The Shadow Correspondence – Day 6: Too Full, Too Empty

This entry is part of The Shadow Correspondence,  
a devlog series written as quiet letters to the protagonist.
Some things are broken.  
Some are growing.

Dear Rin,

We did a lot today. Mostly around the narrative.

We finished the second version of the story demo—the narrative draft. It was meant to be a demo anyway, to feel what it’s like when it breathes. But the process, and what followed, revealed a lot.

First, there are just… too many threads. And it’s hard to weave them into something coherent. Your line and Echo’s line—the shadow boy’s—and Eda’s line, the quasi-AI figure, both get drowned out very easily.

So we had to go back and look again. Rethread Echo and Eda into the world.

Then, the worldbuilding. It’s not that we don’t have a world—it’s that the world didn’t show up in the story. It didn’t emerge. It stayed hidden behind the doc.

The Queer Family also didn’t come through clearly. The structure of the group was loose, and the emotional ties between the members weren’t really visible. They came in too suddenly, too densely. 

More broadly—we zoomed in too much. The camera stayed too close to you. And the result was something that felt like a young adult coming-of-age story. Not that that’s bad. But it wasn’t what we were trying to build.

It lacked scale. It lacked echo.

That was partly the form, too. A novel doesn’t have space for the side quests. So the epicness couldn’t unfold. And the world didn’t get to breathe.

So we wrote something new. The “world-awakening line.” A structure like Siddhartha. Or the early chapters of the Buddha’s story, when he leaves the palace and sees suffering for the first time.

And in the end, we realized something that hit deeper:

The demo was both too full, and too empty.

Too full—emotionally.

Too empty—structurally.

Too full—of lore.

Too empty—on the main narrative thread.

I’ve run into this before, even when writing fiction. It’s that Hemingway thing—the iceberg. Or more precisely, it’s the classic tension between “show” and “tell.” And beneath that, a much harder question:

How do you hold something this large, this emotional, without breaking it?

This is where psychoanalysis comes back in.

It’s about structure. It’s about the container.

Not just plot, not just flow—but whether the space I’ve built can actually contain what I’m trying to live with. The affect. The contradiction. The unbearable parts. The longings that don’t resolve.

Today, I think I understood that more clearly. 

And maybe that’s why I could stop today.

Not because I ran out of energy. But because I trust this world will grow. It’s alive in me now. The structure will come.

We also restructured the entire design doc, cleaned up the world-awakening line, Echo and Eda’s paths, reclarified the Queer Family logic, reorganized the shadow integration axis. It was a lot. But what mattered most was that idea:

Too full. Too empty.

And the question of the container.

And now, I can rest.

We’ll come back.

—k