Earlier this year I started sketching out ideas for my new short story about correspondence chess. I’m happy to say the first draft is done. Here it is!

As I wrote in January, this story is an exploration of kishōtenketsu, a Japenese story format. It was a pretty interesting experiment for me. I’ve never been particularly motivated by plot, character development, conflict, or really any of the rudimentary elements of creative writing: I’m much more interested in subtext, symbolism, and meaning. Perhaps that is ultimately a kind of laziness, in that I want to express an idea and don’t care to put together a decent story in order to do so? It’s not terribly clear to me, but if that’s the case, I guess it’s fine by me! In some ways writing is a selfish act, and I guess I’m ok with that.

In any case, I found that I really enjoyed the challenge of kishōtenketsu.

The first two parts, while a little tiresome and maybe plodding, were fun and in a way breezy. Here we have a somewhat boring but sympathetic character, doing some rather boring but sympathetic things, with what I hope to be an entertaining voice.

The third part, the non-sequitur whose drama arises from an entirely new narrative voice, was in some ways the easiest to write: I found myself rather didactically writing out some of the thoughts I’ve had in my head about two rather disparate but important pieces of work. It was all rather prosaic, but I decided to make that third part a piece of kishōtenketsu unto itself because… why not? That was fun.

The last part, in which we resolve the tension between the two choices, was relatively quick to write but consumed a fair amount of mental energy over the last two weeks. Having set up this oddball contrast between two very different kinds of characters, I now needed to bring them into harmony. How was I to do that, and how indeed would I do that while imparting the lesson I hoped to impart?

I hope that I’ve done so in a satisfactory way. The idea that AI is a tool, one which can enhance our thought processes but never replace them: I like to think it came across rather nicely. I certainly hope that the story in which this idea is enmeshed winds up being enjoyable and entertaining!