3 Questions With Lucy Zhang
Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Vassar Review, Fireside Magazine, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbooks Hollowed (Thirty West Publishing, 2022) and Absorption (Harbor Review, 2022). Find her at kowaretasekai.wordpress.com or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.
HFR’s Art Editor Winslow Schmelling chats with Lucy about her piece “Thoughts from a perceived hero” from our Revolutionary Forms online issue.
We're so excited to have such an interactive piece as "Thoughts from a self-perceived hero" in our Revolutionary Forms online issue. It's even more exciting for that interactive piece to be clever and playful in a way that makes us want to keep interacting further and further. What is the process of writing something that plays with the reader in this way, that kind of sends them down a rabbit hole? Do you have an "ideal" way to interact with this piece in mind?
I normally start with the form and go backward for these types of pieces. In this case, I started with coding an empty pie chart drill-in. The subject matter often just comes from whatever I’m thinking about in that moment—in this case, the idea and subjectivity of a hero (I had been reading too many save-the-world manga at the time). Once I have a general outline of the content, I’ll plug the text in and start interacting with it. This is when I end up changing the content and form to suit each other better. I suppose you could call that the “revision” part of the process? It’s interesting to see the text visualized though, since sometimes things like size, length, and balance of the visual affect how I change the words. These visual cues end up shaping the “story” vision more than any kind of initial outline does. There’s no ideal way to interact with this piece. Click as you please!
Your bio aptly states first that you "write" and "code"; does it happen in this order, the other way around? How do those disciplines blend for you and what does that offer the work you create? (A side note, I'm very blown away by your work with I CAN SEE YOU WRITE!)
For interactive pieces, I code and then I write.
But in general, I prefer to write over code because coding is the day job, and I’m always trying to escape what I spend the most time on. But I bet you if my day job were writing, I’d prefer to code. In any case, the way I think about it, if I were to die, I’d rather people remember me for my writing than all the bugs I introduced in their operating systems.
Tech influences my writing in that I am very interested in writing about computers, robots, engineers, etc. I like to write about how things work and fixate on these details that I get lost in while rereading. But other than that (and the occasional interactive piece), it’s like the coding half of my brain shuts down when I start writing. I am an escapist at my core: trying to escape coding by writing, trying to escape novel edits by coding, trying to escape the world by only thinking in compiler errors or the apocalyptic setting of my latest short story or some cliched manga.
I don’t think too deeply into it. I’m just trying to distract myself!
Is there anything about "Thoughts from a self-perceived hero" that you'd like to share that we don't know?
A hero is the “good guy.” But of course, there’s rarely an easy “good” or “bad,” especially when there a real human behind the label. Part of the reason I made this piece was because I wanted to delve into the reality of “saving the world.” To someone else, your “saving” could be “destroying.” When I made this piece, I was partially influenced by the political climate at the time (the war in Ukraine), but it seems apt now as well.