Fiction: Chris Huisjen (Aest Belequa)

[00:00:09] Welcome to Ten Thousand. I'm your host Ben Scofield and this is a podcast about expertise.

[00:00:13] It isn't about experts though, it's about the journey. My goal with Ten Thousand is to talk

[00:00:18] to people at all stages from absolute novices to world-class performers to find out how they

[00:00:21] think about what they do and what it means to excel and especially how what they think changes

[00:00:24] as they get more experience. With that said, let's get into it. So about a year and a half

[00:00:34] ago I found Royal Road online. It's a website kind of like Wattpad or Archive on our own a little bit

[00:00:40] where authors who are mainly independents are able to post their work from short stories and fanfic to

[00:00:45] serialized web novels, sometimes running to hundreds of thousands of words. Like there are some really

[00:00:49] long stories on there that are amazing and I've been reading there off and on ever since.

[00:00:54] This week I'm actually really excited to be talking to Chris Huisjen who goes by S. Bilequa who is one of

[00:00:59] the authors that I've enjoyed reading. I found Magical Girl Undergrad I guess a couple months ago just

[00:01:04] before it ended up the series run. So Chris has written a number of stories and series on Royal

[00:01:11] Road and published to Kindle Unlimited. Like I said Magical Girl Undergrad recently wrapped up

[00:01:16] and for the last five months or so I guess you started the Halcyon system which is your main

[00:01:21] work right now. Welcome to Ten Thousand. Thank you for having me.

[00:01:26] So what does good mean in the context of writing fiction for you?

[00:01:31] Um, so good in the context of writing fiction. Writing fiction is a lot like

[00:01:37] carpentry or basketball or any other skill that you pick up.

[00:01:41] I think in that like when you're looking at a professional athlete or a professional carpenter,

[00:01:48] there are all of these skills that you don't necessarily see. When you're looking at a finished

[00:01:55] work of fiction, you don't necessarily see all of the skills that are making it do what it does.

[00:02:01] But a beginning author or a beginning carpenter can take a hammer, nails, glue and a handsaw and

[00:02:08] they can build a basic cabinet. But the more tools you have and the more tools you've gotten mastered,

[00:02:13] the better that cabinet ends up turning out. So when I think about good fiction authors like Margaret

[00:02:22] Atwood or Sarah Moss or Stephen King, they've got a lot more tools in their toolkit that they can draw on.

[00:02:31] And so the process of becoming good at writing fiction is a lot more like

[00:02:39] slowly developing this toolkit.

[00:02:42] So concretely, like what sorts of things do you think go in the toolkit?

[00:02:47] So things that go in the toolkit, understanding how stories are put together structurally.

[00:02:54] Um, there's both chapter level structure, how an individual chapter works and how it ends on a,

[00:03:03] on a cliffhanger or producing a question that the reader asks.

[00:03:09] Like either I wonder how they're going to get out of this situation, or I wonder how that plan's going to work.

[00:03:16] Always leaving on that question of wonder.

[00:03:19] And then larger story level structure, rising tension, that process.

[00:03:27] But then there's also understanding how character arcs work, controlling tension across chapters,

[00:03:35] being able to ask questions or make the reader ask questions, and then being able to answer those questions

[00:03:43] through the book to build trust between the author and the reader.

[00:03:47] These are all very discreet skills.

[00:03:50] Sure. So, so when you're working in a serialized medium, I would imagine that some of the skills you need

[00:03:55] are different than you, than if you were contracted to write, you know, a full length novel from the beginning,

[00:04:00] where if I go to the bookstore and pick up a novel, the author may not have needed to have a cliffhanger

[00:04:06] or a direct question at the end of every chapter, because the, the readers like already committed,

[00:04:11] like they've already bought all 500 pages. Um, so what is the size of the difference in the sorts

[00:04:16] of skills or the, the, the balance of what you're using for working in different channels, I guess?

[00:04:23] So I'm part of an online writing group, mostly focused on serials, especially

[00:04:28] like the lit RPG progression fantasy stuff that's really popular on Royal Road.

