Postmortem: The Button

I had to let this one sit for a while. Now that the sci-fi contest results are in, I think I'm ready to do this. My process on how I wrote The Button and my retrospective after the break.

When I saw the sci-fi contest come out, I was intrigued by it, and I really loved a couple of the stories I saw being submitted to it. I didn't have any intention to enter the contest because I have enough trouble writing for my own deadlines, nevermind someone else's. However, as the deadline got closer, I started playing around with a story idea: it was a dystopian hacker story based on a nerdcore album from 2014. That is not the story I wrote because I couldn't get past the first 500 words of it. Maybe I'll come back to it some day, but it needs time to bake.

Then, with less than a week to go, the muse struck me with a new idea that became The Button. It was a silly idea, and I think the earliest source of inspiration for it came from a Ren & Stimpy cartoon I saw as a kid where Ren and Stimpy are space cadets or w/e and Stimpy has to guard this big red button and then it becomes an extreme expression of the temptation to push to button. (best video I could find of this cartoon). But that was just the seed of the idea. Another early piece of inspiration is the opening scene from the movie War Games which emphasizes the dehumanized and mechanical operation of a nuclear silo.

The Stanley Parable could also be cited as partially to blame for this story, but I wouldn't credit it too much as direct inspiration. More as a mood that shaped the Facility to feel cold and oppressive, which brought out the existentialist tone of the story.

There's some other stuff which I'm not gonna bother going into (this isn't the first time I've experimented with this idea, but it is the first time I've actually produced something from it). The important point here is that from the start I knew that my controlling idea was going to be a bit weird because it was more of an open-ended question than a declarative statement. Something to the effect of: "Do you push the button?"

My first pass at an outline for the story took the form of Discord popping in on each of the Mane 6 and just presenting them with a button and tempting them to push it. And as it happened with Twilight Opens a Door, Discord helped shape the story without appearing in the final version. Go figure. Actually, very little from this first pass survived to the final, but I spent time thinking about how each character would act in the situation and that informed my character decisions later. Like, I imagined Rarity wouldn't care so much about the button itself as she'd care about what everypony else is doing because she's sensitive to group trends, and Twilight would naturally drive herself mad with indecision. Pinkie Pie would press it immediately of course.

A button by itself isn't exactly sci-fi though.

Or is it?

While the Facility provides a sci-fi set dressing, I like to think that what makes this story a work of Science Fiction (and why I love sci-fi as a genre) is how I used the setting to express a bigger idea. Ideas about compliance, complacency, alienation, and agency are important to me, and have been on my mind a lot, especially as I was writing this story, because of the burnout I was suffering at my job. That's as personal as I want to get about it, but things are improving now.

I wrote the first draft in one sitting. It was very extemporaneous. I picked a couple characters (started with AJ and Rarity) and put them in a sterile location (the elevator) where it was a normal boring day like every other normal boring day. But today something was different (Rarity missed her usual stop) yadda yadda establish the big red button, and scene. Yadda yadda, Twilight twigging-out, the end. I passed it to Sparkling Twilight for a preread, for which I'm very grateful for, and the brief conversation we had about it gave me all the feedback I needed to make some last-minute edits (deleted a scene, added a scene, moved a scene) before publishing and submitting to the contest only hours before the deadline.

I feel bad about the scene I cut. It was Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy in a room of buttons that light up and essentially play Conway's Game of Life. It was a bit of fluff. Sparkling Twilight liked it but did recognize it didn't quite work. I'll let past-me from our conversation sum it up:

I'm very conflicted about this scene myself. As I mentioned, it's my least favorite (I really only wrote it because I felt the need to include all of the mane 6 and had no other ideas for what to do with these two). But I guess there is something to like about it, and as I also mentioned, it helps to balance the tone of the ending.

Moving AJ's scene helped balance the ending, I think (the alternative was to follow directly after RD's scene, which didn't feel right to me), and giving Rarity her own scene at the start filled out the story to a reasonable length (writing in the 2-3k word range is apparently my sweet spot). All while keeping the narrative lean and focused (I'm nothing if not a parsimonious writer. ...when I'm even a writer. )

I had fun writing this story. It's a weird-ass anti-plot where everything happens by coincidence, nothing is explained, and the characters lack all agency. ...They lack agency until a crucial moment: when the cover unlocks and the big red button is just sitting there, staring them in the face. There's a satisfaction that comes just from the act of pushing a button. Just look at the market for keyboard switches. (I do love me some proper clacky-clacky keys when I type.)

I did not expect to win anything in the contest. I had fun, and I like what I wrote, but compared with what I was up against

I've been struggling to getting back to work on AI Misadventures. This has mostly just been me being unmotivated (related to aforementioned burnout), however there were some tricks I employed to get myself to sit down and actually write The Button, and when I'm feeling up to it, I'll do the same and get more UniVAC published. It'll go quickly once I get started.