Author
I finished reading Lem’s Solaris and then was notified of a discussion about the book and the film adaptations.
I intended to draft a book review, but I may defer.
For now, I’ll note that the similarities between this and my own work are superficial. Both have philosophical perspectives, but Lem’s is much more psychological. This is nice, but it’s not where I tend to take things, and not so overtly.
Zach Cregger wrote Weapons. He also directed it, produced it, and composed the soundtrack. This blog is about writing, so let’s stay with that. In a recent interview with Perri Nemiroff at Fandango, he described how the story emerged almost by accident:
Perri asks Zach how he got the idea for the story:
I didn’t have an idea for the movie when I started writing
— Zach Cregger
I was like, “Okay, little girl telling a story— takes place at a school. Kids go to school. Follow a teacher. Class is empty. Why? I don’t know. Let’s find out.”
And then two sentences later – because the kids all ran out the night before.
Okay, that’s a hook I like. So, I knew… I have a good question. So then, I probably wrote 50 pages before I even knew what the answer was going to be, honestly.
So, you know, I got the teacher, I got the angry dad, and they’re kind of doing their cat and mouse sort of a thing, and then… I got this cop, and… it wasn’t until about the midpoint where I had… what it was.
And that was a really good moment for me because I was like, “This might not ever be a thing. I might not have anything here.”
You know, if I don’t have a good answer, there’s no reason to watch this movie.
That’s pantsing in its purest form — starting with a question and running fifty pages before you even know if there’s an answer. Discovery writing at its most precarious: equal parts exhilaration and existential dread.
Personally, I lean hybrid. Sometimes I pants a draft until it coughs up a structure; other times I start with scaffolding and let the innards misbehave. But the dead ends always loom. I’ve euthanised countless ideas that failed to evolve, rather than stitching them together with some lazy deus ex contrivance. (Television thrives on that sort of duct-taped plotting, which is precisely why I don’t bother with it.)
Anyway, I have not seen this movie. I am not a fan of horror, but every now and then I sample what’s out there. I might check this out to see how well it delivers.
Some novels are born in a lightning bolt. Needle’s Edge was forged in sediment: years of observations, contradictions, and lived experience settling into something that could no longer be ignored.
The video is intentionally, if not mercifully, short for all parties considered; it comes in under five minutes.
Needle’s Edge is Ridley Park’s latest novel-in-progress, a raw, unvarnished work of literary realism with grit under its nails and philosophy in its bloodstream.
In this first episode of a new series on my writing process, I unpack the origins of Needle’s Edge: from life between the vantage point of an anthropologist and the poetry of Bukowski, to lived experience inside the worlds of sex work, addiction, and the quiet economies of trust and betrayal.
I reflect on the shift from speculative fiction to a tethered, reality-bound narrative, a story that rejects morality tales, subverts tropes, and meets its protagonist, Sarah, in the middle of her life before looping back to her beginnings. Along the way, he weaves in themes from Simone de Beauvoir, explores personae and code-switching, and interrogates the myths of middle-class respectability.
This is not a documentary – twenty years of lived history are compressed into five – but it’s true in its bones. Join me as he begins peeling back the layers of Needle’s Edge and the philosophy that drives it.
A common question I get about my writing—my fiction, anyway—is: what motivates you?
It sounds like a harmless question. Like asking a plumber what motivates them to fix pipes. But fiction is not plumbing. And motivation, for a writer, is often post-rationalised. Still, I have answers. Or at least fragments of them.
A primary driver is to convey philosophical concepts that I feel apply to life in general, but don’t tend to get the airtime they deserve. A good example is Heidegger’s Geworfenheit.
In English, that’s usually translated as “thrownness.” It refers to the feeling—no, the condition—of having been thrown into existence without consent, without context, without recourse. It’s the anti-heroic beginning. You wake up on a raft. No map, no memory. Just current.
Now, Heidegger gets a bad rap. And some of it is earned. He joined the Nazi party. There’s no excusing that. But if we’re going to disqualify thinkers based on political affiliation, we’ll need to scrap about half of the Enlightenment and most of the 20th century. The point is: Geworfenheit is useful. It names something modern life often glosses over: the fact that you didn’t choose to be here, and now you have to swim.
