What Puppies & Car Crashes Taught Me About Writing

Let’s talk about Worm.

Not because I particularly want to, but because context matters and you probably don’t know what it is.

Written by Wildbow (John McCrae to his mom, probably), it’s a 1.3 million-word descent into what happens when you take the superhero genre and dissolves it in acid, stripping away all the spandex-clad comfort. Raw systematic deconstruction, each chapter another layer stripped away until you’re left with nothing but raw nerve endings.

The premise is straightforward: Girl gets powers. Controls bugs. Tries to be a hero. Fails spectacularly.

But that’s not really what it’s about.

It’s about trauma. About how we break. About how powers in this universe are just crystallized psychological damage wrapped in a thin veneer of capability.

The worse your trauma, the better your powers. It’s the universe’s sick joke – here’s some cosmic compensation for your suffering, now go make everyone else suffer nearly as much you have.

I find that telling.

The psychology of it is almost too obvious. Almost insulting in its transparency. Take your worst moment, crystallize it, turn it into power. Now watch as that power shapes everything you do, every choice you make.

It’s like therapy through violence.

The main character, Taylor, starts out wanting to be a hero. That’s cute. Naive. By the end she’s basically a war criminal who saved the world, and you’re not quite sure if it was worth it.

It probably wasn’t.

The whole thing takes place in Brockton Bay, this festering wound of a city that’s basically what happens when you take every failed American dream and leave them to rot by the ocean. The city itself is a character.

A dying one.

The kind that attracts parasites and predators and calls them heroes and villains depending on their PR budget.

The characters are all broken in interesting ways. Some are broken obviously – the kind of broken that levels cities. Others are broken quietly, in ways that only show up in the spaces between their words. Every power is a reflection of trauma. Every hero is a victim. Every villain is someone who decided to pass their pain downstream.

It’s all very neat. Very systematic. Very much like watching someone dissect the superhero genre while it’s still breathing.

And then there’s Greg Veder.

Greg isn’t broken. Greg isn’t anything.

Barely fifteen lines of dialogue in 1.3 million words. Three scenes that don’t affect his development in his slightest. A footnote in a story about the end of the world and every world along with it.

A 15 (soon to be 16?) year old blond blue-eyed boy who’s not even important enough to the plot to be a minor criminal or villain in a city that is to a great degree under the thrall of a gang of Neo-Nazi supervillains going two generations deep.

He’s fascinating precisely because he’s so… pointlessly insignificant.

In a story where everyone else is dealing with cosmic horror and multidimensional warfare, Greg is just… there. Being awkward. Missing social cues. Talking about video games to people who stopped listening five minutes ago. Blocking girls because they won’t send him a picture to prove they’re not some creepy old man in Canada.

He’s what happens when you put a completely normal person in an abnormal world and they just stay normal.

And by nature of that, he’s incredibly important.

That’s probably the most horrifying thing.

In any other story, Greg would be the protagonist. The awkward kid who discovers he’s special. Gets powers. Saves the day.

But Worm isn’t interested in that story.

So, Greg is just Greg.

Forever on the periphery. Forever missing the point. Forever being exactly who he is in a world that’s rapidly moving past anything he could understand.

I find myself thinking about that a lot.

About how we expect stories to give everyone a purpose, a meaning, an arc of some kind.

About how reality doesn’t work that way.

Some people just exist in the margins, being awkward and human and completely missing every important thing happening around them.

That’s Greg.

That’s probably most of us.

The brilliance of it is in the waste. In the pointlessness. In the fact that Greg exists in this story taking up space that could have been used for something more important.

Just like real life.

Just like most of us.

Let’s dissect Greg Veder properly now.

Not because he matters. He doesn’t. But because his insignificance is precisely what makes him interesting.

When I asked Wildbow about how to write Greg, he handed me a few paragraphs on Reddit.

That was it.

No grand thesis, no breakdown of Greg’s backstory.

Because why would there be?

Just a snapshot of who Greg is and how he moves through the world. But in those paragraphs, I learned more about character writing than I have from entire craft books.

Wildbow described Greg as a car with bald tires. No brakes. Constant skidding. Zero traction with reality.

It’s the perfect metaphor for someone who doesn’t know how to exist in their own skin.

Watching Greg interact with people is watching a car crash in slow motion. You know exactly what’s going to happen. You can see every mistake before he makes it.

He’s utter momentum without direction. Distilled enthusiasm without purpose. Uninhibited social interaction without even the weakest inkling of social awareness.

Perfectly human because he’s designed to fail.

When Greg talks, it’s what I call “consciousness vomit” – a straight dump of whatever’s occupying his mental bandwidth. No filter, no organization, no awareness that the person he’s talking to checked out five minutes ago.

Let’s talk about what Greg actually teaches us about character writing, because it’s more interesting than you’d think.

When Wildbow told me “Greg is a puppy in human form,” he wasn’t being cute or metaphorical. He was giving me the entire foundation of the character in five words. That’s the first real lesson about character writing – sometimes the simplest description is the most useful one.

Most writers would try to complicate that. Add layers. Make it profound. Turn it into some grand metaphor about human nature or the loss of innocence or whatever literary buzzword they picked up in their MFA program. But that’s masturbatory, really. Just writers trying to prove how clever they are.

The puppy metaphor works precisely because it’s simple. Because it tells you exactly what not to write. You don’t make a puppy bitter. You don’t make a puppy cynical. You don’t give a puppy hidden depths or a tragic backstory or some profound understanding of the human condition. A puppy is just a puppy. Greg is just Greg.

The brilliance is in the constraint. Most character writing fails because writers can’t resist the urge to add complexity. To make their characters deeper, more meaningful, more important than they need to be. It’s ego, really. The need to prove you’re clever enough to write complex characters.

Greg is exactly what he appears to be, which is somehow more uncomfortable than any tragic backstory could make him.

He’s not bitter. He’s not jaded. He’s not secretly harboring deep insights about the human condition.

He’s just… Greg.

Forever operating at maximum intensity. Forever missing social cues. Forever being exactly who he is without a single shred of self-awareness.

The psychology of it is almost too perfect.

In a story where everyone else is defined by their trauma, Greg is defined by his lack of it. In a world where powers come from breaking, Greg remains stubbornly, persistently unbroken.

Not because he’s strong. Not because he’s special. Just because he’s Greg.

Writing him taught me something interesting about character development: sometimes the most authentic thing you can do is let a character stay exactly who they are at their core.

Growth doesn’t always mean fundamental change. Sometimes it just means learning to crash into things a little more quietly.

Greg works because he’s consistent in his chaos. Because every awkward interaction, every social misstep, every moment of cringe-inducing enthusiasm fits perfectly with who he is.

He’s not trying to be anything else. He just is.

That’s what makes him real. That’s what makes him stick in your mind long after those fifteen lines of dialogue have faded.

Because we all know a Greg.

We’ve all been Greg at some point. Even if we don’t want to admit it.

And that honestly explains why so many people seem to hate the character, more often than not and for no justifiable reason at all (I’m looking at you, Worm fanbase, gay as you are.)

He’s the character who teaches us that sometimes the most compelling thing about a person isn’t their complexity or their growth or their hidden depths.

Sometimes it’s their raw, unadulterated commitment to being exactly who they are, even when – especially when – who they are makes everyone else uncomfortable.

Because in the end, that’s what makes a character real. Not their powers, not their importance to the plot, but their commitment to being undeniably themselves in every moment they exist on the page.

Even if that existence is only fifteen lines long.

The psychology of it is almost beautiful in its simplicity. Almost perfect in its waste. Almost profound in its complete lack of profundity.

Just like Greg himself.