You Can Be One of Them

· 3 min read

I documented in The Click a generative method applied to haiku, which is a favorite source of mine. However, it works with just about anything.
I’ll show you with one of my favorite digital artifacts.

That is the story for Soldat. A 2D action game. https://www.soldat.pl/en/

As it says, it’s like Quake except 2D and it does allow you to be one of them. I’ve played the game a lot over the years and I’ve read this line dozens of times now.

There is so much to unpack in this story.

  • Why was the decision made?
  • Did they calmly meet about this beforehand and reach consensus?
  • What might happen if only one of them is left?

Poems are falling out of this idea already.

Of all these angles, the most interesting seems to be the meeting where they decided to kill each other. Digging into it:

  • Someone makes a slide deck
  • Someone raises a concern about parking
  • All in favor of killing each other, say “aye”
  • I think maybe the dirt lot behind the abandoned Cub Foods might be a good place to kill each other, what do you think?
  • Does Saturday work for everyone?
  • Is there a Facebook event?
This is the point where I'd get started. An easy first line might be something like

They met Saturday morning
in the parking lot
behind the abandoned Cub Foods.

Now the page is no longer blank.

I know up front the temptation will be to explain why they decided.

But the poem is the meeting, not the motive.


Bullet Points

They met Saturday morning
in the parking lot
behind the abandoned Cub Foods.

One brought coffee.

One balanced his laptop
on the hood of his car
and opened the slide deck:

Killing Each Other.

There were questions
about how it would work,
what weapons were allowed—

what happens after.

One said
next Saturday was difficult
because he had his daughter
until noon.

One had tickets
to a Twins game
that started at five
so they needed to be done before.

They picked a time
and began to leave.

One of the cars would not start.

They gathered
at the open hood.

Someone had cables.

They stayed
until it turned over.

I arrange the evidence and walk away.

A couple of notes on writing this: I use parataxis pretty aggressively when writing. I could blame it on the haiku, but it predates even that — my brain is just wired this way. Where I use hypotaxis and subordinate clauses is always interesting to me and I mean that because it just happens subconsciously.

Here, all the scheduling stanzas contain subordinate clauses. But nowhere else.

Again, I’m not writing like “hey, I will add a causal construction here”. I just settle on a shape that tickles my brain and sounds right to me.

The stanza I spent the most time undecided about was:

They picked a time
and began to leave.

I wanted more specificity here. I over-rotated adding specifics (Next Saturday at noon) and taking them out. But again, the poem is the meeting so I eventually decided it wasn’t relevant.

I’m going to show you some machinery here.

I was thinking about parking lots and remembered a time when I was 16 that I gave a jump start to a guy in a mall parking lot. He was so thankful. He told me he was a karate instructor and if I ever had any problems with someone, to let him know.

For a minute I moved through the world confident that I had someone to fight my battles for me.

That memory became the ending.