned endpoint-- not the most efficient or economical, but the most interesting. which just gets back to what i was saying about meat and candy in the last post, where you never want your readers to get so much of one thing they get sick of it before you give them something else. so you can see how increasing the size of the cast and the information density of the setting/plot exponentially complicates the math, which is why i sometimes finish a writing session feeling like my brain is overheating. but i think another, less loaded phrase for this would be to just call it a flow state. it doesn't feel like i'm solving the problem when i'm solving it. i am still running on pure intuition. it's just, somehow a sort of mechanical intuition, structured and guided by years of experience and experimentation.

but i want to step back for a moment and make a broader, maybe tangentially related point. writers love comparing their job to other jobs, as in "writing is like building a house" or "writing is like climbing a mountain", which is useful at a surface level but quickly becomes counter-productive when you start acting like there's a genuine procedural connection there. like, if you have the blueprint for a house, you want to follow that blueprint to the letter in construction otherwise you risk longterm structural instability, to say nothing of code violations or good old fashioned tackiness. if changes need to be made in response to unexpected conditions on site, you want the architect and/or engineers there to quadruple check the math before a single other brick gets laid. you can ARGUE that the same is true of writing in some cases, that you should stick to your plan for internal consistency etc etc but at that point we're no longer talking about writing OR building a house, we're just kind of gesturing at conflicting philosophical phantoms that have nothing materially to do with each other.

a story isn't a house. you can ignore the blueprint. you can change it as you go without checking the math. you don't even have to have a blueprint in the first place! there is no cost for trying and failing. there is no penalty for breaking the rules. you SHOULD know the rules, you SHOULD have a solid grasp on what the average Finished Thing looks like, and you SHOULD probably spend some time in the I Fucking Suck At This mines before diving face first into your ambitious narrative epic. but you don't HAVE to. no one is going to send you to forever jail if you don't. you can break every never-ever-do-this rule in the book and still end up with a great story, as long as you write it good. and the only way to learn how to write it good is to write it bad first.

a lot of writing, for me at least, is about listening to what the story wants. any given scene can go a million ways, but the story has a funny way of telling you when you've picked the wrong one. this is where i get writer's block. i can just feel when i've gone off the rails, even when i like what i'm writing. sometimes i push through hoping that i'll manage to circle back on track, but i almost never do. so i end up having to retrace my steps and figure out where the wrong turn was. it's so frustrating how you can be stuck for hours, days, months on a problem like this, and the instant you find that blind alley you took by mistake suddenly the whole thing flows like there was never a block at all. you have to have humility enough, as a writer, to accept that your words aren't sacred and sometimes shit's just gotta go. i cannot emphasize enough how important it is to internalize what "first draft" really means. nothing you write is finished until publication, and words are a profoundly cheap building material. they're impossible to waste, so give up on being precious with them and just try shit.

the question of how to keep a big-idea large-cast story focused has infinite answers, and the right one is whichever works for you. i personally find it helps to have an overarching structural logic dictating the shape of the narrative. i think television is a useful source of inspiration here. a show like LOST maintains focus by structuring each episode around one specific character, giving them dedicated pre-island flashbacks to complement their present day on-island predicament. this diptych forms the A-plot, which typically advances the focus character's arc, some aspect of their relationship with the other survivors, and often an element of the larger mysteries of the island all at once. the B-plot often spins out from the A-plot, where you might have a big group of main characters forced to split up. advancements in the B-plot tend to happen in parallel with those of the A-plot, but with some kind of ironic twist or contradictory information. maybe characters in the A-plot see strangers holding people hostage and assume they're the bad guys, but characters in the B-plot saw that the strangers were actually acting in self-defense. LOST is a machine that runs on unreliable narrators, so a lot of conflicts are the result of nominally-aligned characters operating on wildly different assumptions about the world-- which tells us as much about the world as it does the characters in question. by the end of the episode (or multi-episode arc) the A-plot and B-plot collide again, usually in a way that upends the status quo and sets up the next episode/arc's focus. then of course you'll typically have a C-plot, which acts as a palette cleanser usually focusing on a lower-stakes story beat with comedic undertones.

