short stories 1

written 6 january 2026edited 19 september 2026

who are the characters?

what is the main plot?

what is the form?

these are 3 questions i do not have the answer to. today, I discovered that i’m terrified of writing a short story. perhaps i’m going to regret yesterday’s commitment. perhaps i already am regretting it.

however I have read a few shorts stories today and tried to figure out what it’s all about. some thoughts:

good short stories are surprisingly similar to good poems. i’m not sure how.
the most compelling stories are probably grounded in real world experience - write what you know? it’s harder for me to imagine a scenario that is very alien from my daily life than one grounded in my experience. good short stories contain random details and descriptions that immerse you in another world.
somewhat relatedly, the most compelling characters and dialogue is also probably grounded in your experience
in order to be a good writer, you need to be good at noticing. describe the mundane with new eyes
because they are so short, a lot of short stories tend to begin in media res, what is going on in the story only unfolding as the story progresses

is this working

written 5 january 2026edited 19 september 2026

ok this will be the 20th writing.

I think this has been a somewhat productive exercise so far. My barrier to writing things that other people will see has reduced. I’m not sure my writing quality has necessarily gotten much better. These writings tend to be much too short and unstructured - which is well suited to my mind tends to function. But I think I would benefit from actually committing to something and editing it from start to finish.

I do think the commitment mechanism is probably quite useful though.

I’m going to start working on a short story here. I will not stop until it’s finished. The notes will be messy and perhaps not the most comprehensible. Sorry.

Knowledge

written 4 january 2026edited 19 september 2026

Knowledge is mental structure that is isomorphic to reality.

We can never know things as they truly are. We are fed light particles that reflect off surfaces and our brains use this to build an incredibly rich model of our experience. Isn’t it incredible that we can have dreams that are practically indistinguishable from our waking lives? But these models are only models of our experience. The thing producing them is an approximation of reality, simulated inside our brain, optimised to be useful. Reality is far too complex to hold in a brain. So it is a simplification, an abstraction we interact with.

This mental structure is only useful insofar as it can predict future experience. It can do this because it shares structural properties with the structure of reality. Knowledge is structure that mirrors the structure of reality. This enables it to make predictions and understand the world mechanistically, without ever being able to directly interact with it.

If anyone claims that language models don’t ‘truly’ understand the world because they are not embodied and therefore their concepts are not grounded in the world, I think the same equally applies to humans.