[00:04:34] Oh, Hey, I wanted to pop in here during the edit to explain two of the terms that we used just now,

[00:04:39] and we'll be using a little bit later on. So progression fantasy is a genre in which a core,

[00:04:45] or maybe the core of the narrative is that the characters are increasing in power and ability.

[00:04:48] You might see explicit training montages and discussions of technique and practice,

[00:04:52] that sort of thing. Lit RPG on the other hand is a genre that fuses elements of role-playing games,

[00:04:57] like Baldur's Gate with the fiction, sometimes very deeply. So here you get things like magical

[00:05:02] or sci-fi systems with a capital S granting skills and ability scores and level ups to characters.

[00:05:07] In the narrative, you might see examples of status screens or, uh, characters might have inventories

[00:05:12] where they can store absurd amounts of material in an extra dimensional space,

[00:05:17] just like you would have in Final Fantasy or, uh, Dragon Age or Mass Effect or something like that.

[00:05:23] There is a lot of overlap here. Lit RPGs in particular are often also progression fantasies,

[00:05:28] where the characters are focused on getting explicitly more powerful and that increase is

[00:05:32] visible in the stats and the stat screens that you see in the narrative. Um, progression fantasy

[00:05:37] is broader though, and you can have progression fantasies that don't include anything like,

[00:05:41] like numerical values for your strength or intelligence. So with that in mind, let's keep going.

[00:05:48] Um, but a lot of the resources that we draw on for learning our skills are traditional fiction skills.

[00:05:57] I think we put a lot more emphasis on maintaining tension and never answering all the questions that

[00:06:04] we've made readers ask ending chapters on cliffhangers to try to get people to click the next chapter button.

[00:06:11] And ideally the Patreon link at the end of chapters as well. Right. Um, so I think there's more emphasis

[00:06:18] on that, but I don't think it's necessarily different skills than what a traditional author would use.

[00:06:23] When I read, uh, Scolamance, A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik last year,

[00:06:29] chapters were ending on cliffhangers, chapters were ending on the same kind of upbeats that

[00:06:35] we use in, in serial fiction. Some of that is it's how stories are written.

[00:06:42] Yeah. Yeah.

[00:06:44] Yeah. I wonder, I mean, so, so I think probably everybody has had the experience of picking up a

[00:06:49] well-regarded book that you can't put down, uh, versus a well-regarded book that

[00:06:56] you kind of have to put down every once in a while, right? Where some books are propulsive and some

[00:07:00] books are more meditative. I don't, yeah, maybe that's the right word. And, and serial fiction just

[00:07:07] naturally tends to be more propulsive, but it's not the only propulsive fiction that you can have.

[00:07:12] Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think most of Naomi Novik's books are like that. Uh,

[00:07:16] I know the Temera series or her like Napoleonic wars with dragons stuff. Yeah. It was very much the same.

[00:07:23] Uh, and then at the end of the day you get, oh, they're going to China next time or, or whatever

[00:07:26] it happens to be. Like, so it just ramps up the stakes even more to make you want to pick it up.

[00:07:31] So. Right. And with traditional publishing, like the big cliffhangers happen at the end of books

[00:07:38] with web serials. A lot of the goal of the web serial is actually to make it to Amazon and to Kindle

[00:07:44] and audible. So those same big cliffhangers and big promises tend to, tend at book at the end of books as

[00:07:51] well. Yeah. So, so you have individual chapter or arcs essentially that reach a high point and then

[00:07:57] you cut off and then you want to do the same sort of fractally going up. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Um,

[00:08:04] how do you and your writing group get better at doing that? With my writing group,

[00:08:10] there's not really any difference to me between like practice for fiction and the process of writing

[00:08:19] fiction. We're always doing the same kind of five things. So we read a lot both in our genre and out

[00:08:27] of our genre. Um, I'm working through several audio book series right now. And also I have four or five

[00:08:36] books that I need to get to on my shelf that, that are just fiction and they're fun and they're recommended

[00:08:42] by people in my writing group. Um, and then also reading or studying a lot of craft. Um, so craft

[00:08:50] books like, um, save the cat writes a novel is great for structure. Creating character arcs is great for

