Writing "Cropped Red Hoodie"

Process notes for a story I wrote.

The stories I post here matter more to me than anything else I write.¹ I think fiction is just a better fit for the internet than nonfiction. With nonfiction, there’s always a gap between the piece and the reality behind it. That gap is distorted & widened² by the dynamics of online virality. If ten totally honest essayists, who together make up a representative spread of experience on some axis, write ten totally honest essays about their experience on that axis, the invisible hand³ of internet market dynamics will raise up some of them and obscure others, with much more bias for virality than for representativeness, so that readers who get their world-picture from nonfiction could end up with pretty poor world pictures, despite the essayists’ honesty.

Stories are complete in and of themselves. When you post a story online, the whole thing is online. For me, as a writer, it’s much less easy for me to bullshit myself about my fiction than my nonfiction. When I’ve written nonfiction and people don’t agree with me, I can tell myself there’s a reality I’m referring to that they haven’t seen. When I write a story that people interpret differently than I do—well, often they just literally haven’t read what it says, that’s true for nonfiction too, but when they have actually read it, I don’t have privileged access to other information, the reader & the writer are both “on the same page.” At least, that’s how I feel. Also, stories are more straightforward about the type of truth they offer, if that makes sense.

Often people say that no one on Substack is interested in fiction. That is not what I find. Definitely my most popular posts are, like, advice, which I feel weird about. But I’m pretty happy with the response my stories have gotten (especially relative to how good the stories are, which is to say, not very). The readers who’ve been into my stories are surprisingly cool, tasteful, smart, considering that, again, my stories are not very good. I’ve had great conversations with them that matter a lot to me.

If you think stories are so great, you may well ask, then why do you mostly write stuff that is not stories? And the answer is that writing stories is really fucking hard. When I write a take, reality does a lot of the work for me (even if I’m wrong about my opinion, I at least don’t feel like I’m inventing stuff, if you see what I mean). Writing stories often feels scary for me. I never feel sure if I can make it happen, the way I know I can for a take.

I’ve tried to solve that problem by taking a lot of process notes. Then, when I start a new story, I can see what strategies I’ve used before, whether they worked or not. Here are my process notes for Cropped Red Hoodie, relatively unedited from Obsidian formatting. I don’t necessarily expect this to be of much interest to everyone, but if you’re paying for my Substack, you might be invested enough to be interested.

1/23/25

**plan:** try, for no more than 50 minutes, to tell a story, the way you did last lent. put it in the substack editor. try to take process notes extensively so as to be able to recreate.

**start time:** 10:19

**stage:** skillbuilding (prewriting)

**duration:** 50

**word count:** 711

**process:** okay. i feel like i often start these stories by asking questions about other fairy tales. bellflower the question was "when he climbs her hair, doesn't it hurt?" the little mermaid the question was "is this already a turn-around of other princess stories, & what happens if i turn it back around again?” so what fairy tales spring to mind and what questions do i have about them.

cinderella…will she be happy…bleh overdone

little red riding hood…..where’s grandpa….overdone

goldilocks…why’d she fuck up those bears’ life….overdone

IDK I feel drawn to little red riding hood? I have my little red riding hood. call it “cropped red hoodie”

what happens in little red riding hood?

you: riding hood

need: visit grandma?

go: into the woods

search: (road of trials) the big bad wolf

find: meet with your grandma—but it’s the wolf—eaten up

return: hunter saves her, she goes home

change: she’s more careful now????

got a question, got an image, trying to make a story structure out of it. distracted and looking for the hoodie

so the basic story is. she goes on an errand of mercy. along the way she meets a wolf, to whom she gives TOO MUCH INFORMATION. she tells him: ABOUT A VULNERABLE PERSON SHE WOULD CARE FOR, and she tells him HOW TO AVOID PEOPLE WHO COULD POSSIBLY STOP HIM.

the wolf pretends to be A PERSON WHO NEEDS HELP.

red riding hood notices the "red flags" but allows herself to be rationalized out of them--especially she rationalizes red flags by saying "her voice is hoarse because she's sick"--the red flag is explained away as being a result of the other person's vulnerability.

SHE GETS INTO BED WITH THE PRETENDER.

in perrault it's over for our girlboss.

in grimm, "coincidentally" a hunter passes by, notices red flags, and investigates. it turns out that he has been hunting the wolf a long time. he kills the wolf, saves the girl somewhat worse for wear, and the original vulnerable person.

i think this is do something withable.