The Tao Te Ching was libertarian like 2,500 years before libertarianism became a thing.
Chapter 75: Stephen Mitchell translation:
When taxes are too high,
people go hungry.
When the government is too intrusive,
people lose their spirit.
Act for the people's benefit.
Trust them; leave them alone.
In my ongoing sci fi story, there was one character where I wasn't sure whether they would live or die at the end. I decided it today.
I had outlined much of the plot from beginning to end with spots to fill in a while ago, but that particular outcome wasn't determined yet.
But after writing 75k words, and experiencing that character a lot, it gave me the right vibes on what to do.
Been spending less time online this past week.
More time walking, and more time writing offline.
Until election season is over, Twitter has reached rock-bottom to me.
I won’t say it’s unusable, since I am using it, but I have to navigate around its main thing to continue with the positive elements of the network effect that exists there.
And so many accounts are super biased on any given topic to a clearly irrational degree. I keep seeing things that seem like satire, but instead they are genuinely written to appeal to lower information people in a way that, from my perspective, is highly patronizing to them.
I find it so distasteful. The prior election year 2020 had a lot of polarizing elements obviously, but 2024 has more clearly conscious polarizing elements going on. Large influencer accounts whose motives are clear toward a broader audience with talking points geared toward child-level rhetoric and civic understanding. You can watch them as an observer speaking to their flock as though they were children.
The gold standard that I reference as a baseline for how to write an exceptional supporting character in fiction, is Lieutenant Colonel Maes Hughes from Fullmetal Alchemist. Absolutely exceptional.
Two decades after my initial reading of him, he’s still phenomenal.
Fullmetal Alchemist, the mature manga/anime, has a world set in the early 1900s, except where alchemy is real magic, at least for the few people who dare to practice it. Alchemy is hard to do and has a high price. There’s also a massive alchemical conspiracy involved in the government and military that runs the main country of the setting.
Lieutenant Colonel Maes Hughes is not an alchemist. He’s just a kind and hard-working 30-ish year old guy that is really good and experienced and at his job in military intelligence. He’s also great with throwing knives as his main hobby.
In the early arcs of the story, Hughes befriends as a semi-mentor the younger main alchemical protagonists (Ed and Al) and is already a close friend with another military colleague major supporting senior character (Colonel Mustang, who is a flashier military officer and alchemist).
Hughes is incredibly friendly and positive, and sometimes serves as comic relief. The funny, chill guy. As all these heroes run around, he focuses on his work. And unlike all of them, he’s a family man; his wife and young daughter mean the world to him. He always wants to show everyone pictures of his 4-year old daughter; he’s just absolutely thrilled about his family.
But behind all the kindness, and correct obsession with his wife and daughter, he’s super smart. He’s a lieutenant colonel in military intelligence, after all. He’s not a genius or anything but basically he’s just highly competent professionally, socially, and ethically, and thus optimized his life well. He doesn’t pursue alchemy and so he doesn’t do all the magical things that some rare people do that can greatly exceed human capabilities in battles, but he’s great elsewhere.
In his military intelligence research, partially from talking to the protagonists, he figures out the entire main villain plot before anyone else does. Before all the protagonists and other supporting characters. He then tries to go to a private (non-surveilled) payphone to share that information with his close colleague Colonel Mustang, and is murdered in the process.
And that murder doesn’t go down smooth, since Maes isn’t a pushover. He gets attacked by a supernatural alchemical villain entity named Lust to stop him, and with his throwing knives he holds his own against her better than most humans would and manages to escape injured. And as he gets to the payphone, he is attacked by a second supernatural alchemical villain entity named Envy, who can transform into people. Envy transforms into a lower-ranking officer Hughes knows, but Hughes can tell it’s not really her from a minor detail, since he knows that officer well. So Envy transforms into Hughes’ wife. Since he adores his wife, that fucks him up even though he logically knows it’s not her. He hesitates at throwing a knife at his visual wife, and thus gets shot to death by Envy before he can relay the key information to Mustang and other heroes. He dies in the phone booth, seconds away from providing key information. He did everything right but was overwhelmed by the superior conspiracy. And yet his death left tiny clues.