[00:08:55] understanding how characters work, but then also, um, Brandon Sanderson's lectures when he was at BYU in

[00:09:02] 2019, 2020 are really good. The writing excuses podcast has a ton of information and just finding

[00:09:09] sources of information, um, is kind of the second thing. But then we also talk constantly about

[00:09:17] things we're reading, whether that's craft or whether that's fiction or anything, there's a lot

[00:09:24] of conversation all the time. So that's the third thing is talking and discussing. And we do a lot more

[00:09:30] of that than I expected when I started, but then also giving and providing feedback on each other's

[00:09:39] writing helps crystallize and solidify what we like and don't like in other people's work. So the giving

[00:09:49] feedback is actually way more important than receiving feedback because it helps us to figure out,

[00:09:59] to train our brains to read critically, but not in a like negative kind of way more in a,

[00:10:06] what is the author trying to do here? Why is it, or isn't it working? How can I do this in my own work?

[00:10:13] And then the fifth thing is writing just a lot of writing. Yeah. So actually I'm really interested in the

[00:10:20] reading with a critical eye. So, um, so obviously when your writing group is sharing samples or

[00:10:27] potential chapters or whatever, you're, you're doing that, you're like setting out to do that

[00:10:30] when you're reading or listening to audiobooks. Um, uh, when you're reading anything now, do you find

[00:10:37] yourself always slipping into the critical eye or can you still read for pure enjoyment or

[00:10:40] is that a meaningful question? Um, it's a very meaningful question. I think, um, I have a

[00:10:46] background in teaching. I taught for four years and worked as a teacher's aide for four years before

[00:10:51] that. Um, and one thing that we did with reading, especially was we talked about close reading,

[00:10:58] about the process of reading something several times. I try to do that with, with some stories,

[00:11:05] but not all. And when I, when I set out to do that, I will read a story and I'll just blaze through it,

[00:11:12] having fun, not worrying about what I'm trying to learn. I'll comment like, this is cool. This is

[00:11:17] interesting. I don't understand what's happening here, but that's the extent of my comments.

[00:11:21] And then I can go back and turn on the, okay, what's the author trying to do here? I, and that helps

[00:11:29] understand, okay, um, Naomi Novik is setting up a character in Scrawlomance that's really sympathetic.

[00:11:37] You really understand what she's going through and what she's dealing with, but also to me,

[00:11:44] at least she's not very likable trying to figure out how Naomi Novik balances that. That's, that was

[00:11:51] a goal when I read that series was figuring out Elle's voice and why she can be so nasty to everybody

[00:12:02] around her and still be somebody I want to have win. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I guess how many questions like

[00:12:10] that can you focus on when you're doing a reread? So in that case, I think you could spend the

[00:12:15] entirety of Scrawlomance focusing on Elle, uh, or you could also look at, um, is it Orion? Yeah.

[00:12:21] The, yeah. So, so I think, I think Novik is doing very different things with those two characters and

[00:12:26] she's, she's subverting existing tropes, which we probably should talk about. Cause I mean,

[00:12:29] I think serialized fiction like lives or dies by tropes in general. I wonder, uh, can you focus on

[00:12:37] more than one of those sort of craft level questions in a reread? Um, can I, yes, should I? No. Um, the,

[00:12:50] the thing is there's so much going on in writing that's like, I, I don't see probably three quarters

[00:12:59] of what someone like Stephen King is doing at this point. I don't even see the levers he's pulling.

[00:13:04] Mm-hmm .

[00:13:05] So I can't understand how the machine works at all. But if I tried to focus on learning all of

[00:13:13] the skills all at once, it would be really messy. One thing my writing group tries to do, we bring in a

[00:13:20] lot of new authors and we try to expose them to one or two skills at a time because that way they can

[00:13:27] move from this, um, I don't know if you've seen the like wheel of competence thing. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:13:35] So they can move from unconscious incompetence to conscious competence where they understand the

[00:13:42] thing and they're using the thing, but they still have to think about the thing. And if, if they're

[00:13:47] doing that with 14 different skills all at once, or if I'm doing that with 14 different skills all at

[00:13:52] once, it's not going to, I'm not going to learn any of them well. So you need to learn. I think

[00:14:00] you need to learn one skill or two skills at a time. Gotcha. So, so you've been on Royal Road for

[00:14:07] about two years, a little more than two years, I think. About 20 months of writing time. Okay. Yeah.

