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My 48K Challenge: A Programming Lesson on Creativity

June 13, 2022

creativity, javascript, nostalgia, patience, programming, society, video games

There are all sorts of asinine challenges in the ocean of mediocrity that is social media, and let me assure you, this isn’t one of them. My “48K challenge” is something I came up with when I noticed something disturbing on my “smart” phone: The size of the calculator app is 8MB. That of the alarm clock is 19MB. And my personal favorite, the messages app (just SMS, that is) is a whooping 204MB.

Are these people serious?

When I was a kid, you could pack an entire video game in 48KB. In other words, the space the calculator app requires is the equivalent of more than 165 video games for the ZX Spectrum – my first computer.

It goes without saying that technology has advanced a lot; the games of the 80s can’t be technically compared to those we have today. And yet, it feels programming has become sloppy.

I’m of course generalizing, but it feels as if the more the resources we have, the less the creativity and the greater our laziness. It all leads to resource hogs that take too much space and are often buggy. Because, hey, let’s all keep updating all the time.

And so, I gave myself what I termed the 48K challenge. I decided to make a retro-style video game in JavaScript, that had to be 48KB or less. The results were intriguing and revealing – and a little bit disappointing, but not in the way you imagine.

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Restraint in Writing: Doing Your Characters Justice

March 15, 2021

Fiction Writing Tips, Writing

ambiguity, fiction, pace, patience, restraint, writing

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I’ve often talked about patience and “less is more” in my posts. I’ve also often referred to the importance of subtlety and ambiguity, rather than over-explaining. Restraint in writing is part of this grand concept, and it basically refers to keeping your authorial eagerness in check.

To exercise restraint while writing means to understand narrative journeys. Exercising restraint and subtlety means to resist ~~divine~~ authorial intervention: If a certain outcome, way out, or solution is unlikely to happen in real life, then it’s twice as unlikely to happen in fiction.

Remember that, although life doesn’t need to make sense, fiction does!

And so, in this post I’ll show you why restraint when writing fiction is important. I’ll also show you ways to find and maintain this restraint. The way can be challenging, but the result will be worth it: You will end up with a narrative that is far more mature, engaging, and rewarding for you and your audience alike.

But, as a first thing, we need to zero in on the concept of restraint. So, let’s begin with some definitions and examples.

For many authors, restraint in writing sounds negative; it connotes limitation, being chained. Well, as you can see in the next photo, further below, being chained can be a good thing!

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Over-Explaining in Writing and How to Avoid It

March 14, 2018

Literature

creativity, literature, over-explaining, patience, writing

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Besides a linear narrative progression and not optimal narrative endings, another problem area for authors of fiction is over-explaining. By over-explaining in writing, we mean the tendency of a writer to provide too much factual information. This is usually detrimental to the overall pace of the novel, but it’s not the only repercussion, as we will see further below.

In today’s article I’ll show you where over-explaining in writing comes from (in other words, why fiction writers tend to over-explain), as well as how to avoid it. As a sneak preview, I could reveal that over-explaining in writing is very much related to an author’s relationship with their audience. In more detail, fiction authors who over-explain do so out of fear that their readers will not understand the story.

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