now explode the structure top down. there's the Series, the whole finished thing. sorry to break it to you, but it's impossible to know what that's gonna look like when you just start out. even if you plan the entire story start to finish before writing chapter 1, the final work is gonna look completely different. every writer is making it up as they go along. a good writer has a structure guiding them to make the right choices in that process. so instead of focusing on the series as a whole, you break it down to the season. LOST has six seasons. the first season explores a set of basic assumptions about the island, and ends with the survivors enacting a plan based on those assumptions. the plan then goes wrong in a way that expands and complicates our base assumptions about the island, setting up season 2 to have a whole new set of questions and ideas to explore that season 1 could not. season 2 does the same thing, exploring the new status quo, establishing some sense of objective knowledge about that status quo, then breaking that knowledge over its knee in the finale. every season functions this way, which is why LOST consistently has the best season finales in television history. but for those finales to sing, they need to have a firm foundation to stand on. so you lay out how many episodes you have in the season, you look at where everything is at the start of the season, you gauge where you want it to be at the end of the season, and that's how you dictate the pace going forward. some of those episodes you know have to be Big Important Barn Burners, and as such you know about where they should fall in the episode order for dramatic reasons. but not every episode can be one of those. sometimes you need a fucking around episode. it's meat/candy again! but at the same time, back at ground level, you can't have a fucking around episode where nothing important happens, otherwise your audience will feel like you wasted their time. so you balance your A/B/C plots accordingly, with an eye towards maintaining some kind of abstract meat/candy balance.

so you see now how there's this sort of achronological order of operations here, moment-to-moment storytelling vs scene-to-scene vs episode-to-episode vs season-to-season. structures nested within structures, the way the spiral arm of a galaxy spins with the same visual logic as the water running down a drain. if your problem is too much chaos, then the solution probably involves imposing some kind of order.

literary writers will tell you to stay away from making your prose more like television, and i agree in a general sense. there are strengths to written fiction that are different from broadcast television, and it's easy to just write glorified TV scripts instead of literature. but even as i agree with the sentiment in a general sense, i am nevertheless irresistibly drawn to the episodic flashback structure. to my mind, the best way to deal with a big-idea large-cast narrative is to break them up into smaller, more manageable chunks. split your cast into groups, split those groups into smaller groups, bring them back together and split them up again in a different order, and on and on again at your leisure. if a big idea is hard to grasp, isolate it into smaller ideas that can be each established independently at different times so that you can tie them all together again later on. if you really want to get your media wires crossed, think of it like Mario 1-1. it's a level that teaches you everything you need to know about the video game's base mechanics. every level following on from that complicates those mechanics, drawing insane difficulty out of what might at first seem painfully easy.

build up to the big stuff, basically, is my advice. i try very hard to only put all my characters in a room together when absolutely necessary. i know there are full-cast scenes in parts of Godfeels where a couple people are functionally just sort of t-posing in the background waiting for their next line. sometimes that's okay and even necessary, but it's remarkably easy to fuck up. hence the structure. almost every story i've sat down to write has been motivated as much by a structural hook as the actual narrative/thematic contents. it is through my grasp on the form that i find my way to the function, and it's never a straight or straightforward path. that's why you need to leave room for improvisation. a structure is only as good as its elasticity. it exists to do the hardest parts for you, so you can focus on the component parts.

now to the second half of your question (oh god, we're only halfway through?!). the quickest way to deliberately get lost in the weeds is to just shamelessly write the exposition you've shied away from. i've got a lot of big weird metaphysical ideas boiling in this werewolf story i'm working on, but i didn't know how they could possibly be applicable. so i invented a flimsy guy to write a shitty paper that's just pure stream of consciousness on my part. none of that is usable for the finished story. but in writing it, those previously abstract ideas became very specific, and now i have a very strong grasp on what specific ideas excite me most. this opened a mental door for me, and now i know exactly how and where to deliver that exposition in a way that isn't boring or pointless.

let's talk about your society with no concept of romantic love. this is a tough idea to convey because obviously characters who lack something that doesn't exist can't comment on its absence (and presumably you don't have a fish out of water to shine the spotlight). but good news! the audience does live in a world with romantic love, which means they are uniquely equipped to comment on its absence all by themselves. so the trick isn't "how do i tell the audience this fact about the world" but rather "how do i direct the audience's attention so that they can infer this fact about the world?" a society lacking in romantic love will no doubt look very different from our own in certain key ways. it's your job as a writer of speculative fiction to think through the material ramifications of this idea and play them out on scales large and small.