[00:14:12] So, so, uh, what has your journey been like, uh, both before that and then on the platform?

[00:14:19] So when I started writing, I'd always kind of been a writer, but my writing had been more

[00:14:25] nonfiction history stuff. I got a degree in history from a local university out here. And while I was

[00:14:34] getting that bachelor's in history, I did a lot of like conference paper writing and presented a few

[00:14:41] conference papers at undergraduate history conferences. So prior to this, I understood how

[00:14:48] writing worked and how like sentence structure worked all of that, but writing fiction wasn't

[00:14:55] really a thing. But, um, during the pandemic and right after the pandemic, I found some of these

[00:15:03] stories on the slash slash HFY subreddit, um, which is a totally vulgar name that I probably can't repeat.

[00:15:13] Um, but it's about humanity being awesome and fighting aliens and being really cool,

[00:15:23] basically. But there were these really long space operas, like military space operas. And I

[00:15:28] started reading them there and that's how I found Royal Road, um, kind of fell into the

[00:15:35] more progression fantasy that RPG storylines from there. And then found a story called Dungeon Tour

[00:15:43] Guide by Aaron Shi. I was reading it and I said, I could probably write something like this. Um,

[00:15:51] I could not, it turned out.

[00:15:54] Well, at the time.

[00:15:55] Yeah. Um, so I started by like reading a whole bunch of stories on the site and figuring out what

[00:16:04] I wanted to try to write. It didn't go the way I wanted it to at all. And I thought like being a

[00:16:10] good writer was, I can create chapters that are more or less the same size that can end on a

[00:16:15] cliffhanger. So people want to read the next one. The story is more or less cohesive. That was kind of

[00:16:20] what I thought I was going to need to do. And I think I did okay at it, but I wasn't good at it.

[00:16:27] What do you think was missing and how you thought about it?

[00:16:31] I still haven't had any formal training at writing fiction. I haven't taken any classes on writing

[00:16:38] since like 2012 or something, even history classes. So it's been a while, but this writing group that I

[00:16:47] joined was, is really focused on the craft skills of writing less or more so than the marketing and

[00:16:57] like selling yourself side of things. And I think that just being exposed to an environment where

[00:17:04] I could start to see some of the pieces in writing really helped a lot.

[00:17:09] So now I'm a little more experienced and I'm thinking more about structural beats and

[00:17:14] a chapter's role within the story, how to maintain tension, all of those things. And it's, it's basically

[00:17:20] the same stuff I was focusing on 20 months ago, except I've got a vocabulary set now and a skill set now

[00:17:27] to understand what goes into making a story cohesive or what goes into making a character interesting

[00:17:36] that I didn't have before.

[00:17:38] Yeah. Interesting. Um, so, so I think that magical girl undergrad started out

[00:17:44] and it felt a little surface level, right? Um, and by the end it had developed into a much deeper

[00:17:52] sort of meditation on celebrity culture and, uh, colonialism to some extent and, and capitalism.

[00:17:59] Do you think that, uh, your earliest attempts where you were trying to imitate Dungeon Tour Guide,

[00:18:04] did you want to investigate those sorts of themes then or, or did that come later?

[00:18:10] I don't know. I think I just wanted to, at the time I just kind of wanted to write something and see if I

[00:18:16] could do it. And I, I did manage to get my first story to a completion point. I wasn't happy with the

[00:18:25] last 30,000 words or so, but it, it finished. So it was a real confidence booster that I could do it,

[00:18:33] but it wasn't until Metropole Girl undergrad that I started thinking about themes and goals and how to,

[00:18:42] how to talk about stuff like that. I knew that Rocco, Rocco is like the main

[00:18:50] TV producer villain type. I knew they were going to be the main villain, like from the beginning. And I knew I

[00:18:57] was going to be talking about show business and child actors and things like that from the beginning,

[00:19:05] but it wasn't really a focus until halfway through book two.