This theme shows up across my work. In Temporal Babel, Jef is stranded in a temporally dislocated world. In Sustenance, the visitors are alien in both senses of the word. And in Hemo Sapiens, the title species are cloned into personhood with no legal or cultural footing.
None of us choose how, where, or when we are born. But I like to amplify that truth until it becomes impossible to ignore. Take the Hemo Sapiens case: they aren’t born; they’re instantiated. But what is birth if not a legally sanctioned instantiation? Once you remove the ritual scaffolding of parentage, nationhood, and paperwork, what remains is the raw fact of being.
Another key motivator for me is philosophical provocation—questions I don’t intend to answer, only pose. Like this one: imagine you’re shipwrecked and wash up on a tiny island. A single inhabitant lives there and claims ownership. He tells you to leave or die. You have no weapon. He has a spear. The sea is vast and lethal.
Do you have the right to stay?
Do you take the spear?
Does ownership matter when survival is at stake?
Sustenance explores that tension. Property, sovereignty, mercy, survival—these are themes we pretend to understand until the scaffolding is removed. My aim isn’t to preach about what’s fair. My aim is to show what happens when fairness loses its footing.
Related to this is the theme of otherness. Us versus them. But I’m less interested in dramatising hostility and more interested in the quiet bewilderment that comes when categories fail. What do you call someone who isn’t man or woman, isn’t alive or dead in the way we recognise, doesn’t speak our language or obey our metaphysics? What happens when you meet something you can’t assimilate?
Another layer is cultural construction—the way our societies retrofit meaning onto reality. We build scaffolds. Gender, law, ownership, grief. Then we forget we built them. My fiction likes to peel back the drywall. Not to show the truth, but to reveal the studs. The story behind the story.
And finally, I write because I suspect something important is always missing. That language is never quite enough. So I keep trying. Not to solve the insufficiency, but to dwell inside it.
That’s what motivates me.
Or maybe I’m just trying to answer questions I never knew how to ask.
That too.
This is a wonderful interview with Science Fiction writer, Cory Doctorow, on the desire by some to replace screenwriters with AI. I recommend rewinding to watch the entire clip, but this is cued to his response on AI and writing.
When you see a Hollywood exec saying, effectively, “We want to fire all the screenwriters and replace them with plausible sentence generators’, that’s because, even if the plausible sentence generators aren’t very good, they have this weird hubristic faith in their ability to, through iteration, replace the screenwriter who wrote good dialogue with their own kind of wild-ass ideas. And you know the screenwriter’s experience of getting notes from an executive is already just AI prompting, right? Like, I need you to write me a version of Indiana Jones but in space—and could you make it a horror movie but make the hero a 10-year-old girl, right? That is, you know, your classic executive-to-writer note. And then the writer makes it, and they go, ‘Can you bring in a lovable animal in act two?’ This is just prompting, right? This is just like me writing instructions for removing a grilled cheese sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible, right? It’s just prompting. And so, you know what you get with automation is not something that’s good but something that doesn’t complain when you try to impose your genius on it. And it’s ever been thus.
— Cory Doctorow
At the beginning of the interview he discusses how he connects with the reader.
Let’s discuss Aiden. This character is part of Mallory’s backstory, who she confronts in this narrative. Aiden was a former love interest. In fact, he is the presumed transmission vector for Mallory’s malady.
As the story goes, Aiden and Mallory met in a college philosophy class and became an item. They entered a long-term relationship that ended with the incident that left Mallory afflicted, which left them estranged.
Whether Aiden was the vector remains to be seen. In any case, his being a vector only kicks the can down the curb, leaving open the question of how he might have become infected. Aiden was asymptomatic at the time and has no signs that he could infect another.
I won’t go on with Aiden as I don’t wish to spoil the rest of his character story.
We still don’t know whether Mallory is infectious or if there are others with the same affliction, and we’ll have to wait to discover how this plays out.
Disclaimer: This content relates to a work in progress. As such, details are subject to change or removal.
Interview with Ridley Park continues.
In this interview, Ridley discusses his motivation for writing this book.
Check out a snippet from my first published interview.
Ridley Park 