The funeral scene is hardcore. Hughes’ wife is devastated, and his young daughter doesn’t even fully understand the concept of death yet. She cries and panics out loud at the funeral, wondering how her father is going to finish all his work while he’s in a box underground, which makes all the adult main and supporting characters absolutely die inside at how hard that is to hear.
Hughes gets post-humorously promoted two steps up to Brigadier General upon his death, by the key military leadership of the country who are behind the whole conspiracy. Colonel Mustang, who knows Hughes tried to contact him that night but doesn't know what about, devotes his entire focus for the rest of the story to figuring out what Hughes found and avenging his death. The protagonists (Ed and Al) are also devastated from it and keep him in mind.
The death of this supporting character sends arguably the biggest shockwave through the series in terms of emotion and plot. It's not a throwaway. It raises the stakes, gets all the main and semi-main characters dialed in, and he never gets reborn or anything like that. Hughes never comes back. He’s dead, survived by his wife and daughter, and his friends have to deal with that fact until the end of the series.
Few supporting character arcs hit harder than Maes Hughes, imo. Roughly two decades after first experiencing it, I’m still like, “damn.” That's one of those weeb generational impacts worth studying for fiction creators and appreciators.
One thing I've come to appreciate about fiction writing is that it's as much problem solving as it is creativity.
Creativity is the spark of it. You start with a story idea. Vibes.
And then there's the basics. You have to put in your hours on reading fiction, and looking up tutorials on dialogue, exposition, structure, etc. Basically, spend a thousand hours reading things you like and reviewing all the mostly-right rules so that you can selectively break them when need be.
But the majority of the time actually spent on the craft, is problem solving. And as an engineer, that appeals to me. You have a series of scenes that need to happen for the story to occur, and have to figure out how to fill in the gaps to make one lead to another properly, i.e. mostly invisibly to the reader as though they're immersed and it's totally organic and really happened. And then you realize a plot hole with one of your scenes, and have to figure out how to tweak that scene or other scenes to fix the plot hole without creating more plot holes in a butterfly effect.
It clicks all the same fun challenge sensors that my brain has when it comes to engineering design or financial analysis.
Currently listening.
At around 5pm eastern I’ll be participating in a panel at the New York Stock Exchange on the topic of Bitcoin/crypto ETFs.
With Nic Carter, Eric Balchunas, and Mike Green. They’ll livestream it on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/live/9HjylxjjCW4Markets be like
Back in February I gave a Broken Money book talk at Princeton.
I put more prep into that presentation than any other I've done, since I often do firesides or panels and so forth. Eight months later it's still my go-to reference if someone wants the gist of the book. It recently crossed 100k views on Youtube.
I spent more hours than I care to admit yesterday studying laser guns, why they mostly suck compared to normal guns, and how one might design a less-awful laser gun given 10-20 years of better tech progression.
Gm.
I wrote 60,000 words of (rough) fiction in the month of September. About half a novel. It’s been a really fun and creative process.
If you want to do something, just start. Starting is the hardest part for most things.
Woke up today and decided to reconnect with a very close college friend from 15 years ago. Just sent a minor note, he responded enthusiastically, and we caught up on 15 years of life. Happily to see how much he has gained in terms of profession, family, and hobbies while ultimately being the same person he was back then. Amplified.
Amazing connection. Took a total of 30 minutes back and forth.
My suggestion today is to reach out with a random act of kindness, or a distant reconnection. A reconnection might even be more for your own sake than theirs, but it often benefits both.
Some of my readers today noticed that I dislike modern sub-3 minute songs.
My favorite newish rock band is The Warning. It's a rock band of three Mexican women. I've been a public proponent of them for over three years now. They have special potential, and keep growing.
They do some Metallica covers including of those older and longer songs. Naturally, I love it:
Currently listening:
Action sequences can be rather hard to do in books, and yet there are plenty of good ones.
As a reader I tend to like the "less is more" approach most of the time. A few paragraphs of intense stuff rather than page after page of detail, unless it's something really unique.
If any of the novels you read have action sequences, what do you find draws you in about them, and what sorts of things can turn you off from them and knock you out of the flow?
New Linkin Park
It's good but I wish these were longer. Feels like half a song.