[00:19:11] Okay. Um, so are there specific skills and tools now in your toolbox, uh, that you developed with an eye

[00:19:20] towards being able to investigate those themes? Um, so, I mean, that, that's sort of a level beyond the

[00:19:26] thinking of cliffhangers at the end of chapters or, uh, character arcs to be satisfying need to have

[00:19:32] this sort of general structure or something like that. I don't, I don't think so. Theme is, um,

[00:19:41] I'm going to sound self-denigrating for a second. Lit RPG and progression fantasy is for the most part

[00:19:49] popcorn fiction. It's not usually trying to tell those big things. I don't think, I think there are

[00:19:57] authors that do, um, Matt Deniman's, um, Dungeon Crawler Carl switches from being like a power fantasy

[00:20:08] to being a, an anti-capitalist masterpiece somewhere in the third book. Yeah. Um, or he fights with

[00:20:17] monsters by shirt alone really wants to explore power and the good uses of bad power and the bad uses of

[00:20:28] good power. But I think a lot of authors in the Royal road space are thinking less about theme and more

[00:20:36] about hype. Um, producing those jaw dropping. That's really cool moments. Um, so I don't think theme is

[00:20:47] something I've deliberately focused on yet, but it's something that I am thinking about more as I get

[00:20:55] better at the other parts of writing. Right. So, so maybe as you develop your skills at the sort of nuts and

[00:21:04] bolts of the craft, it allows you to experiment at this, this secondary level. Uh, yeah. To go back

[00:21:10] to the cabinet metaphor, like once you can build a cabinet with nails and glue and a handsaw and

[00:21:18] a board and a ruler and it holds your cups up. Okay. Then you can start taking a router to the surface

[00:21:25] and start doing flowery patterns on it and do the edging to make it look cool, all of that stuff.

[00:21:32] But it requires those beginning skills to even have a surface to work on. I think.

[00:21:39] Yeah. Gotcha.

[00:21:40] Um, there, there are stories that I want to write that I can't write yet because I know I don't have

[00:21:45] those skills yet. Um, okay. So, uh, jumping back a little bit, we, we, we've mentioned tropes and I

[00:21:52] think that you're right on when you say a lot of lit RPG and progression fantasy is popcorn fiction. It's,

[00:21:57] uh, I mean, it's very similar to romance, right? So there are a lot of romance authors. I mean,

[00:22:03] there, there are romance authors who are doing amazing things with story and character and theme

[00:22:07] and exploring deep cruise about the world. And then there are the romance authors that turn out

[00:22:12] a book every two weeks. Um, and, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Um, I think part

[00:22:21] of what allows for that sort of dichotomy of deep, meaningful works and very surface level entertaining

[00:22:28] works is the sort of prevalence of tropes in, in the genre. So there are certain ways that things

[00:22:35] are known to work. So in, in a lot of closed door romances, so not spicy romances, like 60%

[00:22:40] away through the book, they kiss or something like that. And actually I would say that on,

[00:22:44] on a site like Royal road or any, any very publicly driven site where there's trending and their ratings

[00:22:53] and there are people, uh, promoting things to some extent, the more trophy you are, the,

[00:22:59] the better you're gonna do. Cause it's, it's what people expect. Um, how do you think about tropes in

[00:23:05] your work? Like when to use them straight, when to subvert, when to completely break away from the

[00:23:10] framework? Um, with magical girl undergrad, I was mostly trying to stick within the tropes a little

[00:23:19] bit more. It represents 15 months of my writing time from the point where I started planning how the

[00:23:25] system works to the time that I wrote the very end of it. So it's, it's a large chunk of time. Um,

[00:23:36] but I was trying to play the tropes relatively straight. I did a lot of reading in the superhero

[00:23:43] genre, especially with superhero lit RPGs, um, super supportive industrial strength, magic, um,

[00:23:51] magical girl gunslinger, um, super minion. Like I tried to have a really solid understanding of what the

[00:23:58] tropes were for a post worm, um, superhero lit RPG. Worm being the like iconic superhero lit RPG.