i'd highly recommend you read Ursula K Leguin's Left Hand of Darkness for inspiration here. it's about a society that has evolved to be sexually hermaphroditic and universally genderfluid, and the whole book is just procedurally unraveling all the ways this affects their society and makes it different from our own. Leguin would have you thinking through social rituals. is there an equivalent to dating? how does cohabitation work? is there marriage? is there a concept of the nuclear family? how does the cultural hegemon position reproduction, are they conservative or progressive? do people still have sex for fun? do they have recurring sex with the same person over a long stretch of time? what does that relationship look like without a concept of romantic love? do they have other forms of love in its place, the way Homestuck trolls have their quadrants? is this a universally held position on a global scale or are there competing perspectives? is it biological in origin or a social norm? how does it intersect with gender? how does it affect gendered stereotypes around men and women? how does it affect government policy, popular fiction, music, theatre, board games, video games, films, poetry, television, opera, comedy, braindance, whatever?

this is what we mean by speculative fiction. you speculate by asking these questions and coming up with interesting answers, with the knowledge that most if not all of those answers won't make it into the final story. but in having those answers you are able to confidently gesture in their direction with little more than a couple words. do that enough times and bang, suddenly you've done "world building". it helps to build a setting that is familiar to the audience, except in one or two specific ways. this makes the unfamiliar elements stand out all the more.

but also, at the end of the day, you can't be afraid of letting the audience be confused for a minute. a good story makes the reader do some work, encourages them to actively think about what they're reading as they're reading it. it's a fine line to walk, but come on, this is science fiction we're talking about. do you really want your audience to "get it" on page one? give them something rough and textured to hold on to, direct their attention towards interesting questions and then play with those questions as the story goes on. good speculative fiction still functions as a dramatic narrative even if the audience doesn't have a complete grasp on the broader context. that's an asset! deliberately constructed confusion is a great tool for directing reader attention, and it's one a lot of (especially young) writers seem terrified of using. always remember that audiences don't know what they want, and you're never gonna appeal to 100% of people no matter how hard you try. write for your fellow sickos. that's the stuff that has staying power.

so, yeah, there's another essay from me on writing. i always feel so silly when i reach the end of one of these posts because i really don't like writing advice most of the time. all any writer can tell you is how they wrote what they wrote. maybe that's applicable to you, but probably a lot of it won't be. almost all actionable writing advice comes down to: read a lot, write a lot, live a lot. other writers can help point you in a more focused direction if you're lost, but they can't teach you how to do something that can only be learned by doing it with your own two hands. all the rest is just psychology. playing mind games, coming up with metaphors, designing structures and math problems and blueprints and A-plot B-plot C-plot... it's all just an abstraction. an attempt to impose logic onto an inherently free-associative process. a post-hoc rationalization of spontaneous intuition.

it's your story. it knows what it wants from you, and you know what you want from it. but there is a distance between you that must be bridged before you can be truly in sync. that's a personal relationship. like any good relationship, it requires open communication and reciprocity. all the advice in the world can only gesture at how it feels to be in literary love. it's up to you to nurture that relationship, to try and fail and listen and grow and just see what happens next. fantasy, sci-fi, contemporary literature, whatever. the only thing to do is just to do it, without fear. if you can get that shit on the page in a rough, messy, loud, over-indulgent and chaotic draft, that's still better than nothing. interrogate the draft with honesty and humility, take to it with a vindictive red pen, get an outside perspective (be wary of doing this too early on in the process), write it again and throw it away, make the wrong choice but like what you wrote anyway, make the right choice but fuck it up beyond repair, challenge yourself to do things you've never done before, pay attention and listen and learn and try not to go fucking insane in the process. live a life outside of fiction. we don't hammer that one home enough. you need time and space for the work to digest and develop when you aren't actively writing. sometimes you need to take a break to get some perspective. sometimes you come up with a good story and just can't figure out a good way to tell it. and sometimes you just fucking nail it in one go, and it's the best feeling in the world.

anyway, in answer to the question "how do you get lost in the weeds," i would like to draw your attention to the essay you just finished reading. now it's your job to be the gardener. good luck, fucker!

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