Behind the Story: Frag/ment/ed · 4:50pm Jul 29th, 2023
I really didn’t expect much from this release, much less another featured story like I tended to get before I took a several month break. So uh, thanks 65 of you for reading my batshit insane story.
Well, time to do what I tend to do. Let’s take this thing apart.
Frag/ment/ed was primarily devised to get myself in the flow of writing again. I had writer’s block, and I needed something to help me break free, a grand return of sorts. Luckily, the Thousand Words Contest was happening again, and that gave me some time to flex my writing muscles.
Originally, I wasn’t going to write for it, but then I got an idea.
I believe I watched a video on MyHouse.wad, which is a modern classic Doom mod loosely based around the experimental fiction book House of Leaves. House of Leaves was a big conversation topic around QnS and a couple other places (along with a unanimous agreement that MyHouse.wad was one of the greatest Doom mods ever) after a video on the mod surfaced and got big. I believe Like the Wind (also known as “The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet”) also got a spike in attention around this time, but that’s irrelevant, good song though.
So after seeing all this talk about House of Leaves and the experimental nature of the story proper, I suddenly realized “wait I can do that”.
Now Frag/ment/ed isn’t House of Leaves levels of brilliant experimentation. However, I realized that it was something I could do, and I started eyeing up that Experimental genre.
Similar to A Broken Crown last year, I decided to mess around with formatting again, but I needed an idea.
Enter Chiri.
I’m saying her name now because she’s a massive inspiration for this story and she probably won’t see this, though she was supposed to be a sensitivity reader I just took too long. One thing I am not good at is deadlines. If I say I’m releasing a song next week expect me to release a song next month.
But yes, Chiri is my best friend/“gf”/whatever we’ve talked a rather ridiculous amount over Discord and it’s nice. I really like her, kinda crush on her. For all her beauty she does have flaws though and while I’m not gonna say precisely what happened she did influence the story and that’s a pretty good indicator.
Bunny is influenced by Chiri and most everything I know about her. In a way it’s a Raining-verse story but it’s not really.
I decided that the story would have to have some vague, well, story. So, it follows Bunny as they learn more and more about themselves and try to break down the walls that have spent years building up. After writing three chapters I realized that I didn’t want the whole thing to seem unfocused so I had to devise a theme, which I eventually settled on “pretend”.
Well, then it proceeded to “pretend” and “I want to feel cute”, but it’s better than my prior stories which don’t have a theme.
The entire story is supposed to take place within Bunny’s mind, which is experimental in itself, the entire story being not from the perspective of the person but the perspective of the person’s brain. WoF might’ve helped that, especially Escaping Peril, which also does similar brain things with animus magic nonsense.
But the primary thing I wanted to do, harkening back to House of Leaves, was screw around with common formatting norms and create something unusual. Using breaks in 100-word chapters, having 7 precisely 100-word chapters in the first place, panning the words to imply different viewpoints and for emphasis, including using them in “…Bunny?” and “Frag/ment/ed” to represent a cluttered mindscape, and also utilizing some weird FiMFiction things like size and bullet point lists. I should’ve also included colored text and sub/superscripts. Alas, I didn’t have a use for the latter (I just forgot colored text existed).
The ending formatting was planned from the start. I wanted that to be a grand finale when I realized that the words on the words “Who am I” get progressively shorter by line when formatted to the center, so I decided to completely run with that and create a tornado of thoughts that almost kinda looked like a fragment. That last chapter was hell to proofread because if I had too few or too many words (I allotted 300) I had to reformat the entire thing so that it kept its “ever smaller” effect.
At one point there was a plan to have three different fragments but that was axed due to text formatting having a shortcoming when written on the same line as another piece of formatted text. Specifically that it’s not possible. So I stuck with the “one fragment” idea.
As mentioned in the A/N this was all done using built-in FiMFiction formatting tools. Everybody uses Docs and while that has more experimental capabilities, I kinda wanted to let my creativity blossom under restrictions and also not have to deal with the headache that is copying it over, it being too many words, having to reformat everything that breaks so on and so forth. Also I think FiMFiction has a lot of cool formatting capabilities that people don’t use and I want to be one of the people who uses them.
I think it came out pretty nicely given that. Could’ve been better to do meta experimentation though (something akin to Inner Groove or Bite Me). But no, this streak isn’t ending, I have another story that will likely have some formatting craziness to it. I thought Frag/ment/ed was a cool idea and I wanted to do it. I probably won’t get anything out of it as I feel it isn’t as good as The Broken Crown but who knows.
It didn’t actually take a month to write in full. I just kinda slacked off, though I did redo the chapters a few times per (they’re short so it didn’t take as long).
As for why Bunny didn’t figure themself out at the end. It’s because Chiri hasn’t figured herself out either, I just call her a girl because she genuinely doesn’t care.
Influences include ‘66-‘67 Beatles’ production, House of Leaves (through cultural osmosis), MyHouse.wad, and “what can I do with this”
And until next time; be awesome!
-Dashie