[00:24:11] Web fiction. Yeah.

[00:24:14] Trollblazer. Yeah.

[00:24:16] Yeah. Yeah. So it was like with that story, I wanted to stick to the tropes as much as I could

[00:24:21] with, um, the Halcyon system. I'm playing it a little less straight. I'm trying to position the

[00:24:28] main character more as a participant in the events and less as a driver of the events, so to speak.

[00:24:39] Um, she's caught up in things and she's, she's definitely powerful, but she's not

[00:24:47] like God to your powerful with an amazing cheat skill to begin with or anything.

[00:24:52] Yeah.

[00:24:53] And then with my, my new project, that's not out yet, but hopefully we'll be in the next three or

[00:25:01] four months. I'm playing the tropes extremely straight. I'm writing a system apocalypse story,

[00:25:08] which has certain beats that you, you kind of need to hit. It's similar to romance in that regard,

[00:25:14] where if you don't have the 60% kiss or the 65 to 80% fake, fake breakup or like whatever,

[00:25:25] then you're not going to, the audience is not going to accept that.

[00:25:29] Right. They're going to think something is wrong as opposed to, yeah.

[00:25:34] Yeah. They're going to feel like their expectations aren't being met.

[00:25:37] Yeah. So I guess I wonder what are the skills around working with tropes, right? So there's clearly

[00:25:44] the knowledge of what, what tropes are expected and, and which are sort of like secondary, I guess,

[00:25:48] that you can abandon without harm. I wonder, I wonder how you could practice subverting tropes.

[00:25:56] It feels like it would be really risky to do that with your main story on a major site.

[00:26:02] I guess, I guess maybe short stories or something.

[00:26:04] Yeah. Yeah. Um, short stories are really good for that.

[00:26:07] Yeah. Royal road hosts a short story. Well, it's not a short story competition, but I'm slowly

[00:26:14] turning it into a short story competition. Um, it's the Royal road community magazine contest

[00:26:20] and it's supposed to be like one month of writing the first or second of the month. One of the community

[00:26:29] members tells everybody what the prompt is going to be. And then everybody writes to that prompt.

[00:26:35] So in June, which was the last one, the prompt was about goblins and grandmas.

[00:26:42] That was the whole prompt. And so everybody was trying to support the trope, um, which was going to be

[00:26:47] like, Oh, goblins are terrifying monsters and grandma's terrified of them, blah, blah, blah.

[00:26:51] Yeah. So they all wrote like grandma invites the goblins in and becomes their grandmother,

[00:26:57] stuff like that. And I,

[00:26:59] Yeah. And I was like, okay, how can I subvert the subversion of the trope? And so I wrote a story

[00:27:07] about an ancient paladin grandma who is still serving her God, even though she was no longer at

[00:27:12] the peak of her powers. So her God had her going to fight goblins again, even though she had killed

[00:27:17] the demon King when she was like 30. And I wanted to explore like how swearing an oath to a God or goddess

[00:27:26] is not like a, a one-time thing. It's not something that ever stops.

[00:27:32] Yeah. Yeah.

[00:27:33] You're done when you can no longer serve. So I ended up because I was only writing about 8,000,

[00:27:41] 9,000 words. I, I got to play around with the trope of goblins being the evil monsters and grandmas

[00:27:48] being weak, but also with the subversion of that trope, the cozy goblin grandma story.

[00:27:54] Mm-hmm .

[00:27:57] Yeah. So I think in, in practice in general, one of the important things is being able to lower the

[00:28:04] stakes from performance, right? So you can try things that would not be practical for, for, you know,

[00:28:10] sometimes like health reasons. And so in a, in a, like the community magazine, uh, you are not risking

[00:28:17] your overall rating and your reputation on the site for this short story, which makes me wonder,

[00:28:22] like, what are the other ways to lower the stakes in, in working on writing? So sharing with a select

[00:28:27] group, your, your online writing group, uh, and having beta readers, which is huge on AO3. Um,

[00:28:33] Yeah. Uh, are there other ways that you can think of or that you use?

