The story is a codebase

I’ve been using Obsidian to write a story, partly for fun, partly as a de-stresser, but also to try my hand at a different form of writing. And one feature that I adore is the graph view which shows the relationships between your documents.

So in each Obsidian doc, you can add links to another like this:

[[Jupiter]] was a demi-god that befriended old [[Ansel]].

The more links you add, the more the graph view will swarm with connections, like this:

A screenshot of Obsidian’s graph view with lines connecting documents

Graph views like this aren’t handy for writing blog posts or essays, and I don’t usually like mind maps of things because they’re a bad way of organizing information. In fact, they kinda stress me out. But for writing fiction and stories this view is super handy. I can see where two characters aren’t connected or where a scene just sits out there in the void, disconnected from all other characters and events and plot points.

So I’ve been using this graph view once every so often to help me connect the dots. Each character should have some connection to every other in some form and this is a quick way to notice storytelling gaps. But this view is also helpful for me to not just write the story from start to finish, get mad, then bail. I feel like this story is now more like a codebase, where I can pop open one section of it and tinker and tweak it. Poke it until it’s connected to the rest of the code. I can refactor this one page, this scene, this weapon, this location—without having to worry about writing everything sequentially in chapters and without having to worry about writing high fiction where everything has to be beautiful.

In fact, with the graph view, I feel like I’m free now to write absolute junk. And this is vital for any creative thing! You have to feel like your mistakes won’t be judged, that there’s no one watching you write shameful, embarrassing things. Because if you have all that pressure of trying to write the next great American novel then I reckon you’re destined to fail.

All things suck before they get good—and I reckon this graph view helps me accept the suckiness of this thing whilst I work on it slowly, polishing and tweaking and refactoring it endlessly.