An infinite supply of husbands
Hey all,
The sun is out! Joy is possible! Of course maybe you don't live in my kitchen and are not currently sunlit, in which case, my commiserations.
This week I'm mostly talking about the Husband Generator, a little webtoy for generating husbands. So if you're just here for garden reports or kitten news, skip to the end!
THE HUSBAND GENERATOR
When I was writing The Husbands - which, spoilers, has a lot of husbands in it - I occasionally got stuck for... you know. Husbands. Men who could exist.
So I made a little toy in Tracery, Kate Compton's excellent tool for generating text. I called it the Husband Generator. I filled it with lists of names, hobbies, jobs, cities, personality traits, all sorts, and made up a set of rules for combining those traits into millions of different men. If I got stuck - my theory went - I could just sit there pressing the HUSBAND button. Give me a husband. Another. Another. Another. Sooner or later, one of the husbands would be a good fit for the book.
It was... really fun, actually, to press a button and get a guy. So I figured I might as well put it online (with help from Rich Holman to get it running properly and looking nice). And now anyone can generate a husband! Or ten! Or a thousand!
It's a very Old Internet kind of thing, isn't it, a Husband Generator? Press a button, get a little generated treat. "Classic Holly", one friend said when I posted it to Instagram, which is about right. Ten or fifteen years ago I might have made something like this and it would've gone up very naturally on a website of little generators somewhere. Five years ago I guess it would have been a twitterbot instead. But now it's back to: here's a thing on the internet, please, have a look.
Anyway! For me, the most interesting puzzle about making the Husband Generator was: how do you make some of the husbands appealing?
It's easy to make them awful. It's fairly easy to make them awful and funny. But you don't want that, right? You want some of the husbands to feel good, to seem like they might work, to make you go "huh, yeah, I guess I can see that, I'd at least try a date with this guy".
It makes sense that the default generated imaginary person is deeply unappealing. Put three to five random facts about someone together, and all of a sudden everyone can find a reason to say "no thank you". A hat, a hobby, a spelling mistake, a slightly tedious joke, anything can make a potential suitor turn away. (This is part of the trouble with real-life online dating as well, of course. It's so easy to find something to go no I'd rather not to when you're reading through a list of facts, separate from the whole person they describe).
It was especially true of the husband generator because I wanted the husbands to be interesting, to spark curiosity. To evoke someone who felt specific and possible, not just a generic sense of a person.
And it's very easy to come up with bad specific characteristics: he calls his ex-girlfriend every night before bed. Horrifying! Specific! Funny! Whereas: he has a totally normal relationship with all his exes: better, obviously, but really dull!
So the hardest thing about the Husband Generator was coming up with characteristics that felt concrete and fun but also appealing. Adding pets was a godsend, because you can be specific about, say, the breed of dog, or add a cute randomly-generated name, and all of a sudden there's an idea of who this guy might be. I went through and added a bunch of adjectives about appearance, too, which I didn't originally have much on; tastes differ, of course, and "symmetrical and willowy" or "dimply and bearded", say, will work for some, not for others. But at least they're a potential thing to go "hmmm, maybe?" to.
Lots of jobs, especially concrete jobs where you can imagine what it might be like for someone to do that work; fewer jobs that are "he works in an office doing office stuff" or "he works in a shop doing shop stuff" because they're so general and widespread that there's nothing to latch onto. I put in all the jobs from this article on the jobs that make people swipe approvingly on Tinder, of course, though none of them would make my own list of hottest jobs (since you ask: architect; florist for large-scale events; baker at a small local bakery that mostly supplies restaurants but will sell you a loaf or two if you're there at the right time; bookbinder; person in charge of a slightly haphazard artist studio; extremely efficient stage manager who doesn't have time for you right now).
I was very pleased when I thought to add little worries, which are often sympathetic or cute. Irrational aversions were good too: liking the same thing as someone is nice, sure, but it isn't the deep and intense connection you get from hating the same thing.
Now that the generator's out, I keep thinking of more characteristics I could add, and I'm really pleased about how much people seem to be enjoying it. I think I'll pop in a bunch more personality traits and habits and do a NOW WITH FORTY MILLION MORE HUSBANDS rerelease the week of the actual book launch, so if you have any traits you think would work well, let me know.
ONE LAST THING ABOUT THE HUSBAND GENERATOR
Not too many of the Husband Generator Husbands actually made it through to the novel, although there are a few. But just building it was weirdly useful in helping me think through who I might want in the book.
And maybe that's how using randomness as a prompt for writing tends to work? You get ideas from the random combinations, or from the process of setting them up, even if you don't use the combinations in practice. I was thinking about Italo Calvino's Castle of Crossed Destinies, where travellers share stories using tarot cards. It turns out Calvino composed it partly by drawing random cards and then coming up with stories to fit the cards he'd drawn:
The characters’ process is an echo of Calvino’s recollection of his own process in writing Il castello, in which he describes lining up tarot cards at random to see if stories emerged. From this experiment ‘The Waverer’s Tale’ materialized, and then he began to look for other stories in different combinations of the same cards.
And yet he said, of the same book:
My tarot book, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, is the most calculated of all I have written. Nothing in it is left to chance. I don’t believe chance can play a role in my literature.
Huh! Maybe the point is that using random prompts isn't less intentional; it's just differently intentional? There's this, too, from Nicholson Baker on The Alchemist:
I had all these pieces—probably five hundred, six hundred pages of writing—and I got very constricted. What do I start with? So I decided that each chunklet should be assigned a random number from a random-number generator at a Web site called Random.org. Immediately I could see that the new artificial order was totally wrong. The rational side of me revolted against this horrendous scrambling. I fought back and hacked and slashed and crawled my way back to the order the book needed to be in. But sometimes the randomization forced some good conjunctions—there were some sequences that survived.
So too with the Husband Generator, I guess. Here's Rikki:
Good luck with that, Rikki!
GARDEN REPORT
Absolutely nothing is going on in the garden. Technically the winter-flowering viburnum is in bloom, and I remember when I planted it how clever I felt: a tree that would bloom in the grey winter! But it was a mistake. Oh good, it's a scattering of little pink flowers on a weird-shaped bush in a cold grey garden that I barely go into, thanks Past Holly. Yeah let me appreciate its delicate sweet smell, just gotta put on my socks and shoes and a cardigan and my jacket and then head out into the slush to lean my nose against its cold petals.
Plus when people come round they go "oh wow your tree's blossoming in January, climate eh, we're all doomed I guess haha oh no" and you have to go "well technically this is a winter-flowering viburnum so it's behaving as expected but obviously in a more general sense climate eh, doom, yes" and then you both laugh and feel sad.
The question now is whether to live with my mistake or haul it out and put a lilac in.
KITTEN REPORT
Look, we have two kittens, and that's all I'm going to say about them because otherwise this entire newsletter will just be me recounting things they've fallen off of / climbed into / eaten / licked / chased / mewed at. They're so cute it sometimes makes me confused and a little bit angry. You can play this little two-minute game about them if you want to see pictures (made in v buckenham's soon-to-be-released game-making tool Downpour). Ugh, I love them so much.
Right, hope you have a nice rest of the week, speak soon,
Holly