[00:28:37] Yeah. Um, so Royal Road is actually, um, is actually one of those things because the goal is to,

[00:28:45] for me at least the goal is to get to Kindle and Audible. Um, the goal is to be published on there

[00:28:52] because I'm trying to make this a career at some point. Sure. I'm, I'm on my way, but the goal is

[00:28:59] to get published there. Royal Road is a much safer place where I can get a lot of feedback if I want it

[00:29:05] or block the feedback if I don't want it. Um, but it's a, it's a lower stakes environment than

[00:29:13] publishing on Kindle or Audible and publishing on Kindle and Audible is a lower stakes environment than

[00:29:22] reaching out to an agent and having that agent query one of the big five publishing houses.

[00:29:28] So like right now I'm operating at a lower stakes environment than I could be,

[00:29:33] but even lower than that, I run the crit groups on for the council of the eternal hiatus, which is the

[00:29:40] writing group I'm in. Okay. Um, I do the administrative side of it mostly, and we create a low stakes

[00:29:47] environment where there's three or four people in a group and they read a chapter to a week and give

[00:29:54] feedback on it. And it creates that lower stakes environment that you're talking about.

[00:30:00] And that goes all the way down to, I shared this story with a friend and he gave me feedback on it.

[00:30:06] So there's all of these different like levels of environments.

[00:30:09] Sure. Yeah. And anyone can potentially be practiced for another.

[00:30:14] Possibly. Yeah. Yeah. So like I said earlier, I don't think there's a meaningful difference between

[00:30:20] like practice and performance with writing. And I know you ask that question.

[00:30:24] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I, and I, and for, I think a surprising number of fields, that's the answer I get.

[00:30:30] Um, when you are doing the thing, you are necessarily practicing the thing, uh, which I coming into all of

[00:30:37] these conversations, I think sort of surprised me because I think for something to be the most

[00:30:45] actually saying this makes me realize why I'm surprised for something to be the most effective

[00:30:49] practice it can be. I think the goal of the effort needs to be improvement and for something to be

[00:30:55] the most effective performance can be, it is the production of some performance, right? So in writing,

[00:30:59] it's the production of a work that people will enjoy in music. It's the performance of a piece,

[00:31:03] um, in chess, it's the execution of a game. Uh, but the goal is not improvement. It's the production

[00:31:08] of the thing. And so in the back of my mind, I'm always thinking that at least theoretically,

[00:31:14] there should be a difference between I am doing an activity to get better at the activity versus

[00:31:18] I'm doing an activity to produce the thing. Um, and maybe it is just that some domains don't admit

[00:31:25] of that distinction, that there is no way to practice the underlying skills meaningfully or usefully

[00:31:31] or effectively without actually producing a thing at the end. Um, so I think with writing, um, going back

[00:31:40] to the short stories and the community magazine contest, those were opportunities for me to practice

[00:31:46] skills. And, um, with Louie body, which was semi-biographical about my grandpa and Alzheimer's,

[00:31:54] that story was about dealing with an emotional situation that there wasn't a, a possible victory

[00:32:03] for. It was about exploring tragedy. It was about, it was about writing from a male character's

[00:32:10] perspective because I tend to write female characters. Like those were the practice skills

[00:32:14] I was working on, but it was also an opportunity to relatively quickly create a

[00:32:21] very polished story with a specific emotional goal. And that was to make the judges cry. So that became

[00:32:31] the performance aspect of it was the final product will be a tragedy. It will make the judges feel things

[00:32:39] and it filled both roles that way, both as a learning opportunity and as a performance.

[00:32:47] Great. Yeah. Thank you. Well, thank you so much. This has been a really great discussion and I'm glad

[00:32:53] we got the chance to talk. Yeah, it was fun. I'm glad it worked out.

[00:33:01] And that's it for this week on 10,000. Thanks again to Chris Heyshen for the conversation

[00:33:05] and thanks to you for listening. We'll be back soon with another interview.

[00:33:08] Thank you.

[00:33:08] Thank you.